On the good side: The game is gorgeous with Torchlight like aesthetics and lighting. The game controls very well in the default settings for a moblile crawler of this ilk (the v-pad option, while I'm glad it's there for those who want it, is far less precise). The combat + combat skill system is well handled and, initially, satisfying. The "spirit" system is potentially very deep and by all appearances well crafted, albeit not substantially different than similar systems seen in a truckload of similar games. HOWEVER, in this release build, calling this game limited and monotonous would be like calling the Atlantic Ocean wet. Right out of the gate is a deliberate design decision that will either force you to forego future gains or your sanity, you can't keep both. The story mode quests can only be run once, with each difficulty granting an increasing fixed prize, and the prizes are pretty good... on Hard. However, unless you plan on spending your retirement fund on grabbing up 5+ star spirits out of the gate, the only way to reach the strength to complete the story modes on Hard is to repeat the "side quests" for the locations you already completed all story mode quests for (i.e. before you realized you'd already skipped a bunch of good stuff by blowing through the locations. The problem is that "side quests" actually means side *quest*, because there will be *exactly* one non-randomized side quest remotely worth your time and effort at any particular roadblock of a story mode quest. And it's not like they pay well either. You will run the exact same sequence of four barely differentiated dungeons in the quest chain over and over and over and over and over to reach the next strength plateau to move onward, each time getting 4 pieces of loot and one spirit, almost certainly junk for the loot and barely useful feeder fodder for the spirit. This design choice makes me appreciate the "auto loot" for already perfected zones in the highly similar Taichi Panda because it is an enormous waste of the player's time to force you to go through the exact same f'ing dungeons dozens of times when it takes so long to do it. It's one thing to have so much repetition if the fight only takes 10-20 seconds, but this is 3-5 minutes. For example, right now I am stuck on the final story quest for the third location (Avex Ruins) if I want to do it on Hard for the double Grubbin prize (vs. just one, and the four star Grubbins are both rare and save a lot of other grinding, so worth it), I am looking at repeating the "level 8" (I'm already level 21) Water Student side quest chain at the previous location, Arborlith Crypts on Hard difficulty at least another 6-8 times (that's 24-32 ~5 minute repetitions of ZERO challenge) and I've already put in at least the same amount of repetition to get halfway there. The crazy part is, this isn't any sort of pay wall or hill, because there doesn't really appear to be any way to speed it up siginificantly with IAP. Oh, sure, I could have blown $500 on rare spirit grabs to help, but unless they're leveled up substantially, they're not that much good over the stuff you get for free AND there is no way to really speed up your character leveling, and no way to speed up the "spirit missions", which are the main way of getting leveling fodder for your spirits. The stamina system has never been an issue - it recharges fairly quickly and my attention span for repeating the same dungeon I've been running for nearly 3 days now is by far the bigger hurdle LOL. Add in a total hot mess of a chat system (the system posts *every* rare spirit grab result above a certain rarity to the main chat so everything flies by at impossible to follow speed) and no good way to find guilds or find spontaneous parties because you just have to either spam invites to people who will likely block your for interrupting them or you have to field people spamming you with invites and no way to inspect the invitee before accepting (or even know precisely which dungeon you're signing up to run), and what you have is a total half-assing of the game's biggest promise, which is multiplayer dungeon crawling. Then, for some reason, you only get to choose between two classes. I can't even think of the last game I played where customization was so highly touted yet my most important choice was so limited. Your choice boils down to 2H weapon melee or 2H weapon ranged. No archer, no typical weapon + shield fighter, no variety in melee fighters, nothing. 2H Axe and mace brawling barbarians or staff wielding wizards, that's your variety folks. And what makes all of this so disappointing is you can see the potential in the package. The overland world has tons of cave openings you can't go into right now. The splash screen clearly shows a 3rd class right there when you're launching the game. There are obvious plans for opening this up this current on a single rail snooze fest. I would have to guess their venture capital funding ran out and they tossed this playable late alpha build into the wild to generate enough revenue to actually finish the game they want to make, and in the world of mobile gaming where 51%-assed is more often than not the gold standard, I guess I can't blame them too much if this was the only way to avoid cancelling the project. The bottom line is that the current game in no resembles their hype, "THE MOST IMMERSIVE MOBILE ACTION RPG EVER"... my butt . As things currently stand, it's not much effort to find better action RPGs. It's got the pedigree, it's got the promise, but what it doesn't have is any meat currently. I will keep it on my device for the next few updates to see if they address any of these issues, but that's about all the excitement I can raise. For now, it's a beautiful tech demo of a future game.
yeah thought this game was good no paywalls like they said but after the tutorial and the first story mission everything else increase in difficulty, the side quest to hard I die, the next place with story missions to hard. you can't level up unless you beat a level but how can I beat a level when it's to hard? disappointed :/
I played it a while during soft launch, just re-downloaded it. its really good.touch controls are spot on
Ditto. That was fantastic and depressingly accurate on all fronts. I'll stay with it for a while as well. It's worth sticking around for sure.
Yeah, that pretty much nails it all down. Looking forward to seeing how this one grows and develops, but for now, Kings Road seems to be the best in this genre for me.
+1 There's a similar feeling on the official Spirit Lords forums, which are actually pretty dead, considering the game just released to millions of players. They're trying to build up hype, but serious changes are still needed. Why didn't they change this stuff during soft launch?
I go back to my idea that they ran out of funding. Was looking at the higher ranked guilds and even many of the guilds recommended to me by their system, many are dead with members who haven't been online for more than 3 months. Indicates the soft launch went for a long time and nothing was changing much so somebody made the decision to go live as-is. If they can use the income being generated to quickly expand the variety of content and tweak some of the balance matters (e.g. gold has next to no value because you accumulate it 20X faster than you accumulate spirits to spend it on), it might work. But if they can't move faster than mobile gamers' attention span, going to be dead in the water and that would be a shame because it's obvious a lot of work and polish went into the foundation.
This really could be a good game. I enjoyed playing it but it just got too grindy for me along with tons of bugs on my iPad mini retina. Also the stamina energy became an issue for me at level 20. Game crashes constantly. I had to reinstall once. Game gets very laggy Virtual controls become unresponsive at times. Crazy high iap I bought the epic gear pack yet i still have to grind easier levels. And the way it is set up, if you don't run story mode on hard, you get screwed because you cannot redo the story quests for the better fixed loot. Just dumb. Tldr; buggy, grindy, high iap, annoying ...but could be a good game Edit-been playing more and it has gotten better. Not sure how often they will do special dungeons but as it is now, you can run the special dungeon and build up shards. You can then use those shards to run the soecial dungeon instead of using energy. So basically you can play twice as much. Make a second character and you can play for quite a long time before running out of energy. Also sending your spirits on missions net you great upgrades. I am only level 28.
More balanced than you think I'm at level 39 and I've thrown more drunk cash at this game than I feel comfortable admitting to myself. The game has some mind-numbing design flaws and the lack of support from Kablam is concerning. BUT, for those of you still struggling your way through the story quests trying to nail everything on Hard mode for the one-time around loot, a word of advice: stop. It's not worth the grind, which you'll quickly discover once you reach the spirit realm. The spirit realm is a series of dungeons that opens once you beat the final overland temple. The loot structure is the inverse of the physical dungeons: spirits and evos galore, but zero equips. The quality of the spirits available and likely to drop is vastly improved on the dungeons you're used to. Furthermore, the difficulties of the dungeons scale with your level. It quickly becomes apparent what Kablam had in mind: alternate grinding the spirit realm to improve your spirit power with grinding the physical realm to improve your gear. Once you've built up your gear and spirit army to a high enough level, tackle the end-game dungeon, which is so hard I imagine it's still a pipe dream for even the grindiest, whaliest beta tester. The grind is still extremely repetitive but at least you can see the progress bar moving with each subsequent victory.
That is very interesting. You can get a Legendary chest piece for beating one of the Felis Sanctuary story levels on Lord mode. I think I'm on Day 4 of the grind. It's definitely possible with the right equipment choices and spirits, and TONS of kiting, but yeah, it's brutal. So are the equipment rewards worth it? I haven't seen any Legendaries up until this point, so I figured it had to be.
The legendary equips early on are most definitely not worth it. The amount of grinding necessary to reach that level of power without steady quality spirit drops would take months if not years. More importantly, your gear is scaled to your level when you acquired it. So a lvl 35 blue staff is likely better than the lvl 18 purple one you spent too many pointless hours grinding for. Don't get me wrong; epic drops are great and will last you far longer than lesser quality, same level gear, but if you run into a wall that seems too frustrating to get through, just lower the difficulty to normal and get on with it.
A few more tips for those sticking with the game I'm a Mage so your mileage may vary with some of this advice: * Level your feeder spirits a little before feeding them to your mains. I don't know what the mathematical sweet spot is, but it's definitely not lvl 1. * Concentrate on leveling one good shield spirit and one good blink spirit. Shields, for mages, are invaluable for withstanding the initial rush of encounters when you're stunned, pulled, leaped at, etc. None of the other abilities are worth your time. Leveling mats are rare enough that you can't afford to level up a separate blink and shield spirit for each school of magic, at least not early on. * Different attack spirits call for different playstyles. Some call for closer range attack and retreat play, some you can just kite all day long with. Kiting is much easier. * Try to maintain a good balance of attack, defense, and recovery for each of your teams. * covet your health orbs. Your health doesn't regen in game so try not to over heal. I've kited a boss once across a whole damn stage because I left a heal orb waiting for me at the entrance
Just got access to the Spirit Realms. Man does the game open up once you get there. You get access to 5 element themed Realms. Each has 3 "tracks" you can do depending if your wanting to work on access to the Necropolis or wanting to farm Grubbins/Evo mats. Each Track has , from what I can see 10-12 nodes in it. So assuming a “node” is equivalent to a small level that’s at least 150 levels or maps you get access to once you finish up in Arborlith. Compared to the quests you get in the physical realm there’s tons more action once you get to the Spirit Realms.
So I upped this another star. I have actually been playing it quite a bit over the past couple days. The event dungeon saved it for me. The fact that you get 3 spirits each run on easy or 4 on normal is great. Problem is my warrior at level 28 with decent spirits all evolved and lvl 14-20 get hammered on normal. If I run on easy he doesn't get touched. But i put it on normal and he gets owned. All my gear is blue lvl 28 as well. I play my son's mage and he breezes through on normal like no one's business. Even my lower level mage does better and he has very basic spirits. I think warriors need some sort of life leech or more armor. The vpad controls are whack as well for warrior. If there is a pot nearby he will always leap on that versus a mob and lots of times the attack buttons do not work. However, on the mage, you will always blink where your cursor is and the attack buttons almost always work. I am looking forward to getting to the spirit world that you guys are talking about. I am on the last level of forest atm.
http://m.bild.de/spiele/spiele-apps/apple-apps-spiele/spirit-lords-test-40573886,variante=S,wantedContextId=17410084.bildMobile.html German BILD website wrote that this game is damn boring and its just a lame grinding with same monsters with diff look and same skills ect As i read you guys tell me its a grind/farm game with not much varieties. That sound boring... Its stupid that new freemium games all are boring grinding games where you have to repeat 10000x a lvl to get a good item or any progress in the game. Free to play player have to spent all their day just to get almost nothing compared to a P2W player?
It’s the same with the Sorcerer, I can’t tell you how many times my 28 Sorc has died because of this. If you don’t destroy every single destructible pot before the battle starts, the auto-aim shoots at those instead of the mobs. There isn’t even a chance of gear/spirits dropping from those, which makes it even more annoying. As for survivability, I haven’t tried the Barbarian, but you are probably right. Kiting across the entire level, while not exactly super fun, is an option for the Sorc on Hard/Lord if the right level spawns. There are a few level designs that will just crush the Sorc because there’s nowhere to blink at the beginning of the level. sammycakes’ tips are really good. I *did* actually get the Legendary armor, which felt great, until I realized it looks exactly like other Common or Uncommon armor of the same type. Which means that only the stats matter, and while they are good they aren’t jaw-dropping or anything.
It's a mmo dungeon crawler so yes it's online only, haven't hit a paywall yet and the visuals are pretty good from what I've played so far.
Games great. Does it drain batter and make your phone extremely hot very fast? iPhone 6 here. Haven't had that issue since my iPhone 4s. My 5 and 5s didn't experience that. Most graphically pressured games don't heat my phone up. Ex. Dungeon hunter 5 doesn't until after 2-3 hours of play. This game does it in 20 minutes - 30 min. Anyone else experience this?
