Game Impressions This surprised me when I saw it available in the US store and I quickly hit Buy Now. Impressions (Running on iPad2 with iOS 7.0.4): Options: Sound, Music, Tooltips, and Tutorial. Nothing else. NO, you cannot turn off that annoying vortex that is animating non-stop underneath the play area or speed up the gameplay at all. Stability: Rock solid considering the huge amount of cards in the app and all of the interactions (even the Nintendo DS games sometimes had some bugs shipped that had to be corrected later). However, I could not play ANY of the tutorial. Any attempts to try any of the 15 (more or less) Tutorial lessons resulted in an immediate crash to Home. IAP: You are awarded honor points for logging in and playing duels. If you have played previous Yugioh Nintendo DS games, the honor awarded is in a similar fashion. You get awarded points for doing things during a match (like attacking more than your opponent, how many special summons you do, healing, etc.). These are totaled at the end and that's how many honor points you get. Note that winning or losing, in general, will not affect how many honor points you gain. Of course, doing "more" will result in more honor points (because you are "checking" more of the honor point boxes). With these Honor Points you can buy either boosters or avatars (your in-game portrait). Boosters are either x1 or x10 (with no discount on the x10). The boosters are completely random and you'll get cards from any set (although there is no way to look at or sort by sets in-app, only Yugioh players will know what sets the cards came from). There are no rarities on the cards you get, and indeed I have gotten boosters with 5 traps or 5 spell cards (so, really no card distribution at all it's just completely random). The honor boosters pull cards from the NON-PREMIUM cards. PREMIUM cards are those that can be purchased. PREMIUM cards can only be gained with real money. They cannot be gained in any other way (according to the app). They allow you to buy fully made decks at $4.99 (US) each. Each deck is self contained and with a clear theme. You will not always get x3 of each card in a deck. Some decks are definitely more powerful than others. Once you buy a deck the cards can be used in other decks you make. They also allow you to buy PREMIUM boosters at $3.99 (US) each. These are very interesting. The contents of PREMIUM boosters are set in stone, they are not random. Each booster has a clear theme. They list the cards that come in each booster (around 12-15) and you get x3 of ALL of those cards. These are generally very powerful cards. You can probably (with a good eye for these sorts of things) buy 2 of these premium boosters and have an extremely hard to beat deck. This would only cost you $3.99 x2 and might be the best way to "beat" the game (and the randomness of opening non-premium boosters). There are also campaign duels and weekly challenges. Completing duels in either of these nets you special cards. I do not yet know if these cards are either from the premium, non-premium, or a special third category of cards yet. Gameplay: The game plays very closely to the old Nintendo DS Yugioh games. If you are familiar with those you will ease right into this. If not, it might take you quite a few hours to come to terms with everything. The biggest problem with the gameplay is, believe it or not, a lack of controller, or a way of giving the players options in how they control their games. Yugioh is a game where there are NUMEROUS opportunities on both your turn and your opponent's turn where you will need to interrupt an action or stop the gameflow. Magic: The Gathering also has these sorts of "instants", however they deal with it in a much better way (at least in the iOS apps). Note that Yugioh BAM specifically eliminated all of these interrupts, so they were never an issue. In Magic, each phase of each turn has a 3 second (or so) counter during which time either player can pause the game to do instant or interrupt actions. If no one does anything, the game continues. In Yugioh, however, each POSSIBLE moment you can interrupt or perform an instant action, a pop up appears, asking if you want to perform the action. Now, the DS versions got around this by allowing you to hold down the B button, which would auto-pass each prompt. If you needed to perform the interrupt, you just let go of the button. Without the ability to do this on the iOS version, you will have to tap No to this prompt approximately 20 times PER TURN and this is if you are doing nothing. Attacking and playing more cards will increase this number. After a handful of games I was already thinking of decks I could make that would include NO instant action spells or traps. Of course, your deck will be fairly weak if you do this. =( Modes: There is a campaign mode that allows you to challenge characters from the anime and comics and previous DS games. Their decks are themed around the characters that play them. Each opponent has multiple difficulty levels and multiple rewards for beating each level. I am unsure if you can go back and play previous levels once you defeat them (initial play says No, but perhaps once you beat a character six times you are given a choice of what difficulty to play). There are 9 or 10 characters to challenge at the moment but it is clear based on the UI that they plan on adding more. There is also a weekly challenge that will award you a special card if you beat it. Multiplayer modes consist of creating and joining unofficial games, being paired automatically for official games, and joining leagues. That concludes my impressions of the game so far. TL;DR The app has great graphics and music, but a dearth of player options. The core gameplay is fun, and the IAP is not too bad, but strict adherence to the DS versions severely hamper iOS game flow.
Seems to be the very definition of pay to win. I'll still give it a go but I imagine there will be a very tight meta game involving the cards you mention above and those playing the "earnable" cards will get quite thoroughly spanked by decks they cannot beat.
Tutorials crash for me, also - so I have no easy way to learn this game. Bit stupid, really - surely this is something that should have been tested before release! Putting out a game this complex with no way for new players to learn it, is really going to limit sales...
It's possible that this makes it pay to win, but I have no way of telling what cards are included in the honor boosters. There may be cards of equal or greater strength in there. Either way, it would come down to the luck of getting those cards early in random packs, vs. instantly in the premium boosters. Just comparing it to the DS Yugioh games (which, I continue to do because the iOS app is nearly a carbon copy of those) and not comparing it to the state of iOS gaming in general: the DS games were $50 and had competitive online environments. The methods to get the best cards were: 1. hack your game save (or hack the game in-engine), 2. luck into the best cards early, 3. get the cards eventually after lengthy single and multiplayer playtime (or some point between 2 and 3). The online matches were rarely evenly matched even so, and I suspect the lopsidedness will be present here as well, probably even more so because it will only be $8-12 to get extremely strong cards guaranteed. The game is intricate enough that having these strong cards does not guarantee a win (sound tactics and a good knowledge of all cards and current metagame decks are definitely very important).
Honestly the best advice I would give is to just play a few games against the first AI campaign duel and likely lose miserably. You'll learn slowly as you go. The biggest hurdle is getting past the 20-30 prompts per turn. If this doesn't annoy you to deletion, then you'll probably do fine with the app. Some basic tips: Cards played in normal orientation use their attack values, cards placed in sideways orientation are in defense mode and use their defense values. Cards placed from your hand in a Normal Summon can be Summoned (attack mode) or Set (face down defense mode). Having a card face down means your opponent does not know if his attack value will beat your defense value. Also, it will trigger any "Flip" effects when he attacks it (you can also trigger these effects on subsequent turns by flipping the card over yourself). Spells can be played on your turn and you will learn that their type icons mean they are either equipment (attached to a critter), ongoing (stay on the field, taking up a permanent space), normal (used and then discarded) or instant action (you'll get 20-30 prompts on both your and opponent's turns asking if you want to use it). Traps are similar to spells but they must be set (face down) and generally cannot be triggered (either automatically or by your input) on the first turn they come into play. That is the "basics" I think. There are field cards and fusion decks and XYZ and Elementals (and in the future, Pendulums!) and a million other special little things but you should get some understanding from what I wrote above.
Endlessly synching,mcant start... Anyone got a fix or any idea? probably the servers are busy... But still bummer.
"Offline Play" that apparently includes literally 10 minutes of syncing EVERY time the main menu is accessed and only about a 5% of actually logging in even after that.
Hi there, I've been playing this non-stop every night for a week and I decided to share my reviews here TIPS: If you are continuously synching and just want to play offline, it would be better to start off with airplane mode - you'll get to the game straight in. For general, the app was rocking solid! All cards functions are what they are supposed to be, UI are great, and AI loads fast! It crashes sometime on my iPad Air though, eventhough it was rare. Some crashes on duel beginning and once it crashes when I was looking through my 3rd of 10 bonus pack purchase - fortunately all the cards still got into my inventory even though I didn't view the last 7 pack. Memory leak maybe? For the campaign, I was able to proceed up until Isis Ishtar with no IAP (only buying honor point boosters also helps a lot) - but only by defeating their normal deck (fight 1-3), it was hard to beat their advanced deck (fight 4-6) with starter deck. But I was able to defeat Yugi's Grandpa's all six fight because Exodia is easier to fight. Maybe some of you could defeat Isis with starter deck but I found it hard to defeat her Necrovalley deck^^; Also, if you defeat 6 fight, you can still rematch the NPC but you get no prize - just honor points. And you must rematch them with their advanced deck. As for the IAP, just consider that this is a 4.99$ game and buy one structure deck that you like the most. Just one deck could get you a lot further to the game, and after that you could carve from the random boosterpack. I got a lot of good cards there such as Dragluon, bombardment dragon, etc. I've bought two structure deck and I am on GX's 3rd boss match - unfinished not because it is hard, but because i am tired playing all night everyday Thanks for Tinsel for giving info about premium boosterpacks! I thought I only get 3 card out of the list, but it turns out I'll get all card listed x3!! I'll definitely buy some of them! Tips: - Login 7 straight days will gives you free boosterpack on the 7th day! - Defeat Weekly challenge if you can - more free boosterpack! - For racking honor points, you could try rematching boss match, especially the advanced deck version. winning one duel out of three already gives you 600 honor points! CMIIW My suggestion is rematch yami yugi - his advanced deck is relatively easy to defeat rather than kaiba or pegasus - even yugi skull servants deck is a bit harder for me with stardust deck. just beware of his magic cylinder or mirror force. Never played duel league or multiplayer yet since I couldn't find anyone on the lobby. I think that's all for me, have fun dueling guys!
Looks like it's been withdrawn from the UK store now... Needs some real care and attention really... I also cannot connect online at all - so they may have shut down the servers or locked the accounts too? The version we have downloaded is 0.502 which does look like a prerelease version number...
You're right badmanj. It was very rough with crashes and too frequent online checks. It might have been an accidental release. You're very welcome about the tips. If you're interested I could point you to some tutorials or just type a few more things in here as I remember them to help guide the way. I also recommend you read through the Glossary in options (it doesn't crash!) and that will help you somewhat as well. The card description lists card elements by number, leading me to think there should be an image to refer to, but there is not, so if you'd like an explanation of all the elements of a card I can post that here. @kangtakang I read your original post (and I can understand why it was changed, either by you or a mod). However, you did bring up a good point that should be repeated here now that your post is gone. His comment was that after "extensive" research, no one has found any good cards in Honor Boosters. If Konami (and I wouldn't put it past them) has placed only very subpar cards in the Honor Boosters, then you have absolutely no way to progress in the game without buying decks or boosters for real money. I'd appreciate it very much if they added a card list to the Honor Boosters showing what we can possibly get. As it is it feels very sloppy to give absolutely no information about the Honor Boosters.
So uhhhh there's literally no way to farm currency? Because after about the third fight the enemies get completely impossible with the horrible starting deck. Spamming Mirror Force and some shit that can negate ANY card effect at NO cost against my 1300 attack cards is fake difficulty to the extreme.
