Summoner's Greed Review

 

Today's post is going to be different. Today I will be reviewing a game that convinced me into installing it via its unique advertising tactics. If you are a regular reader of my blog then you may have noticed that the only game review that I did was of FAU-G, the most hyped game of India after PUBG Mobile ban.

Before we continue, I'd like to make it clear that it is not a sponsored post(looking at you PIXIO 😜). This is 100% honest review from my side.

                       Contents of this post

1. Summoner's Greed: Introduction
2. Advertisement tactics that got my attention
3. Game Review
4. Tips for new players

Summoner's Greed

Summoner's Greed is an Idle Tower Defense game by PIXIO that came out in 2017. It is available for free under the name Summoner's Greed: Idle TD Hero on Google Play Store and as Summoner's Greed: Empire TD on Apple App Store. It has mostly positive reviews on both stores: 4.7 stars on Play store and 4.9 stars on App Store. 

Unusual Advertisement Tactics

You might be aware that memes are more popular than ever. Meme pages on social media platforms are getting more engagement than most celebrities and public figures. So the advertisement team took advantage of the trend and started creating ads in form of Memes. And it worked for them. In fact even I got curious by those memes and I don't even play tower defense games(but I HAVE played some popular TD games in past like Plants vs Zombies, Kingdom Rush, Clash Royale, etc, so I think that makes me fit/qualified enough to review the game). 

Summoner's Greed Review

As the name suggests, you can play the game mostly just by staying idle(AFK in gaming terminology). Only catch is, after a certain level(wave), your monsters will become too weak to defend against the enemies as the enemies get tougher and may have extra boost in the form of powerful beings(Heroes). 

Solution to this problem? Draw/Summon better monsters or level them up(and evolve). 

For summoning monsters, you can use either orbs(rewarded for finishing a level for first time), gems(rewarded for completing achievements) and summoning stones at special events. 

For leveling up the monsters, you require coins which is awarded by defeating enemies. But gathering coins this way is very slow as you get only 1 coin per enemy defeated. Alternative(and recommended) method of gathering lots of coin is to close the game(yes, you read it right, close the game). The longer you don't play the game, larger is the reward. This approach may seem odd as most games try to keep the players online as much as possible, this game is encouraging you to close the game. But I'm not complaining, the kids won't spend too much time playing this game even if they get addicted to it.

Reward get better if don't open the game for longer

The best bit about this game is the advertisement system. While most free games try to push ads down your throat for revenue, Summoner's Greed uses a method that I wish all the free games do(unfortunately very few free games use the similar approach at the moment). Instead of firing up an ad on your face, there's a dedicated character that walks up to the bottom of the screen offering a reward for watching an ad. If the deal is bad or you simply don't want to watch ad, you can skip it. 

Now the bad part, like any other game, this game is not perfect. Which is to be expected from a free game. Don't get me wrong, the point I'm about to make is not a deal-breaker in any way, in fact I do recommend trying out the game if you like TD games. 

I feel the game progression to be very linear, the wave patterns repeat over and over again, just the difficulty and number of enemies changes. Now I do understand that this is what a TD game basically is. But that's also the reason that I don't play TD genre. I wish there were more modes and maps in the game. In PIXIO's defense, they did add maps and challenges but there are no indication/subtext to how or when other maps unlock. If they included that info, I would be more motivated to keep playing. 

There are other maps and challenges available

Other than that, the game is pretty stress-free and relaxing to play at your free time. I'd give it 4 out of 5 star rating, definitely worth playing.

Tips for new players

The game is simple and intuitive enough to figure out on your own but having a some free tips wouldn't hurt anyone. So here are my tips for new players:

• Level up your monsters as frequently as you can, because heroes can overpower them quite easily if you don't.
• Plan the monster placement carefully, you can't rearrange them in between the waves.
• Try to combine monster abilities: for example, use a monster with stun/slowdown abilities with fast attacking monsters in same row.
• Don't forget to upgrade player skills, they can help taking care of heroes much faster.

That's it for my review, I didn't make a gameplay video because I felt it wasn't needed. But if you want to see a gameplay footage anyway then feel free to let me know in the comments section.