Guild of Guardians Review – Free to Play and now available for download!

Here’s my Guild of Guardians review which is now free to play on Google Play and iOS from Immutable Games!

 

Guild of Guardians is published by Immutable and developed by Mineloader. Immutable is one of the VC-funded blockchain game startups, backed by investors such as Temasek, Animoca Brands, Tencent, Galaxy Digital and Coinbase. Mineloader is a premier game development studio with 20 years of experience, and has worked on some of the biggest games in the world, including Final Fantasy XIV, Final Fantasy Remake, Biomutant, The Lastof Us and many more

First let’s talk about what Guild of Guardians is.

The game is a mobile squad RPG that let’s players go on a series of dungeon adventures where they grind and level up characters, obtain treasure, fight bosses and get more items to summon more powerful creatures. The game is promising enough despite the simplistic approach to the characters. While it does share some DNA with other idle games it does have some unique features such as letting players make decisions during battles that will either help the party win or give them that death sentence.

 

We’re also promised to get additional and traditional RPG components in future updates including Raiding, Trading and an immensely improved crafting system that you can use for trading outside.

So let’s go through some of the elements for Guild of Guardians.

 

Overall visuals

 

Guild of Guardians looks cute, that’s what I’m going to say from the get-go. It’s cute and while the characters are scaled down to their looks, it’s still impressive how they managed to find the right balance between taking them seriously and laughing at the chaos that ensues onscreen when you enter active battle.

 

Combat

I would call Guild of Guardians‘ combat system as straightforward. Everything is made effortless for you of course without having to press too many buttons during fighting. The most effort you have to do is finding the right time to unleash powerful ultimate attacks during the fight or maybe making the call when to use the attack or when to save it for future battles.

A little bit of familiarization with a character’s moves can also go a long way especially since most of the healing attacks and special attacks are very random. In the case of healing, you need to be alert on which character in your party needs healing and time the ultimates for healers to get them up to a good amount of health to continue the fight.

For a simple RPG idle-ish game, I’m also surprised that they added in mechanics like surprise back attacks that will keep you on your toes especially if you’re foolish enough to try to finish a mission with under-developed characters without good armor and weapons and awful skills.

Character Designs

As I mentioned earlier, the characters in this game can either be really cute and cool OR lazily designed and weird. But thank god the good 5-star characters I pulled look cool and are wicked powerful even at the early stages without being really developed; like I just slapped an armor and a generic weapon and they still looked awesome.

The bosses and generic monsters aren’t so bad at all too. I can’t pinpoint what boss I kinda liked but that spider boss at the early part of the game sure has some solid recall power.

 

Exploration

Please don’t expect full open world exploration here whether its for the map exploration or for the dungeon map. What happens here is that when you hit on the “Adventure” button, you get a set of locations and then when you click those, you’ll start the run. And it’s on a per-room set up meaning you’re following a specific room arrangement whenever you visit a location. The only thing that differs from your first, second and third visit would have to be the number of rooms, the levels of the enemies you’ll encounter and the quality of the drops and the treasures waiting around.

As you continue further in your missions, you’ll also be able to encounter player-friendly rooms such as a merchant area, a blacksmith area, a campsite and a healing area.

The only bummer here is that you are only allowed to choose one action especially when in the healing tree and campsite meaning if you have a badly wounded party with two dead characters, you’ll have to make the decision of bringing your team back to health or let them go to the next room at the same health with revived comrades. Either way that would affect the outcome tremendously which is a fun thing about RPGs in general.

Plot

The plot’s also very standard RPG. You play a commander who controls a party of fantastic creatures while on the lookout for the big bad who aims to destroy the kingdom. What I do like about the plot is that it welcomes and actually deals with the problems encountered initially like when you pick Healer elf character for your team rather than the Ogre / Tank, you’ll get a mouthful from the angry green guy.

Crafting and Equipments

The crafting here can be quite confusing. So initially I thought you’d have to continually wait for material drops like in normal RPGs but apparently, you get a crafting window with three bags that generate random crafting materials. Each bag corresponds to the different types of “category” for characters in the game.

Heavily armed characters need metal strips and ores for you to build helmets, boots and chestplates while most of the elf-like creatures will require wooden materials to get their armor and equipment.

Of course there’s another gacha aspect here and that’s the quality or the number of stars your crafted item gets. Have higher luck both IRL and in-game and you really get the chance to get those 4-stars and 5-star equipments that makes your team a lot more lethal in dungeons and missions.

You can also increase the level of your gear in this game, so always be on the lookout for materials that would improve your character’s weapons and armor.

 

Music

Wasn’t expecting a good musical score but surprisingly they have good melodies especially for missions inside tombs and creepy castles. The Boss battle music is kind of generic for me though. Still it’s overall a positive spin and dare I admit it, actually inspiring so good job on getting us hyped.

Shops and In-Game Purchase

Also good job in not forcing players to get in-game items too much or do micro-transactions. That of course is a different thing when we’re dealing with the web3 aspect or the NFT but for the base game it’s all good. I did some looking at the items for sale and they were OK too, nothing that will severely change the outcome for the game.

So that’s it for this Guild of Guardians review. The game is absolutely free to play so if you want something simple and different but still under the category of a standard online RPG then this game definitely takes the cake.