The advent of Puzzle & Dragons in early 2012 has ushered in an era when mobile game developers see more fit to fuse more than one element, like RPG, puzzle, adventure, and etc, together in one single app. Following such a trend, Battle Camp arrives in the App Store as a not-bad follower that features similar color-matching combat mechanics, a persistent MMO virtual world and a ground-breaking PvP mode. With the initial aim of combining Pokémon and World of Warcraft in a mobile game, PennyPop did a remarkable job showcasing how mobile game creators are making bigger investments to bring a console quality game to mobile.
Combat is technically turn-based and built upon the conventional tile-based match-three system on a 6×5 grid. Different colors have different powers that can be used to inflict damage on varied types of enemies. The more tiles you match of a certain color, the more damage you do to that type of enemy. Your enemies fight back between your moves, so you’d better eradicate them one by one so as to take less overall damage in battle.
There is actually not much to say about the color matching part of the game, but at least, it’s different, though not in a favorable way, from most match-three games like Candy Crush, in which you can only slide tiles to adjacent places. In Battle Camp however, you can literally slide to any place you want, even all the way across the grid. This feels fresh at first sight, but it won’t take long before you get bored, as there is hardly any move-planning strategy, which makes a ton of other matching titles extremely fun.
What really makes Battle Camp somewhat stand out from other mobile games is its persistent virtual world. Everything you do in other UI-based games can be done with real world players now in Battle Camp. You can interact with real people in real-time, chat live with people from all over the world, team up with friends for synchronous raids, and clash with rivals in real-time PvP. The only premise here is that you have to connect to the game with your Facebook account. While this is pretty much a usual practice in the realm of social gaming, PennyPop might have overdone it by consistently throwing spam messages at your face and your only way out is to disable the function in your Setting.
Of course, there is an energy bar that finally entails the monetizing system of the game. There is an array of resources: stone tokens, energy, and of course gold, each can exchange for another. When you run out of energy, there are basically two options: either wait for the energy bar to refill as time flows or buy it with real money if you don’t have the patience. Problem here is that there is way too limited supply of energy that you cannot go far before a bar of energy is used up. Frankly, I am not against putting some real money in a promising game, but I’m also not a fan to dump my money in a game that grabs for IAP so deliberately like a bottomless pit.
All in all, Battle Camp introduces some elements that are highly playable, but unfortunately fails to stretch the advantage to the limit. The matching and battling could be more fun, and given the short supply of energy and agonizing grabbing for IAP, it’s fair to say that Battle Camp still has a long way to become a smash hit like Puzzle & Dragons.
Note: Apps Mentioned in this article.
Battle Camp iTunes App Store Link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/battle-camp-massively-multiplayer/id569929985?mt=8
Puzzle & Dragons iTunes App Store Link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/puzzle-dragons-english/id563474464?mt=8
