Friday, February 6, 2015

Brave Frontier Global

I've been addicted to Brave Frontier lately. I play it on my iPad. It's a pretty fun game. I actually have this game account backed up on Facebook so I don't lose it in the event of device failure. I have a separate Facebook account just for gaming. I don't do anything with it but that. You can find it here if you want to be my friend in a game that I'm playing. Currently only 3 games are linked (Family Guy Quest For Stuff, Simpsons Tapped Out & Brave Frontier). So, on to the review...

Brave Frontier by Alim/Gumi



Brave Frontier is what you would call a passive MMO. You require friends and battle other players, never in real time. In order to play this game you MUST have data on your device or access to Wifi. A good chunk of your game is stored on Gumi's servers.

Learning the game play is pretty easy. After the screen above you will see the following screens.


Any interesting news and events are told here.


Your daily goals. It's what you need to build up Brave Points daily.


This is your main page. Where you see Quest, you can swipe to the right or left to get other areas such Vortex, Arena, Imperial Capital Randall and Raid (coming some time in the future). Quest is the story line. Vortex are special dungeons that can test your strength and/or farm items. Arena is where the MMO part comes into play. It's your team battling others around the world (excluding Japan because they have their own version). Imperial Capital is some random areas. You can get you could get your gaming record there (but you can get it from the menu area too). I can't tell you about Raid because it's not available yet.




When you click on Unit below, you get the picture above. You use Fuse unit to do just that. Units get levels and attributes by fusing units together, not by experience (bummer). Evolve unit allows your Unit to become a more evolved unit. Units can get rarer and more powerful as they evolve. Max rarity is 7 stars. You get a lot of worthless units as you go thru game. You can either fuse them to existing units or sell them. There are different types of units, but getting into it here will make this a novel and not review. You can research at the Wiki here.


The Town is where you craft items and spheres you will use during gameplay.


Since this is a Freemium (free to play with in-app purchases) there is a shop for you to purchase gems. Gems can do what each button says in picture above and allow you to do what they call Rare Summon. Gumi/Alim are pretty generous with gems. So you definitely play the game without spending your cash.


Rare summon is where you can get rare units that you will not get thru regular game play. It costs 5 gems to do 1 summon.


When you battle in Quest or Vortex you get an allie. With each alie, you are give Honor points. These points add up. With these points you can Honor Summon. Typically you get fodder, but when they do Super Honor Summon, you can get level increasing hard to get units. It costs 200 honor points to summon 1 unit. Honor points stack really quickly. So I usually save them for Super Honor summon.


Social is where you have your Friend's list. You can also receive and send gifts between you and your friends.

This game is really easy to play. You don't need to be a rocket scientist at all. It's challenging and entertaining. It keeps me entertained and distracted.

There is a couple of issues.
1. Since your game is stored on their servers you get a lot of connection errors. You will see a lot of this:



2. Since game on their server, you tend to have issues like gems disapearing (you can restart fame and they come back, very few times they won't in which you contact Gumi suport), reloading issues, their server crashing because too many people are on game and odd sorts if stuff. It gets frustrating at times. For all the issues that are server-side Gumi gives you presents in game for the grievances (gems and hard to get stuff).

The server issues can be annoying but I'm patient. It doesn't distract me from playing. I'm sure Gumi never expected so many players to join. I wonder what they expected after they put out a television commercial. They have a lot of work to do to get their servers in tip top shape.

During all they technical stuff, they still put out new content and events. I have only done one event. But they are trying to keep their players entertained. Which is a lot more than a lot of Apps do to keep their players (freemium versions).

So I give this game 4 stars

iOS, Android, Kindle Fire