This game review is powered by Honor Play with it’s Kirin 970 AI chipset | 6.3-inch Fullview display | GPU Turbo
Developed By: BBGame HK
Published By: BBGame HK
Reviewed On: Honor Play (Android)
I believe the title Romance of The Three Kingdoms (RoTK) is not new to a lot of people, especially those who resides in Asia and Chinese descendants. Many people had been wondering when RoTK game will come to mobile. After the long wait, the one and only official licensed Romance of the Three Kingdoms game by Koei Tecmo Games has officially landed. New Romance of the Three Kingdoms is based on Koei Tecmo Games smash hit Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI. This game has inherited a lot elements from official Three Kingdoms games that mostly sold like hot cakes.
Gameplay
The game is based on the famous historical novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三国演义). The story mode features most of the important plot and events from the novel. The game also featured most of the heroes, namely Cao Cao (曹操）, Liu Bei (刘备), Sun Quan (孙权) and many more. Player will choose to start their province in either Cao Wei (曹魏), Shu Han (蜀漢), or Eastern Wu (东吴).
The fundamental of the game is raising player’s province to be strong and capable to conquer and unite China together with the rest of the players from the same country. There are total of 4 types of resources, namely grain, wood, stone, iron. Resources are needed to upgrade buildings, train and recruit troops. On top of resource requirements, building upgrades also has a waiting time depending on the building level, the higher the building level, the longer the waiting time.
Recruiting generals is via gacha system which requires Sycee (元宝), the in-app purchase currency which can be purchased via micro-transaction. There is a free-to-play way to recruit generals, by collecting generals’ goodwill (or better known as fragments in other games). Upon collecting the required amount of goodwill for each general, player will able to recruit the general. Duplicate generals can be used on evolving them to increase their stats and firepower. Generals has 4 different grades (best to worst), orange, purple, blue, green. Player also can increase general’s firepower by promoting them and leveling them. Selected generals will have bond and increase stats when player manage to recruit them.
The are several more upgrades will boost player’s troop firepower and increase the province capability in war. Most upgrades also requires the same 4 resources as building upgrades. Resources are generated from resources building, or player can use troops to gather from resources from world map, but involve risks of getting snatched by other players. Excessive resources that are not protected will be vulnerable, and will be lost when player’s province is attacked by other players.
When player raise their province to a comfortable level, they can start to perform combat. There are 2 types of combat, which is PvE and PvP. Story mode, attacking bandits in world map are PvE. These 2 combats will gain player experience, general experience, and obtaining materials upon successful combat. Attacking other player’s province, attacking big cities will be considered PvP. The defending side can choose to garrison their city with troops to increase the chances of winning in defending their province. PvP will involve troops marching time on attacking and returning depending on the target range from player’s province. Other than story mode, the rest of the combats will involve with troops injury and troops dying. Injured troops and deceased troops will reduce player’s firepower and requires to recruit more troops and heal the injured in order to recover the temporary lost firepower.
A War That Can Be Won With Money
Strategy games requires planning, cooperation among allies, and good strength to win a war, or to conquer. In The New Romance of the Three Kingdoms, most actions can be accelerated by in-app purchase. Ranging from general recruitment, to fast upgrade completion, to fast troop marching, everything can be accomplish by micro-transaction, making players that are willing to fork out cold hard cash to gain a lot of advantage over those who doesn’t. During my period of playing with my friends (who had prior experience from the Chinese version), we had deployed recommended strategy, forming formidable allies, building consider strong armies, we are still no match with those who paid and accelerated their progress. In simple, this is pretty much a pay to win game.
Verdict
During my early hours in the game, I felt a lot resemblance from the web game, Utopia. Initially it does feel fun to raise our own province, training a strong army with well known generals, and seeing our province grow day by day. But things turn sour (at least in my case), when I am on the losing country. The total amount of players in each countries are quite imbalance, and causing the war results to be one sided. Adding salt to injury, those countries with more players are also having more “cash” player, while my country’s player are more on the F2P (free to play). By losing our big cities one by one, I slowly lost interest in this game. My friends did invited me to start over in new servers, but the time required to raise a new province puts me off. If you are not the “Kiasu” type like me (afraid of losing) and enjoy strategy game, this game is still enjoyable even for F2P.
