In an increasingly polarized mobile landscape, with the premium offering of Apple Arcade on the one hand and freemium productions increasingly accessible but equally limited on the other, the Raziel's review: Dungeon Arena certainly helps to get an idea of how things are at the moment, at least for the action RPG genre.
Developed by Indrasoft, a Chinese team that has cut its teeth creating graphic assets for various triple A titles for PC and consoles, the game comes to occupy the beauty of 7,7 GB on iOS, which makes it a somewhat complicated product to manage and to keep in case you have a terminal with little memory.
However, one soon realizes how this mass of data has been used to pump up the visual sector of the experience to the maximum, in the context of a story that sees a handful of warriors brought back to life to face the terrible demonic hordes that have invaded the world.
Technical realization
Let's start from technical realization, undoubtedly one of the characterizing elements of Raziel: Dungeon Arena, which in fact boasts a truly extraordinary graphics and with very few uncertainties. In addition to the spectacular cinematic sequences, it is possible to appreciate a high level of detail, a great attention to detail and an enormous variety for the scenarios that we will find within the game's full-bodied campaign, consisting of over sixty missions.
In short, the Indrasoft guys dealt with assets and wanted to demonstrate all their experience with this project. We do not remember ever seeing a mobile game in which the grass of the map it folds when stepped on by a character, or in general such a large amount of settings in place of the traditional "recycling" in order to dilute the actual contents with respect to the potential duration of the experience.
However, the question does not end here, because in addition to the excellent scenarios the game can also boast excellent protagonists: there are currently twelve that can be unlocked and used in the perspective of a sort of tag team, facing various types of enemies along the way, as well as big bosses who will not fail to give us a hard time.
In short, design and animations are at the top, and surprisingly everything moves smoothly to 60 fps on a 2018 iPad Pro even when setting the visual quality to maximum, and without the device tending to overheat. The action is also accompanied by a valuable sound sector, with dialogues in English (the localization in Spanish is completely missing at this moment) and convincing music.
Gameplay
But let's go back to gameplay, which if on the one hand it can boast undoubted solidity and rest on very well tested foundations, on the other it unfortunately turns out to be excessively simplified in certain respects. At the beginning of the adventure we are asked to choose our hero among three different warriors: an Ice Priestess, who strikes opponents with spells; a Ranger, who with his bow dispenses death and destruction while staying at a safe distance from targets; and finally a Beastmaster, powerful and unstoppable.
During our tests, aware of the limitations of action RPGs without defensive actions for the protagonist, we opted for the Ranger and the choice turned out to be decidedly sensible, since we managed to overcome the first acts of the campaign with too much ease. The aim of the ranged attacks is in fact completely automatic, whereas a twin stick shooter-style approach would have guaranteed greater satisfaction and involvement, and this trivializes the challenge a little too much.
I controls touch are almost perfect, with a repositionable virtual stick and an excellent arrangement of the attacks on the right side of the screen. However, the fact that just a few attacks suffered to see one's vital energy reduced to a minimum confirmed our suspicions: probably with a character expert in melee the experience would prove difficult already after the second chapter, as it would become complicated. avoid taking damage by having to get close to enemies to hit them.
The inevitable paywall can therefore be perceived differently and it is clear that the game offers us a series of microtransactions with which to accelerate the progression, obtain better weapons and armor, as well as upgrade the statistics enough to be able to overcome any critical phases. However, if you want to avoid spending money, it is possible to replay the missions already completed at higher difficulty or perhaps experiment with multiplayer modes, both competitive and cooperative.
Comment
Tested version iPad Digital Delivery App Store, Google Play Price Free Resources4Gaming.com7.8
Readers (1)
7.0
Your voteRaziel: Dungeon Arena has all it takes to become a solid reference point for the action RPG genre on iOS and Android. It is in fact a visually excellent title, very nice, with many different scenarios and characters as well as an almost perfect touch control system. The problems of the game lie in a gameplay that is too simplified in some respects, with excessively short missions and a controversial management of freemium dynamics, which you may perceive very or almost not at all depending on the type of hero chosen.
PRO
- Graphically sumptuous
- Many different characters, enemies and scenarios
- Almost perfect touch controls
- A little too simplified gameplay
- Chaotic and messy interface between missions
- It really takes up a lot of space
