Clash of Avatars (or CoA), the new Asian developed RPG being published in the west by AMZGame, is a free to play browser title that sees us embarking on a fantasy journey, completing quests, unlocking new features and working towards advancing your character. The game has just gone into a week of open Alpha and so we spent a few hours trying out the game, more so to see how it would compare to other RPGs in the genre, the constant trend of these Asian imports is to just use the same tired mechanics over and over with a slightly different theme or storyline. Loading up the game we were struck by the rather impressive 3D graphics, rendered environments and nicely designed character models... there was hope yet!

But it was short lived.

The first popup had spelling mistakes in it; bad English translations. Check. Our character instantly started auto-attacking nearby enemies, fighting his way through them and then auto-pathing to the quest turn in… fully automated AFK systems. Check. Speed levelling making early levels completely pointless and reaching level 10 in under 5 minutes. Check. B.R. system in place. Check. My issue with Asian RPG games isn’t so that the types of gameplay they cater to isn’t really my thing (grinding, AFK gameplay, shallow questlines) it’s that they’re all the same. I make a point of judging every game on its own merits, coming at each one with fresh eyes and treating it as a new game… but they’re not, Clash of Avatars isn’t, it’s the same formula and mechanics (albeit renamed in some places, but mostly just the same copy paste) as practically every other browser RPG that sits in this genre.

From the quests that simply consist of “kill of ”, that you then hand in to unlock the next quest in the chain in a completely one track linear fashion there is zero replay value for someone like me (that actually loves the RPG genre over anything else). I’m a sucker for a good story, for intriguing plots, for choices that affect the game or shape the story line… the game does none of that, it is the same story for everyone, regardless if you play a different class, it will always be the same story from level 1 to level 60.

The actual journey is tiresome, the lacklustre storyline is only the half of it, the pursuit to excellence is paved in gold, literally, a good 50% of the “features” are just different methods of spending gold to increase your skills, stats, pets (which increase stats), mounts (which increase stats), different ways of levelling up gear (which increase stats)… each method is basically spending gold, spirit, or some other resource, but they all ultimately increase your stats and B.R.; you increase your strength by spending resources, those are the “features”, there’s no depth to them or interesting mechanics behind it.

What about how you acquire resources and currency? Isn’t that where the fun is? Well yeh it’s supposed to be, but this is either through AFK PVE (literally they have a dungeon where you can switch into AFK mode and grind levels and gold), solo dungeons (which you can AFK), Arena PVP which consists of you challenging another player and fighting an AI controlled version of them, which lasts about 10 seconds max and you can only fight so many times a day. Many of the bigger events are locked to certain times of the day, so most of the time you won’t be able to do them anyway. Capture the Flag is team based PVP where you log in with the click of a button and are instantly transported to an instanced based map… but you’re thrown in the fight with level 60s who pretty much kill you the moment you load in and then camp the spawn area, you can’t click the “Exit” button whilst you are dead (for 15 seconds…) so the new game is trying to click the Exit button in the half a second that you are live before you are killed with one shot.

The game is geared towards end game content, players trying to be the best, have the highest B.R., be at the top of the Arena ranks, but the journey to level 60 is long and boring and just an awful grind. It’s appeal is to people that don’t really want to actively have to play, just get to end game and compete, which is fine, but if that’s the point then they really need to start cutting out the entirety of the levelling process which just isn’t any fun (the fact they have an AFK dungeon so you can level without having to play goes to show that they know the game is a grind).

So what’s good? Are there any redeemable points with the game? Like I said... the graphics, they’re pretty decent, it has a fairly unique zoom in mechanic with the camera so it plays a little different, the sound and music is decent enough and well composed. One of the things I did roll my eyes at were the blatant rip offs of some well-known characters and concepts; we ride around on Chocobo from Final Fantasy, we have a Donkey Kong clone as a pet, and one of the later skins is Monkey King from Journey to the West…

Ultimately if these kinds of game are your bag then you won’t go far wrong with it, it’s the same as all the others, but the graphics are better, so why not?

SCORE

• Graphics: 6


• Performance: 5


• Gameplay: 2

• Pros: Graphics, sound, camera zoom.


• Cons: Unoriginal content, shallow and linear quests, multiple mechanics to do the same thing, bad English translations.

Final Score: 4

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2016 at 6:43 pm and is filed under Articles, MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.