We recently took some time out to try free to play browser RPG Tiny Mighty from Amzgame, in the game players take on the role of miniature heroes, must build up their own team of crime fighters, and progress through a story whilst fighting enemies along the way in team based “strategy”.

So let’s start by saying that traditionally I am a trained illustrator, that is how I spent a large portion of my career, so jumping into this game I was appalled at how blatantly Marvel’s characters have been ripped off, renamed and redesigned in this game. It’s an extremely unprofessional move in my personal opinion (as the author of this article) to try and benefit from such a popular franchise without having to pay any dividends to it, as an illustrator I have always despised when my own work is ripped off and so whilst ruffling developers and publishers feathers isn’t generally my style I do think it’s fair to say that doing this just isn’t cool by any stretch. To emphasize the renaming you have popular characters such as Captain America, with his iconic red white and blue star spangled outfit, signature shield and sporting the “A” on both it and his mask, Tiny Mighty has Captain Mars who wears the exact same red, white and blue, same shield, but has an “M” instead. “The Hunk” is literally just a blue version of The Hulk, “Thorn” is Thor, even the newest Guardians of the Galaxy heroes “Grout”, “Rabid Racoon” and “Starry”. Each of these heroes is a smaller fatter version, has the same abilities you would expect of the Marvel version, though we’ll hold our hands up and say that as an illustration they’re really well done and we love the imitation style.

 

So on to the game, essentially the idea is to complete the story content, broken down into various areas and each area a dozen or so stages, each stage is broken down into three fights where the final fight goes up against some enemy heroes (still the same ones that you collect). Every stage in an area is essentially the same but has a slight rotation on some of the backgrounds, the fights get slightly tougher as you progress and you earn different loot items. Heading into the fight you must choose which of your acquired Heroes you want to fight with, each with their own level, stats, skills and gear, the skills that Heroes have is based off their rarity/Division; Grey, Green, Blue or Purple. Heroes typically start as Grey heroes with 1 skill, which can be levelled up spending Gold, however, each character has 6 gear parts that they must collect and once they have all been equipped the player hits the Upgrade button to absorb these items so that they disappear and level up that Heroes’ Division. As many Heroes will require the same item it means you need to keep going back to the same old levels over and over each time you want to level a new Hero, given that they’re not that entertaining the first time round this isn’t ideal, but you do have a classic “Blitz” option to just auto complete them by spending Blitz tokens.

Combat is 90% automated, as you attack you build up rage or power, or whatever they like to call it, and can trigger one of your key skills to do some big damage, big heals, or whatever the effect depending on the Hero. That’s about as much involvement as you get, and there’s even an Auto button to let the AI control that as well. The thing with combat is that as the progression is so linear, i.e. you have to go through the same stages as everyone else in pretty much the same order, you will inevitably hit a battle that it’s just impossible to get passed until you level up, and these come very suddenly where you are getting along find and smashing everything to pieces, then suddenly BAM! Way too difficult and you result in a team wipe. It pretty much just forces players to go back to the old content again.

As this is an Asian import (obviously given the complete disregard to intellectual property) the localization and English translations are so awful that they become laughable, all wrapped around a paper thin storyline. Given the style of game and cute graphics and basic gameplay we’d have presumed this was targeted to a slightly younger audience, but some of the choice language makes us think otherwise. A perfect example (that also highlights how bad the English is) comes from the iconic “Jennie Grey” in a moment talking to your character about how there’s no bad guys around she says “Shit.. too quite. Make me anxiety!” Now, aside from the terrible spelling, the unnecessary use of profanity, I doubt Jean Grey, who the character is based on, has ever used the word “Shit” and this is something you would have expected from Wolverine or Deadpool (sorry, “Wolfie” and “Red Fury”).

Ultimately there is nothing particularly enjoyable about the game and we can see why they went with the Marvel rip off as otherwise it would be unlikely that anyone would want to play it. It has the same mechanics and features as every other RPG out there, only a lot less care and attention to the English translation and the constant recycling of graphics and assets. The game has performance issues where it hangs a lot, half the time entering a battle the enemies appear as little placeholder skeletons until the actual graphics load up, but you kill stuff so quickly this invariably doesn’t happen.

 

SCORE:

• Graphics: 5


• Gameplay: 4


• Performance: 4

• Pros: Characters are well illustrated.


• Cons: Ripped off Marvel Intellectual Property, boring gameplay, terrible translations.

Rating: 4.5

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2015 at 8:44 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.