LIYO KIKON
Giant robots, big guns, chainsaw and more giant robots! That’s the perfect cocktail for a high intensity game and this is what Warhammer 40K: Freeblade is all about. Developed by Pixel Toys, it created quite a buzz when they presented the demo at Apple WDC, Sept 2015. It was finally released a few months later and is now available on iOS and Android for free. After playing this game for quite a while now, here’s my take on it.
The game starts off with an Imperial Knight (A 50ft giant robot) under your control in third person view. The gameplay is fairly simple - drag a single finger around to fire your canon and two finger to aim and fire your missiles as the main character walks itself - Yes, you don’t control the movement of the character. But after playing for quite a while now, I found out that by not worrying about the player’s movement, it makes the gameplay simply more enjoyable. With the latest iPhone’s 3D touch technology, this game plays even better since it makes use of the touch pressure to zoom in on where you’re firing. But even on other devices without 3D touch, the game does not disappoint as it is filled with explosive action. When attacked by other enemy robots and flying dragons, it enters a kind of pvp mode for melee and an attack bar appears at the bottom with two lines closing in together. The player must tap the screen when the two lines are close enough to do the maximum damage.
In campaign mode, there are 11 chapters. Each chapter is sub divided into missions where the player can get “stars” or medals much like most other games based on how quickly you finish the mission, the objectives and the number of enemies you kill. One good feature is that you can replay the previous missions as new objectives are added in the form of slaughter, destruction, storm and other modes, giving it a high replay value.
Initially, the map will make you feel like you’re running around in the same neighbourhood with similar looking buildings and areas but you soon realise that each level is unique in its own way, and in later levels you will be introduced to new areas. But since each level hardly lasts 2-3 minutes, one can’t complain much about it and besides, there are quite a lot of destructible areas in the map so that’s always fun. As the game progresses, your knight’s armour will get damaged and you can repair your knight by either spending gold or watching some advertisements. It feels like the developers are trying to squeeze every paisa out of you by making you watch advertisements or bypass it by spending real money. You can also get blessings, send a salvage team and more by watching some advertisements which can get annoying at times.
Multiplayer option is currently not available but the developers are working on it and one can only hope that player vs player combat will be more challenging than the typical attack bar tapping system. For now, you can join events by logging in with your Facebook account. Events are score based competition, the more enemies you kill and the more you play, the higher you climb up the leaderboard. This is a great way to see which of your Facebook friends have the highest score. But again, each time you want to participate, you can either wait for a cool down timer or deploy by spending 20 gold coins or watch another advertisement, ugh! Believe me, I’ve watched more advertisements playing this game than anywhere else.
Being an RPG oriented game, you can customise your Knight by giving it a paint job, add emblems, patterns and more to make it unique to your taste. In the “loadout” section, you can add and upgrade your weapons, shields, armour, melee weapons and more. You can also “forge” weapons using some old ones to make better ones. But unlike most RPG games where you go around picking up items from within the level, you are rewarded with the item at the end of the level.
I like the way Warhammer takes itself, with their overly serious script and yet rather comical and over the top weapons and characters, the signature look of buffed up shoulders in all their main characters fighting against the extremely zealous enemies shouting quirky dialogues makes the world of Warhammer quite unique in itself, and I’m glad that they brought in the same style of art, dialogue and gameplay to this game. So, my verdict is that if you like high explosive games with impressive graphics or you are a hardcore Warhammer fan or you just got that shiny new iPhone 6s with force touch and you wanna show off its capabilities, then this is definitely the game for you! One thing is for sure, if you start playing this game, you will definitely end up watching more advertisements than you can count, unless you wanna spend money on it. For me, I liked the whole style of simplistic gameplay and beautiful graphics but I can’t say its really addictive at this point since the advertisements and very short levels take away the momentum.
Available for free on iOS and Android devices with in-app purchases.
