A disjointed, slow, and disappointing experience | Review - Disney Realm Breakers
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✨Overview
Disney Realm Breakers is a mobile strategy game that combines elements of tower defense, strategy, and role-playing. The game features a wide array of Disney and Pixar characters that players can collect and use in battle, each with their own unique abilities. Players must strategically build and upgrade their towns, gather resources, and engage in TD and strategy MMO combat to push back the forces of darkness and save Noi.
The game was made available recently in a soft launch capacity for select regions, including the Philippines, Australia, Singapore, and Malaysia.
🟩Pros
+A blend of tower defense, strategy, and town building elements
+Wide array of Disney and Pixar characters to collect and use in battle
+Vibrant art style that captures the essence of the Disney universe
🟥Cons
-Not much depth in its gameplay mecahnics
-The elements seems disjointed from one another and can feel like different games
-Slow pacing and progression, with a heavy reliance on grinding
-Unskippable tutorials that can be annoyingly too handholding and too restrictive
-Laggy experience
⭐️Score: 3/10
📖Story and Premise
The game is set in the enchanting world of Noi, where a seed of "Disney Imagination" has landed and brought about a magical tree that, in turn, created Imagination Disney worlds of its own, as well as creatures called Lumins and Luminnies.
This is a nice explanation of how all the Disney worlds have come together into one and sets the stage for the game's premise, as players are tasked with defending Noi and the other Disney worlds from the dark forces of the Scourge Legion; all while meeting other Disney characters such as Buzz Lightyear and Aladdin. There is a little bit of story here, although it's not a strong point, especially since half of the charm is lost due to the lack of voice-overs, at least not yet in this soft launch.
🎨Visuals and Art
The game's art style captures the whimsical and vibrant nature of the Disney universe, creating an immersive and visually appealing experience that is faithful to the original design of the characters featured here, albeit all translated into stylized 3D form, coming from 2D, 3D, and Live Action. Moreover, the environments in Disney Realm Breakers are equally enchanting, being equally as faithful to the source materials, while introducing new elements such as the world of Noi, The Tree, the Lumins, Luminnies, and the Scourge.
🎮Gameplay
The core gameplay of Disney Realm Breakers revolves around a unique tower defense experience, with added elements of Town building, and strategy MMO mechanics. In general, players must gather resources, expand their towns, and strengthen their defenses to withstand the Scourge's onslaught. For the TD (Tower Defense), the game features two main modes of play: Single Rumbles and Duel Rumbles (PvP).
🗼Tower Defense
Single Rumble introduce a dynamic tower-defense mechanism, requiring players to utilize Luminnies, Heroes, and Abilities strategically to halt enemy advances. You gain stars over time to place units, but you have no control over where or what unit to deploy, but it doesn't matter anyway, as there is no range restriction. Identical shaped units can be combined with each other to level up and this can be done manually or automated.
Each unit type is commanded by a Disney character or a Lumines Knight, which are unfortunately not present in battle but can activate special abilities at your command. There is a timer that you need to survive, where at this point a random boss will spawn in the end that you’d have to defeat to clear the level.
The system sounds confusing at first but it becomes somewhat digestible after a few minutes of play. There’s not much depth in it because you have no control over the units and even its placement, so it all boils down to using your resources as quickly as possible, either deploying troops, activating especially abilities, or using to boost your units’ stats.
Duel Rumbles follows the same unit placement format, but you now have two defenders with their own sets of attackers. The objective is to survive longer than your opponent by deploying units strategically to impede the enemy's advance. As you defeat enemies on your field, they are sent to the enemy's lane, potentially overwhelming them if you can defeat enemies quickly.
🏰Strategy MMO and Town Building
The game's strategic depth is further enhanced by its Strategy MMO and Town Building elements, allowing players to place structures, upgrade their “Town Hall”, recruit troops, team up with allies and participate in battles in the outside overworld. Players must gather resources, expand their towns, and strengthen their defenses to withstand the Scourge's onslaught. Building and upgrading structures not only enhances the aesthetic appeal of the town but also provides strategic advantages, such as increasing resource production or unlocking new abilities. However, this element feels a little disjointed from the TD gameplay, and sometimes they tend to feel like two different games slapped into one.
⏫Progression
The game features live service elements, including a gacha system for acquiring heroes and knights, as well as an energy system to limit play. Overall, the pacing and progression are quite slow. It takes a long time to even see and more so use other characters from the Disney franchise. Progressing through the levels feels like a grind, with most of the early experience focusing on the Aladdin universe only; Toy Story being the next. Even if you roll new characters with the gacha system, you still can’t use them if you don’t advance the story. Instead of giving us three Aladdin characters to start, a more varied selection of Disney characters available at the outset would have been better.
I also have a problem with the game’s seemingly neverending tutorials. It is annoying that is too hand-holding and prolonged, even locking me up on what I can do, after hours of playing. This unskippable, inescapable tutorial treats players like they are babies.
📊Technical Performance
My experience in the game is somewhat laggy, despite setting the game to a 'high frame rate' option in the graphics settings, which is unacceptable given the light nature of the visuals. I also experience some bugs with the tutorials locking me out of the game requiring a restart to fix. Outside these issues, the game seems to be mostly stable.
⚖️Conclusion
In Disney Realm Breakers, players encounter a blend of tower defense, town building, and strategy MMO elements, although these components can sometimes feel disjointed, and progression feels very slow. While the tower defense mode offers unique mechanics, they may come across as weird and lacking depth. Moreover, the tutorials can be quite annoying in their persistence throughout the game, and the laggy performance is somewhat disappointing, All in all, this results in a game that has failed to be uplifted by Disney's magic, and is mediocre at best in its current state.
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