Wind-Up Warrior Review
Jonathan Anson / Dec 13th, 2016 No Comments
The massive catalog of mobile RPGs gives the impression that there’s little room for titles with originality or new ideas. Wind-Up Warrior by Joyforge aims to prove otherwise. It’s a game that’s ambitious in trying out new concepts while simultaneously emulating the style and simplicity of old console-based RPGs.
The Wind-Up
Set in a textbook fantasy world besieged by monsters, Wind-Up Warrior puts players in control of a mechanical warrior sent out by a man known only as Master Craftsman to defeat them.
Fighting megaslime.
To do this, players must advance through levels by defeating enemies. Successfully clearing areas advances players to the next level, where they will face even tougher enemies. The ultimate goal is to complete all of the game’s levels and rid the land of monsters.
Wind-Up Warrior uses a standard RPG formula where layers gain items, money and skills to strengthen their warrior. The game offers some unique slants on this formula, such as a three-button combat engine.
For starters, players can order their character to focus on attack or defense while in combat, and can rush to the next enemy. Switching between these three modes is very easy and you are encouraged to do so as the more you use each one the more effective it becomes.
These actions all depend on the trademark feature of this game, which is keeping the warrior wound up by constantly. By tapping the cog button repeatedly, players help ensure the warrior’s movement bar is filled. If the bar reaches zero, the warrior will stop, leaving him in a vulnerable position. It’s a terrific means of ensuring consistent challenge in the game.
Players can also opt to return to the home of the Master Craftsman to equip weapons, shields and magic using a simple inventory engine. Items can be sold to acquire money to upgrade. Upgrading items is instrumental to beating the game.
Should you die or voluntarily choose to go back to the home of Master Craftsman between fights, the game starts back at level one. You will have to fight all the way back to your previous place in the game. Though you gain access to magic later in the game to help you out, Wind-Up Warrior is a stiff challenge.
The game ends up being a genuinely challenging game requiring both patience and strategy if players are set in making a clean run from the first level all the way to the end. This formula is uniquely simple, yet deviously challenging.
Rusty Gears
Wind-Up Warrior suffers from the its developers focusing too much of their efforts on innovation. This has this unfortunate result of the rest of the game being neglected or half-baked.
A not so giant enemy crab.
One good example is the game’s story: there’s barely any. This is quite at odds with the fact that the game strives very hard to emulate both the visuals and sounds of an RPG title. It succeeds in emulating those two aspects, but fails to do the same with its story.
Even the gameplay has problems given the game’s linear combat-based format. After a while, beating one enemy after the other becomes boring, even more so considering the lack of story to keep players invested in the game.
It can become quite tedious considering how the game returns you to the start of level one when you return the the Master Craftsman to equip items or when you die. It becomes a chore to maintain interest after you have to complete levels over and over again.
Once the main story portion of the game is done, there’s very little incentive to keep playing. The only reward players get for their efforts is an endless mode where players must survive against a wave of infinite monsters. Beyond that and the ability to earn achievements, Wind-Up Warrior has little to offer in terms of replay value.
Overall
Wind-Up Warrior manages to be an above average effort. It’s a great, simple and challenging way of killing time. But as an RPG, it isn’t groundbreaking or as fleshed out as most other RPGs, even ones designed for mobile devices.
The game deserves merit for trying new things. But, like its main protagonist, it needs a great deal of maintenance and work to be truly successful. At the moment, it’s a good effort but it must do more to become a genuinely excellent RPG.
Jonathan Anson
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tags: android , Joyforge , review , Wind-Up Warrior , Wind-Up Warrior Review
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