Dragonheir: Silent Gods

I downloaded this mostly to scratch my summoning itch and a little bit to give it a bad review for my bad experience from when it first came out--and I almost did. But they've made huge improvements and I think that deserves a recommend. [h2]Overview[/h2] This is objectively one of the best summoning games in existence. The characters are beautifully designed, fairly well animated, and you get to summon a lot of legendaries. You get to form teams of various elements and do it all for free*. [i]*Free to play is totally viable now but if you want more summons, you need to pay.[/i] It does have some issues which I will share but if they're not issues for you, go ahead and give it a shot. [h2]Where they did very well[/h2] [b]Improved summons[/b] There's a massive overhaul to this game versus when I tried it a long time ago on mobile. Back then, you couldn't summon legendaries at all without paying. I had 1 legendary, which I got for about $1--[b]Drizzt Do'Urden and his beautiful big kitty, Guenhwvar[/b]. Now, I have over 20 Legendaries for free after week of playing. It's freaking great, and I hold my own against most players. [b]Decent game progression and a lot of content to play[/b] There's a lot of content and you can do fine progressing through the story for absolutely free. If you want to pay a fair price, I think spending up to $60 on this game is totally fine. Makes sense. It's well made enough to deserve it and there's a lot of content. The new Magichess feature was lame at first, but it's actually incredibly fun. I almost dropped the game immediately when introduced to Magichess (it blocked the main game so I even thought it was a different game with a similar name) because of the non-stop glazing from the NPC guide when you're doing simple tasks It's quite insulting to keep seeing the equivalent of "OMG, YOU'RE SO AMAZING."for beating an enemy that never had a chance against you in the first place, but Magichess gets better. In Magichess you basically drop your heroes on a chess board where they auto fight based on how you deployed them, and you upgrade them between turns. It functions like a mini-game but it's its own environment entirely (like Gwent in Witcher). [h2]Where the game is still "blah"[/h2] (but may not be an issue for you...?) [b]You will be absolutely obiliterated by whales and fake players they insert as fillers.[/b] This comes with the territory. It's pay-to-win but if you don't have any envy for the top rewards then...no problem. You get yours, they get theirs and you didn't pay thousands. The structural problem with pay-to-win is of course that fair price for the game (e.g. $60) will get you nowhere. It's more in the range of thousands, which isn't worth it. [b]Timed unlocking of campaign/farming[/b] Unlike the past where you would have struggled to even fight the campaign or farming enemies, you can now fight it reasonably well and farm stuff. However, higher difficulties unlock over time (e.g. 10 days after this server's launch), the same for the story progress. If you're not about to binge-play, it may not be an issue for you. Otherwise, it can be frustrating to get stonewalled. [b]Weird login Steam bug / Google login[/b] It's generally unpleasant to need to Google (or Apple, or FB) login after you already used Steam, but that gave me the advantage of importing my Drizzt from my old server (whoa!), which is not a usual benefit games give AFAIK. If they continue the practice, I may be able to do it again so I'm going to give them a pass on this "bad thing". But, the double login results in a weird bug where after you close the game, it doesn't properly close on the backend so Steam continues to track your login hours (even though the game is closed) and you won't be able to launch the game again until you close Steam in Task Manager. By the time I figured it out, I had a laugh because according to Steam, I played the game 3 straight days without sleeping or doing anything else. ___ So that's the good and bad. As of writing this, I decided to delete this game again to play WH3 instead. Haven't got time to do both.