This way lie monsters

PACKED WITH snappy action and terrific graphics, the mobile game Dragon Encounter is truly addictive. It’s a mobile MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) from a South Korean developer recently introduced here by Playpark and it’s drawn a lot of enthusiasts in short time.

The game is available for both Android and iOS devices. Google Play reports that it’s been downloaded for Android 85,000 times in Thailand and its Thai fan page on Facebook has earned more than 65,000 “likes”.

The Android client software, now in Version 1.2.1, is about 30 megabytes.

The game puts you in a fantasy world of dragons and sundry other monsters lurking in dungeons. Kill them off to accumulate points that boost your character’s level and skills. Clear an entire dungeon to receive “loot”, such as rubies and gold needed to buy extra armour and weapons.

You can choose any of the three classes of characters – Warrior, Archer or Mage. An introductory tutorial explains key techniques and how to upgrade your weapons. At this stage you must play a Warrior to get the feel of a high-level, fully equipped character. 

The tutorial briefly covers the story, which gradually unfolds as you begin clearing dungeons in a specific order. You learn the story in dialogue with non-playing characters and it’s important not to get impatient and press the “skip” button.

I tested the game on an iPad Pro and found the graphics very colourful. The animated effects ran smoothly and were quite beautiful. The characters moved fast, as did the monsters they confronted. The avatars and armour designs are |attractive.

Basic control is via the thumbs. The left thumb handles your character’s movement and the right thrusts the character into attack and selects specific attack skills. All these controls are easily mastered in short time. 

In “auto play” mode, the character is controlled by artificial intelligence, but despite what scientists keep warning us about, AI still isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, so you can’t fully trust it. Your character might soon end up dead, or at least miss out on higher ranks for failing to clean out those dungeons. 

And you need the higher ranks to receive the higher rewards and upgrade your weapons and armour. AI might also clumsily cheat you out of “five-star” items, which are essential for increasing your character’s attributes for the battles against higher classes of monsters.

A shortcut comes in handy when you don’t have time to “farm” for accessories and other items to enhance performance. You can play “for free”, but you need “rubies” to buy the needed upgrades to weapons and armour. These can be acquired via A Cash, TrueMoney, a One-2-Call Cash Card, a debit or credit card or LinePay.

There’s a “daily spin” in the game that gives you a chance to win gold, stamina, rubies, scrolls and three-star items. For this you need to spend 500 rubies in an equipment draw that provides two- to four-star items. 

Then there’s the “bundle draw”, which at least guarantees one piece of four-star equipment in every 10 items acquired, but this will cost you 5,000 rubies. Now you see the need to purchase rubies with actual money through the refilling services.

Once you’ve reached a |certain level, you can unlock “special” and extra dungeons where you can earn upgrading items like enchanting stones, rank-up stones and evolution stones.

And, in the Arena – again accessible only from a certain level – you can fight other players in real time. There are ways to join a guild or set up your own to play in “co-op mode”, thus increasing your chances |of success in the higher-level dungeons.

A shower of gold coins is your reward if you’re able to enter the Tower of Infinity Challenge. Here your hero does battle with waves of monsters, one after another, the level of difficulty rising each time. 

Careful, though – if you get injured, you have only five potions for recovering your HP (health points) and MP (magical points). You might easily come to a sorry end!

 

System Requirements

 

Operating system: At least iPhone 5 with iOS 7 or higher Android 4.0 or higher, at least dual core 1.5GHz processor, 1GB RAM