We have to give the benefit of the doubt to Epic Games, the popular studio that throughout its trajectory gave birth to iconic games like the Gears of War, Unreal, and (closest to our hearts) Infinity Blade sagas. After the departure of Cliff Bleszinski in 2014, the strategy has groped around blindly trying to invent new strategies adapted to modern times. To Paragon, its free MMO, and a new free-to-play title for Unreal they’ve now added Battle Breakers, a fun freemium puzzle RPG for Android that’s just come out in a soft launch in a few countries but can be downloaded and installed via APK.
The game involves a peculiar game system that brings together turn-based battles and an odd clearing of hexagonal boards where you get objects as you clear the board and new enemies come out in your path. The score is based on how you use five colors associated with different elements that interact in different ways, so you have to know who you’re attacking and with what kind of profile if you want to maximize the damage of each blow. Plus, to power up your character’s energy you can break matching-color hexagons.
The bulk of the experience involves sequentially beating these challenges – usually divided into one or more correlative phases that can be played at different difficulty levels. As you beat battles you’ll get the standard objects and enter an endless vortex of crafting to improve your troops, heroes to level up and combine to get “the perfect deck” (though, okay, this isn’t a trading card game).
Beyond that, you can participate in offline PVP battles against other players, manage your friends list, and improve a series of buildings scattered around the game world that will provide upgrades in the medium term. The system is nothing too extraordinary in terms of its freemium philosophy of offering small doses of happiness as you access the game continuously over several consecutive days, but we’ve already totally internalized that by now, haven’t we?
