It is a nice idea, and a nice implementation. However...
The game is not finished... The endgame does not converge, and some buildings are useless.
1) You can do all the research in the research lab by level 12... however you can improve the building to level 20 without any gain
2) The population buildings are useless.. They are needed to improve the main building to a point, but you do not need all 3 houses fully upgraded for that... which... is useless.. why allow them to go to level 20, when having them at level 8 is enough to full upgrade the main building.
3) Same as for number 2... For the storage building... you do not need to fully upgrade it in order to achieve maximum level for the usefull buildings.
Reviews for "Arcalona"
I like the basic idea, managing your base while leveling the actual characters. But the base is just a time sink, waiting for the money to refill. And there is a huge spike in difficulty after the second island, so I spent most of my time fighting the three rock monsters over and over. Meanwhile, my thousands of gold is just being spent on storage upgrades so I can horde more gold for more storage.
A pretty nice game, but like others I get stuck at the scarabos battle. Midway through the fight, it will freeze and I will be unable to continue
I'm upset. I thought I can resume back the game as it automatically saves on the URL. When I came back, and click Continue, nothing happened. And so I have to restart again. Feel like crying right now.
I will not repeat other reviewers and will not talk about how this game is too grind and useless strength and critical is and only useful stats are health and magic. These are defiantly valid, but it has already been said.
I want to point out some other problems:
- When you buy other island it appears on other screen but you cannot place buildings there because you can't scroll between screens with a building placement selected from main base. What happened instead was that I somehow placed my building in mid air between the old and new islands. Then the next time I reloaded the game there appeared an intermediary island under that building which was previously hovering in midair. I could reach to build new buildings to this intermediary building, thankfully, but I still had the island I bought bare and unusable.
- There is no New game option. The first time you start this game you click Play. After that this Play button is grayed out and you can only click Continue which let's you play the saved game. But you can't start a new game and start a new game you must when you realize that you have ruined your characters with putting points into strength. So you are forced to wipe your browser memory which will also delete saves for other games you don't want to get deleted. Not user friendly at all.
- Why can't I return to my home island by clicking it on map, like any other island? Only way to do it is by closing the map.
- Sound can only be turned off from your home island - why not during battle? I may have a phone ringing or door ringing during battle too you know?
- Cannon vs ship battles are boring and not fun. This feature should be removed or dock should give +3 to attack instead of +1 and +50 to health instead of +10.
- Factory should have more fun upgrades up to building level 20 and they should do more for heroes.
- All characters are mages. They all should ignore strength and just pump points in magic. The best end game attack for archer is opening a portal to hell. Wtf? Don't get me wrong - that attack is cool, but it doesn't fit an archer character at all.
On overall this game has a fine basic mechanics and good animation, but some things should be calibrated better and the interface mechanics mentioned above should be solved.