Lately I have been feeling fairly awful, which is leading me to vary my gaming patterns a bit. The last few nights I have been heading to bed earlier, but not necessarily because I am ready for sleep… but more because I am tired of being upright. Additionally my wife has been drained as she is entering that end of the year rush…. and when she decides it is time to sleep I tend to follow her to the bedroom as well. However since I am in a state of not quite ready for sleep I have been looking for activities to do on my phone. Dragalia Lost is still great and still something I pretty much play on a nightly basis… but since we are between events I do my five or so daily activities and then pop right back out of that game. As such I have been looking for new things to try and recently landed upon Marvel Future Fight, in part because I have been nostalgic about Marvel Heroes the Diablo-esc action rpg that was cancelled a few years back. In a post about Marvel Heroes someone mentioned that Future Fight was probably the closest thing that was currently available… which peaked my interests. Future Fight is not exactly new however as it is currently celebrating its 4 year anniversary with an event based on Avengers Endgame.
Effectively it is an Action RPG where you build a team of characters to bring into the content… but only actually control one of them at a time. Each champion of sorts has a basic attack and a range of abilities that can all be powered up. I am weirdly playing Morgan Le Fay in part because I had read she was one of the easier characters to get through the main story with… and seeing as how my mobile skills are still not amazing I figured I needed all the help I could get. At various points over the last couple of days I have been given free unlocks… and have wound up building a team that consists of Morgan as my main and Sharon Rogers and Shuri as my alternates. Ultimately everything appears to be gated based on where you are in the story, and as you progress through you unlock new options… which in truth seems to be a common design for mobile games in general. To some extent Dragalia Lost does some of this with various things unlocking as you reach different chapters in the primary story. The missions thusfar involve running through a few small areas, encountering a boss… and then getting some story afterwards and usually unlocking whatever character you just fought as something that becomes playable.
So far in my experience the character unlocks appear to be plentiful, however the vast majority are all “one star”, which means that they are really not that usable until you start pouring resources into them. I’ve played two nights… and already have an arsenal of 15 characters that have been unlocked and are playable. Among that mix is 4 6 stars, 4 5 stars, 2 3 stars and 5 1 stars… and I am not entirely certain if this is always the case or if the escalation of six stars is somehow due to the fact that there is an Avengers Endgame themed event happening right now. As is almost always the case I am probably going to stick with the same core team before I start messing with other characters. As you work through the main story you are effectively ranking up Captain America, Ironman and Black Widow… that begin as 1 star champions but now that I am halfway through chapter three of the story are up to 5 stars. I am somewhat assuming that before long they will be 6 star champions giving you three freebies in the process.
The only real negative is that Future Fight is what I would refer to as a “very free to play game”. What I mean by that is you are constantly having “special offers” thrown at you, and this game seems to go one step further than most. When you cancel out of one of the offers you are occasionally greeted with a message that states you will not be able to get this offer once you close the window. In the case of my screenshot above it is simply advertising something that already exists in the store… but those “limited” offers are there to try and invoke FOMO or Fear of Missing Out. If you are susceptible to this sort of twisting of your arm… then it might not be a game you want to try. In all truth there is a past version of me that would have been turned off massively by it… but now I am mostly apathetic about it and just accept it as part of the price that comes with playing games on your phone. They all seem to do something like this in one form or another… with the only real exceptions being the ones that are released by Nintendo and their advisement to not abuse the users. In the end… Future Fight is a fun time waster and fills the bill of laying in bed and messing around on my phone.
I’m still enjoying Dragalia way more than I thought I would. My normal nightly time waster is some version of nonograms. They’re almost like meditating for me.