In a bid to monetize its user-friendly but financially dragging giant, Sina recently imbued its Weibo microblogging platform with its own currency — the weibi — and games. But are these games actually any good? I dove into a few of them to find out. This is the fourth in a series of reviews of Sina Weibo games.
Toy Legion is an interesting game, at least conceptually speaking. I’m not a big casual gamer, so perhaps some commenter will point out that this game is actually a copy of something else, but to me, it appears to be an interesting mixture of genres like real-time-strategy (RTS), tower defense, and even a little role-playing game (RPG) stuff. Unfortunately, when I say interesting, I mean philosophically, not in terms of the actual gameplay experience.
Toy Legion starts like an RTS. You’ve got a base and workers to help you build things. You collect resources and use them to make buildings and soldiers, although the resource-collecting is dumbed-down; you just build a few buildings and they collect themselves more or less automatically. But soon after you build your first cannon tower, your base is attacked, and your cannon defends it. You can’t really control anything here, so it’s a bit like a tower defense game in that way. When you attack, it’s much the same — whether you win or lose depends on your numbers and unit types, as well as the opponent’s defenses. There is not much strategy to it.
And that’s where the game’s real problem lies. In an RTS, part of the fun is planning your attacks and defense strategically based on any number of variables. In Toy Legion, some of those variables don’t exist (like different types of terrain) and you can’t actually control your troops once they’ve been sent into enemy territory. But it doesn’t incorporate the more fun aspects of tower defense games either, because again the terrain doesn’t play much of a role in how battles play out. There are also some RPG elements incorporated in that users, buildings, and other things are progressively leveled up, but that’s an element of almost every game in existence these days, and it doesn’t make or break anything.
The game also suffers from the same issue that seems to affect nearly every Sina Weibo game: uber-long wait times. Like most games, it has its own in-game currency that can be purchased with Sina’s Weibi virtual currency which is, in turn, purchased using real currency. The in-game money can be used to speed things up, and you’re given a few hundred dollars to start off with, but once that runs out (and it will, quickly) you’re stuck with either waiting (possibly hours) for things to process, or paying real money to speed them up.
Obviously, the game needs to be monetized somehow, but as I’ve said before, monetization cannot come at the expense of gameplay. If a game isn’t fun, most people aren’t going to want to spend money or even time on it. And a game that makes you sit around waiting for an hour just to move on to the next thing? That’s not fun.
It’s sad, because there are some cool ideas here. The game does allow you to attack friends and other users who are also playing, and the idea of a back-and-forth tower defense game with friends sounds really cool. But if I have to invest massive amounts of time (or money) into the game to wring fun out of it, it’s not at all worth it. I’d rather spend that money up-front on buying a game that I know is going to be fun (and offer better graphics, deeper strategic choices, etc. than a free-to-play game generally can).
Perhaps that means I’m just not a casual gamer, but I enjoy games like Peggle or Plants vs. Zombies as much as anyone. Toy Legion’s problem isn’t just that it’s a social/casual game, it’s that it sacrifices the most important aspect of a game — fun — on the altar of money.