Games worth discovering

Build your kingdom with titans and waifus in Grand Cross: Age of Titans

3K View2023-08-15

When was the last time you got sucked into your phone and entered a land of hot waifu and husbando anime characters? If this premise interests you, Grand Cross: Age of Titans, Netmarble’s latest RTS release, might be the game for you. Grand Cross: Age of Titans did a great job creating a colorful world with fully-voiced characters and an interesting, if not cliched, narrative that effectively held my attention for the first few hours of playing.

The many anime cut scenes that progressed the story after every chapter emphasized the narrative that is unique among games like this, and though admittedly I had fun building my castle, fighting enemies, and controlling a badass mega titan, the many microtransactions, long wait times, and repetitive gameplay means I probably won’t be playing this one all that much in the near future.

I’m not being unfairly harsh here. There are many cool things to do in Grand Cross: Age of Titans. The gameplay revolves around constructing and customizing your castle. Upgrading buildings and troops in Grand Cross: Age of Titans kept me busy using my resources. I spent a great deal of time building up my cavalry units to fight the elite monsters roaming my territory, and admittedly there’s a real sense of accomplishment after expanding my domain. It doesn’t hurt either that the waifus I was collecting looked amazing and had cool skills I could build to help me in combat.

But the combat gets repetitive real quick. Collecting resources is the name of the game, and the longer I played, the more I needed to wait around, sometimes hours, for areas like training grounds to be completed before I could continue with my quest. That is unless I was willing to spend money to acquire the proper resources to speed up construction, which I’m not inclined to do.

With that said, I really enjoyed the self-awareness of the characters. It was pretty funny listening to them chat about being stuck in a video game and unable to skip boring tutorials while I was going through said tutorial. Little elements like this made Grand Cross: Age of Titans charming.

Grand Cross: Age of Titans isn’t reinventing the RTS wheel. Its webtoon animation and narrative stand out, but what fell flat were the many microtransactions and long wait times to build my castle. If you want to try it, you’ll probably have fun in your first few hours or even days of playing, but be prepared for the inevitable paywall when you run out of resources.