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Impressive visuals and combat but the presentation is mid | Review - Tokyo Ghoul: Break the Chains

2K View2023-11-09

Tokyo Ghoul: Break the Chains

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✨Overview

Tokyo Ghoul: Break the Chains is a mobile 3D turn-based strategy card game that combines iconic scenes from the original anime with a turn-based card battle system, and it offers players the chance to interact with their favorite characters from the series, and relive iconic moments from the story.

🟩Pros

+Impressive visuals
+Smooth performance
+Engaging card-based combat

🟥Cons

-Underwhelming story presentation
-Sound desync issues
-Imbalanced pacing and progression

⭐️Score: 6/10

📖Story and Premise

Tokyo Ghoul: Break the Chains recreates the dark and gritty world of Tokyo Ghoul. The story revolves around Ken Kaneki, a college student who, after a chance encounter with a Ghoul, undergoes a transformation into a half-Ghoul, half-human hybrid. He is thrust into the dangerous and hidden world of Ghouls, supernatural beings that consume human flesh.

The game does an okay job of capturing the essence of the original series, and it delivers a plot that fans know and love. During cutscenes in the story chapters, the game uses a manga-style graphic novel panel presentation to tell the story, with some panels being animated.

However, there is no background music in some scenes, and despite many of the original voice actors returning, there is no voice-overs in these story cutscenes, so you'd have to read all the dialogue. This isn't a problem, especially if you're a manga enthusiast. Personally, I found it somewhat underwhelming and half-baked compared to other anime/manga mobile games with story adaptations that provide a more comprehensive audiovisual experience in this regard.

🎮Gameplay

The core gameplay of Tokyo Ghoul: Break the Chains revolves around turn-based card battles. Cards are randomly drawn for the player depending on their character roster, and use them strategically in battles. The game offers more than 30 characters to choose from, allowing players to create their own powerful lineup.

The combat system in Tokyo Ghoul: Break the Chains is reminiscent of the popular game "Seven Deadly Sins" in terms of card combining and turn-based combat. Each turn, you have a set amount of energy to spend. You can use it to draw cards, move cards around, or use an energy card to replenish your ultimate skill. Identical adjacent cards will automatically combine and will result in more powerful version of the card.

It’s a pretty straight forward mechanic, and one that’s engaging. The effects are pretty cool too, although they will get repetitive since the all characters only have one main attack. You can speed up the battles, with the option for Automation unlocked further in the game.

One neat thing I loved about it is the simple information panels that appears when skills are activated, which helps alot in learning the different characters and their attacks, no need to hold press them or read them in another menu.

Perhaps the combat system is the most interesting part of the game. However, when playing the main story chapters, the battle’s are few and far in between, and it mostly focuses on the pretty underwhelming cutscenes that take up most of the chapters.

⏫Progression

The main source of progression is leveling up your profile, and advancing the main story. You'll go back and forth between enhancing your characters' power by using materials and equipping cells; and trying to gain EXP to level up your profile. However, I found the pacing of progression a bit slow and imbalanced. The level requirements for the main story chapters are widely spaced, forcing you to play a lot of the extra content to access the next chapters.

These extra content can become repetitive as well, especially during the early parts when almost nothing is unlocked yet. By the time I unlocked a new chapter, I was pretty overpowered too due to all the extra “assignments” I’ve been doing repeatedly. Furthermore, many game features, such as research, autobattle, PVP, and co-op, are gated by your profile level, which takes time to increase. This means you won't have access to most of the game's content for a long time when starting out.

Energy or stamina is a key resource in the game, and it is used for almost every mission and even watching cutscenes. You have a starting limit of around 30 stamina which slowly goes up as you level up, but imagine, one mission or cutscene will already cost 10-25 stamina, which is pretty overwhelming. Mission costs can be too steep, and once your initial energy is depleted, you might find the game's energy costs overwhelming. Fortunately, the game provides a lot of stamina rewards in the early stages, but I can only imagine the costs when these bonuses are now gone.

💵Monetization

Tokyo Ghoul: Break the Chains follows the typical free-to-play mobile game model with in-app gacha purchases that allows players to progress faster or acquire certain items by spending real money. Different banners are available, and my experience so far has been generous as I already got 3 SSR characters to use.

📊Technical Performance

The visuals and effects are impressive and top-tier. In terms of performance, it's one of the smoothest games I've played on my Snapdragon 888 device. I didn't even bother checking the graphics settings because the performance was silky smooth from the outset while still looking sharp. However, the game is not perfect; I've encountered some minor bugs, such as animation and camera quirks. As good as the visuals are, I also noticed that the sound often loses sync with the gameplay.

⚖️Conclusion

Tokyo Ghoul: Break the Chains is a good looking turn-based card strategy game with decent combat mechanics, impressive visuals but has questionable pacing and progression issues, as well as an underwhelming execution on its storytelling presentation. Despite these drawbacks, fans of Tokyo Ghoul will find much to enjoy in this mobile adaptation, especially if those who appreciate strategic card-based combat games.

Mentioned games

Tokyo Ghoul: Break the Chains

StrategyRPGEditors' Choice

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