Games worth discovering
Even vampires can’t save yet another generic gacha RPG
10K View2023-12-21
SHOULD I PLAY SILVER AND BLOOD?
Not unless things drastically improve between the current test version and the final release. Silver and Blood is the latest in a never-ending flood of mobile gacha RPGs, with its only notable feature being a dark story involving vampires. Virtually everything else here is been-there-done-that unless you haven’t touched one of these types of games before, and it doesn’t even do a particularly good job with the many recycled elements.
TIME PLAYED
I’m somewhere between four and five hours into Silver and Blood. I’ve made it through most of the basic tutorial stuff at this point, have unlocked a lot of features and modes, and have made it to the middle of the third chapter in the story campaign. My main crew of bloodsuckers is all hovering around level 30 or so, but I’ve hit a wall of needing to wait to gather more resources so I can level them up enough to actually make progress.
WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT SILVER AND BLOOD?
• Goofy, self-serious story. I’m a sucker for goth-themed media that doesn’t seem to be aware of how silly it is, and Silver and Blood certainly fits that mold. The moment I realized that the protagonist is named Noah Nevernight, I burst out in laughter. There wasn’t much to like about this game or its localization—more on that below—but the general setting and setup were fun enough.
• Lightly strategic combat that is lightly satisfying to succeed at. Most of the actual gameplay of Silver and Blood is just managing your party, choosing where to place them on a grid at the start of battle, and making sure they start off on the right foot before the auto-combat takes over. Still, as someone who enjoys party management-focused mobile RPGs, this take on it is competent if familiar. There’s just enough thinking required that when I tried to zone out and just tap through combat scenarios without paying attention, I inevitably started losing battles and had to wake myself up.
WHAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT IN SILVER AND BLOOD?
• Sloppy translation. The English localization text for Silver and Blood is full of typos, messy grammar, and sentences that just don’t seem to make sense. On top of that, some longer lines of text seemed to just get cut off, and the auto-text progression option kept skipping whole lines quickly before I could read them. As I mentioned before, the story and setting are silly but also really one of the only things about the game that held some appeal, so these issues drained a lot of the potential fun from the experience for me personally.
• Unsettling character design. Listen, I get it. For a certain subset of gamers, the appeal of gacha games is finding new waifus to fall in love with. I’m not going to judge you as long as you’re not hurting anyone in the real world. That said, Silver and Blood goes to some ludicrous extremes with its fan service, and the results can sometimes be downright chilling. For an example, take a look at Silvan Vetia (pictured below), one of the first SSR characters I unlocked. Why is her body twisted like that? Why are her boobs floating as though filled with helium? I can’t answer those questions, but I can say that even considering the answers has driven me to a precipice of madness that will haunt my nightmares.
• Poor balance for progression. This can hopefully be tweaked and fixed before the game releases, but I was disappointed with how quickly I hit a progression wall in Silver and Blood. By the halfway point of the third chapter, missions had a recommended power level that simply wasn’t possible to hit with the amount of resources available to me. My only choice was to leave the game and return when enough resources had been gathered through the idle system. Pretty boring!
• I have no clue if or how the gacha system works. Despite playing for almost five hours, I have yet to unlock the full gacha system in SIlver and Blood. It’s unclear if this is just how the game works during beta or if the final release will keep the actual gacha summons hidden away for this long, but as of now I’ve only been able to unlock characters one by one by collecting fragments. It makes sense to not have monetization built in during beta, but at this point I can’t even begin to guess if the gacha in the release version will be greedy or giving.
• It’s the same old shit. Forgive the harsh language, and maybe this is just the stress from being just days away from the holidays speaking. But after a year of playing dozens and dozens of gacha games—some of which were very good—playing just one more mediocre entry in that genre that does nothing new or exciting felt maddening. I know 2024 is going to be full of gacha games too, and I know plenty of those will be bad as well. I just hope the ratio is at least a little more balanced toward ones that are good or even just try something interesting.
• False advertising. Silver and Blood describes itself as a "strategic/strategy card game" on its Google Play Store listing. Please know that there are absolutely zero actual "card" mechanics in this game. The closest thing that I guess must be what that description refers to is that before battles start, you place your characters down onto the grid, and they kind of appear in card form there? But it's just the characters you set. There's no randomness, no shuffling, literally no card game elements at all. It is very much a traditional, turn-based RPG, not a card game.
PLATFORM TESTED
Android via Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G phone.
Comments
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bro is so obsessed with proving his forced first instinct "opinion" after playing 4 hours that he didnt even realise its not a gacha game, lol. the character design is pretty impressive and it shows your prude bias with how you disagree. im sorry but this review is an amateurish pile of bs
2023-12-23
I mean that's why I made it clear how long I've played. Not sure why you're so pressed that I disagree with you. 🤷
2023-12-23
Another spd CC hoyeee!!!! How old are you exactly?
2024-03-04