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Launching WAIFUS & GODS to Crush Your Enemies! New Pixelated Catapult Game! | The Wandering Ark

1K View2024-01-07

🎮Game: The Wandering Ark

⭐️Score: 8/10

Wandering Ark is a pixelated catapult game that has you quite literally catapulting your squad of characters against a bowling alley of enemies in an enclosed space.

📖Premise

The premise is entirely nonsensical. I tried paying attention to what was going on at the start, but I became as lost as a blind person driving a car because the game barely dedicates any time to explaining what the heck is even going on. There are evil machines and it’s the post-apocalypse, and that’s all you really need to know. You are also the captain of the titular wandering ark, a gigantic metal behemoth that roams the desert with your crew.

📊Issues

It also doesn’t help that the localization of this game is super half-baked. Sentences and dialogue come across super stiff. And because the English instructions for certain parts of the game are either tiny or not given proper focus, it’s easy to get confused.
There are characters who are based off of mythological gods from various pantheons and regular dudes who you can get in your squad. And you must pull them through the gacha system.

Characters’ special abilities are locked behind how many times you pull for them, which creates a bad precedent in the long run.

🎮Gameplay

Wandering Ark does have the benefit of giving players bountiful resources through gameplay and idling, which are integral to leveling up your characters, but that’s only a minor stop gap to the conceptual problem gacha systems establish.

As game difficulty increases, you’re going to have to get more copies of powerful characters to match the power level number stacked against you.

As for the game itself, it’s nothing special yet quite fun. You take a squad of up to five characters into each level.

When the level starts, your first selected character drops into the ring. From there, you launch your character around like a crazy cue ball and try to hit and ricochet across the various enemies that inhabit the board alongside you. You and the enemy take turns launching your units into each other, with each successive turn dropping in more units for both of you.

There is some strategy involved because certain characters have special moves depending on the situation that can wipe a whole board. You can combine these abilities to get some nutty combos and attack streaks.

⭐️Overall

But, like I said, your damage output is mainly scaled from your units’ levels, so strategy and tactics pretty much go out the window after a certain point. It’s a creative system, but the gacha system kind of doesn’t help. This superficial number scaling can become a headache when the game throws bigger and bigger numbers at you. If you get lucky, that’s one thing, but the strength of a game should NOT be placed within luck-based systems that have a lot of bearing on the players’ enjoyment without giving players the agency to deal with said luck effectively.

✨Conclusion

If you’re looking for a game that requires very little commitment and brainpower, let your mind wander off with Wandering Ark.