At Least There’s A Chance Of A Win With Slots!**
BASED ON DEMOFIRST IMPRESSIONS
It’s taken me as long as the whole demo just to get the basics of the game play offered by this game. And it is still harder to describe. But I did at least figure out what kind of game it is. It is a new breed of Free To Play game where instead of paying as you play, you pay $7-10 up front and then it is Free To Play forever. Oh, no, um, yes, sorry, uh, that’s a standard pc downloadable game! Hmmm...
But if it LOOKS like a F2P, and it PLAYS like a F2P..., then I am still suspicious.
Let’s see if I can walk you through it, although if you’ve played any F2P HO game, you know what’s coming. There is a castle, complete with butler, and you’ve inherited it. The butler, however, is also your guide in learning how to progress through the game. To do that you must:
+find hidden objects in the first room that is open to you. These items are given as a list, a very small list. Maybe 4 items.
+when you do, you receive either/or/and
*coins
*experience points
*a quest item
*a weapon
*collections items.
+you must return to each room many times to “advance” it, so that it pays out more. Each time you return, the list is longer, and not all items are in the same place. But it is dead easy no matter what and boring.
+one feature of this game is that you must search in different modes. A room can be in day (words), night (flashlight) or shadow (silhouettes).
+you are given quests to advance your experience and/or gain coins or loot. You use these items to further progress in the game, and the coins can be used at the shop to buy more of these items. But most especially energy. I will come back to this in a moment.
+in order to open up a new room or begin a new quest, you must pay in coins. This is not made obvious at first, and is therefore very confusing. But once you’ve got the hang of it, it’s clear that you will need to spend a lot of coins to get ahead, and therefore a lot of time in the rooms you unlock in order to continue playing.
+as well as the rooms and quests, there are also beasts and the minions of evil to battle outside the castle walls. These require different weapons depending on what species they are (werewolf, vampire, hell hounds, witches) and yield different benefits.
+there are special collections items that come your way as part of all this, and they, when completed, can be traded for experience points and coins.
+energy is used in doing anything, and refills with time, or you can buy recovery potions at the shop. Soon the game starts looking even more like a F2P, because you need coins and energy to do almost anything at all, and it is just not productive or interesting trying to collect them at the rate of a dozen coins a search, when 100s are needed.
+you can also trade stuff with your friends via facebook.
+like facebook games, this one has tiny little objects and small locations.
I don’t know why this game is being released in its current format. As a primer, to train us into thinking F2P terms? Is it just a F2P wannabe, trying to get on the band wagon without setting up the infrastructure? I have no idea. I do know I don’t enjoy this game any more than I do the ones where you actually pay to get the coins and energy.
It is simplistic for all its complexity, requiring no skill at all, as most of it is done automatically without your input. It is also tediously repetitious, and the pace is agonisingly slow. There’s so much of this game reliant on randomization that I maintain my stance that you may as well be playing slots (where you are also paying to be entertained by the randomization codes of a computer and some cool graphics and sound effects). The saving grace for this one is that you don’t keep on paying and paying for that.
I had thought that the solution to the war between traditionally structured casual games and Free To Play games might be a game very much like this, that was, in every way except the need to keep paying and paying, a F2P game. This one has convinced me it simply can’t be done this way. None of those things I consider precious in HOPA games is present in this one.
I don’t recommend this game! 
