If you've been frequently browsing through YouTube or other social media platforms in the past few weeks, you might have came across an ad by Squad Busters. This is the full version of that video:
Supercell, the company behind Clash of Clash, did a massive marketing campaign for this new game. They even hired notable stars such as Chris Hemsworth, Ken Jeong, Christina Ricci, and Bella Poarch, among others. It looked like a fun game but with that heavy marketing budget, I was almost certain that the company would nickel and dime their customers in microtransactions.
I finally decided to give it a try yesterday and played for a few hours. The game has a mishmash of characters across Supercell's various IPs like Clash of Clan's barbarian, Hay Day's chicken, and Brawl Star's Shelly.
GAMEPLAY
The actual game is somewhat of a reverse bullet-hell/roguelike MOBA with 10 players. The goal is to outcompete your opponents in collecting gems. The stages and rules are randomly chosen, adding additional depth to how you devise your tactics.
In terms of how you play, you fight mobs to earn gold. That gold can be used to open chests which contain additional troops to your squad. The same troop types automatically combine into a stronger version.
You are also incentivized to kill your opponents as they can drop their collected gems when they die. And like other survival games, the boundaries of the map shrinks over time, focusing the action closer into the middle for a climactic deathmatch.
The gameplay is very simple to understand but it takes time to hone your strategizing skills. One game lasts just for a couple minutes and players are constantly thrown into fight-or-flight situations. You'd have to assess if you can easily destroy your enemies or would you also incur heavy losses from the confrontation. Cunning players may also be waiting for two teams to clash and annihilate them both afterwards.
MICROTRANSACTIONS
Initially, characters are very easy to unlock. You can gain the basic levels fairly easily as you progress and it's free.
But as you can see, there are tons of characters to choose from and soon the characters you receive from chests daily are too spread out and you won't be able to level up one particle character to its maximum level.
While it's relatively easy to increase a character's tier one and tier two levels, it would be exponentially harder to upgrade the third and fourth tiers. There's also a whole myriad of things you can spend money on, from characters, skins, battle passes, and gold.
And it's true that they can nickel and dime their players as most of the items for sale are just a dollar so you'd think that you'd only be spending a small amount but then it grows over time.
OVERALL
I was surprised by how enjoyable playing Squad Busters was. There's a sense of satisfaction when you decimate your opponents and take away their hard earned loots. It's easy to understand but a bit harder to master. I can see that this has the potential to be a popular e-sports game and those aspiring to reach the pro levels would have to spend a sizeable amount to be competitive early on. Otherwise, you can still play casually whenever you have time and have fun without spending a penny.
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