Today (May 18th), Anchor Falls opens its fourth beta.
Since its exposure, this product has attracted much attention because of the two-dimensional sci-fi style similar to "Battle Double Pamish" and "Honkai 3", and the number of reservations on the TapTap platform alone has exceeded 830,000, which can also be called a traffic waiting to explode in the crowded two-dimensional track.
What does not match it (referring to the attention received by the product) is the popularity of its developer, Thunder Flame Games. As a company with a scale of 300 people, it has launched two popular models "Bailong Hegemony" (monthly peak turnover of more than 100 million) and "Three Kingdoms of Gods and Demons" in the four years since its establishment, and was also included in the territory by listed company Mingchen Health with an acquisition price of more than 100 million yuan. Perhaps because the previous focus was mostly on placing card categories with the theme of the Three Kingdoms, its presence in the player group was very low.
The recruitment page shows that Thunder Flame Games has begun to try new categories such as two-dimensional cards, MMOs, and FPS. "Anchor Fall" is the team's first two-dimensional product, and as the research and development nears the end, it can be regarded as reaching a key node in the transformation.
A two-dimensional game that focuses more on showing characters
Although it uses a very sci-fi theme, the game "Anchor Falls" does not feel as grand as expected. As a two-dimensional game, it seems to focus more on showing various character images than showing the worldview.
For this reason, beautiful graphics are the most intuitive way to show your character. The entire technical power of the game is reflected in the art, and the beautiful action performance is also its biggest highlight.
Despite being a turn-based game, the graphics are displayed with highly accurate isometric 3D modeling plus 2D rendering. The characters' movements are very smooth, the skills also have gorgeous special effects, the attack animations and battle scenes are seamlessly integrated, and the quality of the action performances is almost comparable to many action games.
Skill animation also enriches the picture performance and strengthens the impact through camera movement skills, and it can be said that there is also a movie-like experience during the battle, which can indeed show the charm of the characters well.
In the dialogue, the characters are shown using Live2D half-length standing paintings, and the movements are equally smooth and without stiffness. The character's reaction to each sentence has a different performance, and these details can also help express the character's personality.
The game's narrative focus is also more skewed towards the characters than the worldview.
Originally, the game's story setting was full of near-future style: humans had just escaped the catastrophe of alien alien invasion and now inhabited terrestrial planets, and they had to always be on the lookout for the deadly pollution caused by the disaster to the environment, and the powerful monsters created by pollution. The player takes on the role of a professional in fighting these monsters and alien xenomorphs.
However, the specific storyline does not show the world view on a macro level, but only revolves around the protagonist and his teammates. The story begins with one of their outings, where they meet characters with different identities and personalities, and feel the intrigue and crisis from the villain's organization. The event scene is generally a small place such as a street in a town or a building, which seems to be not much different from our usual life, and does not emphasize the particularity of the worldview in terms of intuitive feeling.
This choice is not unreasonable. For "well-informed" second-game players, what strange worldview seems to have been seen. If you can't show the highlights from the worldview alone, it is better to direct the player's attention to specific characters who are more likely to be attractive.
The game does this in its narrative. The contradictions of the plot basically focus on the cooperation and confrontation between different organizations, rather than external pressure outside humans - to put it more bluntly, the biggest obstacle to the protagonist is not the "invading alien xeno", but the "human villain who uses the alien xenomorph to make trouble". This makes the tone of the story more of an epic sense of confrontation against conspiracy than against foreign invasion. At the extreme, it seems that the worldview doesn't matter what it is, just providing a background and stage, as long as the villain organization is present is enough to advance the plot.
At the same time, the relationship between different organizations can be reflected through the words and deeds of the characters, and the player's cognition of the worldview is further narrowed to the individual characters.
In order to enrich the depth of the story, there is also a dark line outside the main line, which revolves around the mystery of the main character's life, and focuses on the character to strengthen the player's curiosity about the character.
Since the selling point is all on the characters, the game needs to expose players to more characters as soon as possible to try to meet the preferences of different players. To this end, the game has made a great concession on the guarantee mechanism of drawing cards, and is designed to be 60 consecutive guarantees, which is much lower than most similar games. Moreover, this guarantee number is inheritable. This means that if an SSR is issued at the 20th round, the guarantee count will not be reset, and the player will still get an SSR stably on the 60th shot. In this way, the difficulty of obtaining SSR characters is also greatly reduced, players can collect more characters faster, and they can find their "wife" earlier.
However, the easier it is for players to acquire strong characters, which may result in the difficulty of the level may be reduced. To balance this, an element of attribute restraint has been added to the combat mechanics, and this restraint buff has been set to give a very large damage bonus. In this way, it is more cost-effective to distribute resources to characters with different attributes to ensure that they can "get the right medicine" than simply upgrading a powerful character. This again leads players to tend to develop more characters to cope with different levels.
In addition to the usual power-boosting process of card games, the game also introduces a favorability system. By accumulating favorability by giving gifts to characters, it seems that it is possible to unlock plot and other fragmented information related to the corresponding character. However, this part does not seem to be completed, and it can be seen that the words "confidential locked" occupy a position in the game, and the specific content has not yet been put in.
What's more interesting is the chat function. When a new character is acquired, the player will receive a "chat message" from the character, and through a two-word conversation, you can quickly show the personality characteristics of different characters. And the message will also leave a record after closing the window, considering that the favorability system has not yet been completed, it seems that the game wants to make this chat function longer, so that players can gradually unlock more chat content as the character's favorability increases. If it does, it can be a good way to give players a sense of companionship.
In a variety of quests, you can also see that each character has its own exclusive level, which will be unlocked after the player has the corresponding character, and brush these levels to get the character fragment reward. However, at present, these levels are only the battle process, there is no plot, and the level description only shows "soldier file encryption", and it is speculated that in-depth plots about the characters will be added to these levels in the future.
It is conceivable that if the game is more complete, cultivating the characters, appreciating their heroism in battle, and enjoying the companying of the characters will be the main game experience of this game.
Slightly weak turn-based
In order to highlight the characters and allow players to focus as much attention as possible on the characters during battles, the game has simplified the gameplay a lot to avoid overcrowding and reduce the burden on the player. But this also leads to the flaw of relatively weak gameplay.
The game's advertisement is "action cards", but in fact this action does not refer to the mode of operation, but to the action performance during the battle. The game actually has no action element to play.
The picture shows the official reply of the game
The so-called turn-based is a semi-instant turn-based one. The player does not need to control the character, and the battle will advance automatically. Each character's turn takes a few seconds, and the player needs to tap the icon to cast the character's skill before reading the action bar for those few seconds, which is the whole flow of the battle. This skill casting is similar to "which bright spot", as long as the hand speed is fast enough, there is basically no strategy to speak of. Because of this, even switching the automatic mode will not affect the effect of the game in the slightest.
So in a battle, players spend most of their time watching the character's action performance, and the attack screen cannot be skipped. Although this can indeed show the charm of the character, players will inevitably feel bored after watching it for a long time.
The only strategic aspect of the game is to go into battle and set up before each level of battle. Players need to choose the playing character according to the monster's attribute restraint, and then decide the formation and position according to the buff of different squares. This part of the strategy element is not very difficult.
This space with a special symbol in the figure provides an attack boost
It is worth mentioning that some earlier player reviews and media reviews show that the game's combat process once had a "shield" operation design. During enemy attacks, players can avoid damage for the character by tapping the shield icon at the right moment. However, perhaps for fear of affecting the balance of the game, this operation did not appear in this test, and the combat process was simplified again.
As a result, the game sacrifices the richness of gameplay in order to highlight the action performance. There is no bright spot in terms of gameplay, and it is easy to lose its attractiveness, which will not be conducive to retaining players in the long term. This is probably where the game needs to improve in the future.
epilogue
With the settlement period of 2022 ushered in a result, the VAM agreement period set by Thunder Flame Games when it was originally acquired also ended, and finally exceeded the performance commitment with a performance completion rate of 168.65%. However, a closer look reveals that their peak net profit was concentrated when the previous two games first launched, and they completed about 95% of the promised amount in the first 9 months. With the passage of time, the online games are gradually moving towards the end of their life cycle, and no new products are online, and the company's profitability is also declining, and the net profit in 2022 is even only about 2.5% of the same period of the previous year. The current Thunder Flame game seems to be all the pressure on this most completed "Anchor Fall".
The good news is that Anchor Falls got its release number last December, and the bad news is that it still looks like there's still some content unfinished. The game has now received 830,000 reservations on TapTap alone, and the market is not small. It's just that now the market for two-dimensional cards has been firmly grasped by several new and old explosive models. If Anchor Falls doesn't find enough special highlights, it seems a little difficult to break through.