Iron Throne is more positive than negative. The story is solid, the gameplay options are extensive, especially for battling other players, and getting drawn into the overall body of gameplay can be a fun experience. Iron Throne, while it can be intimidating, is a solid MMORPG for casual gamers that can handle it. It’s certainly more complicated and deeper than expected.
We don’t do a heckuva lot of iOS gaming reviews, mostly because sometimes they can be quick hitters with too much casual substance to them. The idea of reviewing an iOS game that features solitaire is tempting, but ultimately there just isn’t enough to chat about to provide details on how the game truly turns out to be. There are occasions where the substance is much greater, which causes the game to stand out from the norm. This is possibly the case with Iron Throne, an MMORPG mobile game from Netmarble.
This was my first experience with an MMORPG on a mobile device, at least for an extensive amount of time, and incredibly the game is a lot bigger and deeper than I expected. It contains the old Warcraft troop building, a boatload of fighting (when you unlock it), a hint of crop/element growing, and a bevy of timed events that help to build/upgrade your kingdom and experience. Again, there’s a lot going on here for a simple mobile gaming experience, which can be good and bad.
The good part is that the variety of different ways to play and concentrate on the gameplay is brilliant. Obviously, it’s nothing groundbreaking in singular form, but the buffet of different methods of gameplay help to give the player a lot to think about, but nothing to concentrate on too long. That’s something that is prevalent in casual gaming experiences and is very prevalent here in Iron Throne. For example, if you’re growing crops and collecting on them, then you can concentrate on those. If you want to be more aggressive and go with recruiting and building armies, then you can do that as well. While waiting for one item of interest to complete its cycle, because it’s timed unless you microtransation the game up, you can shift over to another part to work on. There’s just so much happening that the game looks and feels big, and, again, makes it stand out in the mobile gaming market.
In addition to the options, you also have a gorgeous looking game. Netmarble, who is known for their mobile game development prowess, put together a simply stunning looking title. It has a lot of fun moving parts to it and it visually has enough details in it to rival a lower-level PC title. That’s a compliment, not a knock. I’ve seen a lot of bad looking mobile games since 2007 and this one does a good job of putting together a big visual world that is movable and workable. The initial castle has a lot of moving parts to it and quite a bit of life in the models it sets forth, which will visually engage you to explore what is happening on the screen. That’s a big plus for this game and one that will certainly draw you in.
The good aside, there are some questionable areas of the game. The first is that, while all the visuals are pretty, there is an overwhelming sense of confusion on where a player needs to go to get started. The tutorial included with the game is fine, and it does give details of what the hell the player should be concentrating on, especially at first, but the amount of information given matched with the number of visual cues going off on the initial gameplay is absolutely a visual overload. I would have had to take academic notes to keep all the moving parts separated and defined from each other, but fortunately, I’ve seen lots of games like this, so it isn’t too bad for me. That said, I cannot imagine a normal gamer, even a bit more than a casual gamer retaining all the information given while playing this game on the bus. There is a lot to think about in the start. Exploration helps alleviate this, but I’m sure the casual gamer might be intimidated by it.
The other questionable area is the microtransactions. I understand that a free-to-play game like this, which has an incredible amount of love put into it, needs to make some money to keep it going, but there are a lot of microtransactions. The balance between time locked material and microtransactions is somewhat balanced well, but still, it runs quite a bit on those transactions. I’m not a huge fan of them, but I understand why they exist. I just wish they weren’t so obvious in this one.
Beyond these two things, the game is more positive than negative. The story is solid, the gameplay options are extensive, especially for battling other players, and getting drawn into the overall body of gameplay can be a fun experience. Iron Throne, while it can be intimidating, is a solid MMORPG for casual gamers that can handle it. It’s certainly more complicated and deeper than expected.
