An invisible menace is stalking the planet, laying everybody low, and the solution involves masks. Masketeers: Idle Has Fallen may look like a slice of stylish, Asian-infused high fantasy, but at heart it’s as topical as they come. Or the …
An invisible menace is stalking the planet, laying everybody low, and the solution involves masks. Masketeers: Idle Has Fallen may look like a slice of stylish, Asian-infused high fantasy, but at heart it’s as topical as they come.
Or the pandemic stuff may just be a coincidence. Either way, Masketeers: Idle Has Fallen is a welcome respite from reality.
The story sees you taking on mysterious, shadowy wraiths who feed off the vitality of living things, sending them into a state of spiralling melancholy. The only way to see these ghost-like figures is by wearing a magical mask, which imbues your heroes with gloom-busting powers.
It’s an odd setup, but the gameplay is refreshingly straightforward and arcadey for an idle RPG.
The core combat sees four Masketeers facing off against a constantly replenishing line-up of wraiths, punctuated by occasional bosses. Magical missiles flow automatically from your Masketeers, so most of your input involves upgrading, transcending, equipping, and so on.
Each Masketeer has its own class – Attacker, Defender, or Supporter – and talent tree. Killing wraiths gives you Sparks to spend on upgrades, and every time you get a Masketeer up to a new level you get a talent points to spend on climbing the talent tree.
Every time you transcend, meanwhile, you lose your Masketeers’ talent tree progress in exchange for greater potential in their new state. Over time you’ll get the opportunity to add new Masketeers to your roster, deepening your offensive options.
As well as your Masketeers, of course, you’ve got your masks. These each impart their own powers, and come at different levels of rarity. Runes, meanwhile, can be equipped to Masketeers to give them specific perks, with up to three runes equippable to a Masketeer at any one time. And then there are Wisps, little collective sprites that apply additional buffs.
And we haven’t even mentioned the Fortune Creatures yet.
Did we say Masketeers: Idle Has Fallen is straightforward? Well, the clever thing about Appxplore’s latest idle game is that it’s absolutely crammed with all the usual idle-RPG ingredients and more, but it never overwhelms you with arcane information.
Masketeers: Idle is Fallen is a solid, well-presented idle-RPG all round, but its ace card is definitely the orb system, which gives the game a puzzle flavor and increases your sense of involvement in the combat.
Each Masketeer has their own associated orb, and these orbs file into the screen randomly along a channel under the playing area. To deploy an orb you just tap on it, and as you level-up your Masketeers you unlock orb skills.
These skills are tied to chains of matching orbs, with chains of two, three, and then four becoming available as you level-up, each unleashing a more powerful attack. Chains of four even gift you with a special orb for even more carnage.
This introduces a mild but engaging hint of strategy as you naturally start to clear single orbs in order to bring clusters together for maximum impact. It feels a bit like making lines in Tetris – when you get good enough, anything less than a four feels like a waste of time.
There’s a huge range of different experiences within the idle-RPG genre, and Masketeers: Idle Has Fallen sits at the more interactive end. Despite its slightly confusing mask-themed narrative premise, it’s a chunky, arcadey take on the genre that might well keep you entertained even if you’ve never thought of yourself as an idle game fan.
Check it out now on both Google Play and the App Store.
