There’s something comfortingly familiar about booting up a new gacha-RPG – particularly when you’ve played as many as we have. For all the different lores that exist, and all the countless hours of imagination and love that have been poured …
There’s something comfortingly familiar about booting up a new gacha-RPG – particularly when you’ve played as many as we have.
For all the different lores that exist, and all the countless hours of imagination and love that have been poured into them, not to mention all the months and years of building and fine-tuning complex upgrade systems, all good gacha-RPGs share the same gentle, undemanding, addictive rhythm.
Mobile Legends: Adventure is no exception, though it looks better than most. An indirect, genre-jumping sequel to Moonton’s hit MOBA Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, it clearly belongs to an established universe with plenty of money behind it.
While the characters – questionably attired waifu females and heavily armed males, for the most part, many of whom will be familiar to Mobile Legends: Bang Bang players – are generic, they’re all gorgeously animated, and the cut-scenes and skill animations are thrillingly slick and over-the-top.
The writing is solid, too. If you were a diehard fan of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, you may appreciate the opportunity to get to know your favorite characters in more depth. Equally, you may be relieved to learn that the text is very easy to skip.
Being an idle gacha-RPG, Mobile Legends: Adventure has a core gameplay loop that will be familiar to many. But just in case you’ve never experienced this type of game before, it goes like this.
You start with a small band of relatively weak heroes to choose from and a limited number of modes. The story campaign is the spine of the game, and it consists of a series of frantic battles.
You can choose which heroes to send into battle, of course, and assembling a solid, well-balanced team is the key to making progress. Heroes come in a variety of different types, including Light, Dark, Martial, Elemental, Tech, and so on. And they come in a variety of different classes, too, including Fighter, Marksman, Tank, Mage, and Support.
At the beginning of each battle you get a moment not only to choose who fights, but where they stand in your formation. Once you’ve decided on those things, battles play out automatically. Sure, you can choose to deploy skills manually, but there’s no reason for doing so. Just sit back and enjoy the show.
Once a battle is over, you spend time among the various menu screens claiming rewards and loot in all the usual ways – completing quests, gaining achievements, logging in daily, and so on. Just look for the red notifications to chase down all the gems, coins, and other goodies that are owed to you.
And you spend this loot and EXP on levelling up and evolving your characters, levelling up their skills, and summoning new heroes to join your army.
Summoning takes place at the Wishing Shrine, and costs gems or tickets. You can also use Miracle Summon tickets to summon heroes of a specific type.
Once you’ve summoned, you can head to the Fusion Shrine to quickly fuse your duplicates, and to your Dismantle Shrine to dismantle the ones you don’t need.
All this helps you get through the next battle in the campaign, but every so often you’ll encounter a battle that your units aren’t powerful enough to win, forcing you to engage with one of Mobile Legends: Adventures many, many other modes.
As you level up, more and more of these modes become available, filling up two whole menu screens with levels to play, tasks to complete, and things to do at various locations throughout the City and the Suburb.
To name just a few, there’s the Labyrinth, a fun top-down section in which you tap on squares to reveal random chests, rewards, blessings, Assist Heroes, and enemies. Plus, bombs and spells appear, and you can launch these at enemies before engaging them in battle. It’s a neat little mode.
The Trek of Miracle, meanwhile, is a series of boss battles, and the side quest-esque Akashic Ruins mode is another top-down map made up of squares that you progress through by winning battles.
There’s also a Tower of Babel, which takes the form of a series of battles in which you can only deploy a particular type of hero, with different towers available on different days.
Plus, there’s the usual arena and guild areas, and various different events. For instance, right now the Endless Darkness is running. It’s a lot like Labyrinth, but endless.
We stress that all this barely scratches the surface in terms of Mobile Legends: Adventure’s sheer depth and detail. There are tons of events, the Holy Sanctuary, the Hall of Fame, Hero Fragments, and so much more to delve into.
In fact, given how many different places you have to go in the game to claim rewards, and how many rewards there are to claim in each of them, we would really have appreciated a time-saving ‘claim all’ button.
Of course, there’s another way to accumulate loot: do nothing. Mobile Legends: Adventure is an idle game, and that means a big chest is constantly filling up with goodies, whether you’ve got the game running or not. Progress is just a matter of time.
Mobile Legends: Adventure isn’t particularly innovative, but it’s among the best examples of an idle AFK RPG you can find if that’s what you’re looking for. It’s pretty, fair, and packed with content, which is all anyone can really ask.
