Welcome to our Is that a good free mobile game series. In this series we look at games from both the App Store and the Play Store and review them. At the end of the article we try to answer the question – Is the current game a one of the best smartphone games? Is it a good free mobile game? For this review, we’re looking at Warriors of Waterdeep by Ludia!
As you can tell from the title of this review, we’re pretty disappointed in this game. So much so that we’re going to release a guide to Dungeons and Dragons games for the iPad (and iOS) and try to offer you much better alternatives for your D&D crave. As soon as the guide is finished, we’ll update this posting with a link to it. The most comprehensive guide to D&D video games is live!
Is Warriors of Waterdeep a good free mobile game?
Your Answer Upfront:
The premade characters, lack of replayability, pay-gated and time-gated content, VIP subscription and complete lack of balance make Warriors of Waterdeep the leading title for this year’s Most Disappointing Review and it’s definitely going on the Wall of Shame, because it’s a shame that the IAPs have managed to ruin what could have been a worthy gateway game towards RPGs in general and Dungeons and Dragons in particular.
Warriors of Waterdeep Review
It’s no secret that here at BSG we’re massive nerds. Think of the nerdiest person you know. We can top that 8 out of 10 times.
Being such huge nerds, it was only a matter of time until the first Dungeons and Dragons game got its minute in the spotlight and, oh boy this is going to be a cruel one.
My initial excitement at seeing Warriors of Waterdeep on the review queue was immense and I was hoping to spend an unreasonably long time playing it before I started writing about how great of an experience it was, but my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined. Let’s dig deeper and see why Warriors of Waterdeep is a shallow and repetitive cashgrab.
Narrator: You find yourselves on a brand new journey…
Upon first starting the game you’re greeted with the usual RPG narrator and immediately thrown into the fight with your two starter heroes. Obviously, they have an easy time getting past the first dungeon and once you’ve claimed the shiny loot, you’re faced with some more tutorial work that gets you started with the base gameplay mechanics.
The first hour or so of gameplay is designed to seem fair and straightforward, with rewards being just enough to give you a sense of balance.
Unfortunately, once you start delving a bit deeper into the dungeons of Waterdeep, you’ll find the ugly truth popping its disgusting head out of the bushes.
As part of your tutorial, you’ll find out that leveling up your party isn’t as easy as just delving into dungeons. You do get a tiny amount of experience after each battle, but that soon becomes clearly insufficient to level up. To make things even worse, you can’t go back and replay the dungeons you’ve cleared, except for boss fights (and even those replays are locked behind a paywall or a timer).
To level up your characters you have to level up their equipment, which still requires you to actually find “equipment cards” and… gold! Yes, you’ve got a triple-lock on equipment (first you need to get a particular piece of gear, then the upgrade cards and then you need sufficient gold to level them up). With 6 equipment slots per character and 4 characters in an active party, you’re looking at managing 24 items at a time, and that’s before you’re in the position of having multiple party compositions.
Now, sure, you won’t be getting item upgrades consistently and you can prioritize what you upgrade, but, at the end of the day, this is the only real way of leveling up your heroes. For reference, a flawless victory gets you 6 to 15 XP (at least that’s my experience so far), while upgrading a common item will give you hundreds.
Narrator: Roll for monetization prompts with disadvantage
To make things even worse, you NEED to level up your characters in order to progress, so you will soon be hitting a wall and the game is more than happy to start throwing you “special offers” and “VIP membership” popups.
Yes, it’s yet another game where the VIP subscription shows up and, at $14/month, it’s comparable with a AAA MMORPG’s monthly subscription. For a mobile game with little to no replay value.
Throughout their patch notes they keep claiming that they’re working on gameplay balance, but all that’s telling me is that they’re rebalancing the rewards so that you hit resource walls more often so that you’ll be even more tempted by that VIP membership.
Since we’re talking about the VIP membership, what does that actually get you?
Well, this is where my disgust goes supercritical.
For $14/month you get exclusive store offers, exclusive items, legendary equipment, VIP chests and basically everything you need to tip the game from Free to Play to Pay to Win.
Had the game not had a multiplayer component, this may have had little to no consequence, but, as it stands, it’s just a battle of the wallets.
Ignoring all microtransactions aside, is Warriors of Waterdeep playable without spending a single dime?
Barely.
The in-game store is supposedly there to offer you gold for spare equipment cards, however, it’s just insulting you. You get a whopping 5, yes, FIVE gold per upgrade card (and you can’t even sell more than 3 at a time, with more sales being locked behind a timer) while buying that one last card you need for an upgrade will cost you TWO HUNDRED GOLD. That’s a conversion rate of 40 to 1 for common cards.
Not everyone reached the Heroic VIP Levels of Legend
As a non-VIP you’re locked out of events, starved for gold and soon to find yourself waiting for hours at a time for that one chest that MIGHT have just enough gold in it to upgrade one piece of gear.
In sheer disbelief I read through some of the App Store reviews and everything I saw wrong seems to be accurate (and even worse, for some, with constant server connection issues), with the “balance” of the game being severely against the player.
Is Warriors of Waterdeep a good free mobile game?
The gorgeous design, both in terms of graphics and sound (it even has voice acting!) are completely nullified by the microtransactions and pay-gates. There is always a sense of “will I be able to progress anytime soon” looming around once you’ve hit level 4 or 5 and those IAPs are always there to annoy you.
About 3 or 4 hours in, the game becomes a grindfest when you’re not waiting for a timer. This puts off many people that want to actually experience a DnD game (or any game, for that matter) and the complaints in the reviews I’ve seen pretty much confirm that Warriors of Waterdeep is definitely a title to avoid.
The premade characters, lack of replayability, pay-gated and time-gated content, VIP subscription and complete lack of balance make Warriors of Waterdeep the leading title for this year’s Most Disappointing Review and it’s definitely going on the Wall of Shame, because it’s a shame that the IAPs have managed to ruin what could have been a worthy gateway game towards RPGs in general and Dungeons and Dragons in particular.
As it is at the time of writing this review (with 0 hope that anything will change), I can’t give it more than 2/5 stars.
Had it been a premium game this could have easily scored 5/5 and could have been a big hit, even without the Dungeons and Dragons connection.
How To Download Warriors of Waterdeep
Warriors of Waterdeep is available for Android Phones and Tablets on the Play Store and for iPhone and iPads on Apple’s App Store. The game is, sadly, not available to be played on M1 Macs.
But you can use an iPad and to stream the game to your Mac if that’s what you wish. Or maybe you can try and setup an Android Emulator on your Mac to play it that way. We’ve covered Android Emulators for both Intel and Apple Silicon macs so you can play Android Games wherever you are.
Where To Next?
Congrats, you made it to the end of the article where we answered the question: Is Warriors of Waterdeep a good free mobile game? I hope it was beneficial to you. It’s also beneficial to us to have you stick around the blog more. We have more reviews of good free or premium mobile games, such as Metal Slug Attack or QB Planets! We also have other articles with tidbits and interesting facts, like this one – which answers the question “What is the Number 1 mobile eSports Game” sorted by the prize pool.
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