It needs work – Avalonia Online RPG Review

**longer review below** TL;DR: Movement is buggy, combat needs improvement, not enough content. To be honest, this game looks like something in an early alpha stage. You spawn in a nearly blank world, void of almost any kind of structures at all, save for a small area of raised cliffs in the center, and player houses. The whole point of this game is to make your own house, fight monsters, collect gold, and buy items. It sounds very familiar to another iOS game, only even emptier. First, let's look at movement. Using the virtual D-Pad works somewhat. However, everything seems to be grid-based movement, like in the Pokemon games. What's worse, though, is that it doesn't seem to be properly aligned correctly to said grid. Changing directions will sometimes have you warping back before changing in the other direction (for example, changing movement to go down will warp you up a few tiles). It isn't too much of a problem, but due to items being much smaller, it makes it a bit harder to collect items lying on the ground. Combat is sort of boring, and at times, frustrating. If your enemy is not directly on the tile in front of you, your sword does no damage. Even if your sword's sprite touches the enemy, if it is not directly in front of the way you are facing, it is a wasted effort. Thankfully, the enemies don't seem to do anything if you haven't landed a successful attack, so you could use this to heal. Combined with the movement problem, facing the enemies can be infuriating too. The enemies seem to move in random patterns. Often times I'll try to face one way so I can kill it, when it just moves behind me. Bombs are very effective if you can land a hit on an enemy with one. Most of the time, however, they will move away before the bomb explodes. It doesn't matter much anyways. If they move even a tile away, it's useless, because the bomb's explosion radius doesn't seem to go very far. You would think the smoke from the explosion would be what would hurt them, but no. Lastly, there's a distinct lack of content anywhere. There's only 2 shops in the entire game (if you don't count the in-app purchases). One to buy swords, and another to change your head/body. Otherwise, the only other buildings you will find are player houses, which most are empty, save for just two pieces of furniture; tables and chairs. The map is mostly empty, too. It just consists of the same generic grass and path tiles for most of the map. There's no varying terrain. It's all flat. As for enemies, there's only the one, which looks like Shrek a little bit. No other enemies, no dungeons of any kind, not much of anything, really. At least it's free to try. Honestly, I can't recommend spending money on this game, until some more content is put out, and the basic game mechanics are fixed. The core ideas are fine, but they need polishing. Make more furniture items. Have a variety of weapons. Add more enemies. Expand the map some, and add some terrain, so it doesn't look like a Minecraft flatworld. Perhaps even add some more customization to the game. If you're going to label it an RPG, include some sort of stats system as well. Possibly in the future, you could work on adding bosses of some sort. Just some ideas. It's got an ok start I suppose, but it needs a lot of things added to it, and some serious polishing up. I really don't intend for this to be taken as a sort of "hate" review, but I honestly feel more things need to be done with this. The game feels very incomplete to me.
Review by Metalwario on Avalonia Online RPG.