A fun game, but needs improvements – Dragons: Rise of Berk Review

I used to enjoy this game a lot, despite its obvious issues, but over time it has become more of a chore than anything else. The game is fun to play and has a good sense of humor. It is a good companion to the movies. That said, there are a few things that could make the game more fun. The first issue is the CONSTANT barrage of attempts to get you use and/or purchase runes (game currency). It is so over the top that it detracts from the what is otherwise a fun game. At times they push a rune purchase that makes you think it is something really good, but then what you get is less than impressive. Plus after a point it can become difficult to progress in the game without buying runes. The game must be really processor intensive or something because when playing this game, my battery gets drained VERY quickly. Don't play this game I you are not able to recharge frequently. It is WAY too easy to accidentally spend game currency. At a minimum, when a window pops up asking if you want to spend game currency, both a yes AND no button needs to be implemented (vice having to exit a window that only has a yes box). This needs to change. There needs to be a way to login separate from Facebook, because there will ALWAYS be people who refuse to have a Facebook account. Without a separate WAY to login, those users will eventually all stop playing. I have been playing this game for a while, but the game is starting to become less fun. It takes way too long to upgrade anything once you are at the higher levels. It’s also way too easy to end up in an endless upgrade loop where you are always upgrading the next “epic” dragon to you can produce resources just a little bit faster or fight just a little bit better instead of advancing to higher levels. They really need to introduce a feature to permanently accelerate upgrades at higher levels. In terms of a time saver, the speeds ups where you watch adds to fast forward during the last two hours of an upgrade is helpful in an annoying and gratuitously revenue producing sort of way. However, the adds frequently mess up screen settings on iOS devices. For instance, the iOS dock can end up only partially appearing on the screen, or can be entirely off the screen. So you have to reboot to conveniently get to frequently used apps. Plus there are some adds where you only have the option replay them, and you since can’t exit, to get back to the game you have to actually exit the app and restart it from scratch. Also the game has a bad habit of saying no adds are available until you repeatedly request a speed up (instead just spending runes), which makes it feel like they are just trying to get you to spend runes instead of using the speed up. I’ve repeatedly contacted their “help” desk about their add issues, and even sent screen shots of the iOS dock problems, but they haven’t even had the courtesy of sending a reply. It’s very disappointing, especially considering I’ve occasionally bought runes, so I guess I’m done buying runes. And OMG, they need to introduce some delay/fault tolerant networking features. If the provider I happen to be using even has a stiff breeze in their area, then the app endlessly tells me I need to reconnect. If the app buffered up a reasonable amount of history and then trickled it back to game servers, that would easily solve that problem and make it a lot more playable. I mean it is sad when literally every other app I use works.
Review by TnT1! on Dragons: Rise of Berk.