Adventure Age Review

Adventure Age is a free-to-play puzzle game with role-playing mechanics layered on top. Players fight battles to earn experience, gain loot, recruit party members, earn items, and more. All of these extra systems make Adventure Age's core puzzle gameplay a lot more interesting and compelling, but the it's unfortunately buggy and still a fairly straightforward puzzle battler that most players have probably seen before.

The game opens with players having to create an adventurer and set on a quest to build the strongest army in the world. Customization options include choosing the character's appearance, in addition to their attack type and alignment. While these options are neat, the game doesn't do much to explain exactly what any of it means. Although players learn about these things in due time, it is a little frustrating to discover that they could have had a more useful character ability after they've already invested a meaningful amount of time into it.

From here, players can battle against AI opponents in quests or random events, or they can test their party strength against other humans in multiplayer. After each battle, players have the potential to earn gear for their character, or other items like new party members or materials that can be used for crafting. While the gear and the materials are nice, the core of progression in Adventure Age seems to hinge on collecting, fusing, and leveling-up party members that can be anything from goats to goblins to giant hedgehogs. Each of these creatures has their own special abilities and stats, so training them to a specific playstyle can give off Pokemon vibes at times.

Even though the premise might seem pretty standard and familiar, Adventure Age does do some things that set it apart. For starters, it has a nice pixel art style that animates nicely and helps make the world feel cohesive. It also has a pretty cool battle system that has some depth beyond simply matching large numbers of blocks. As the difficulty increases, choosing which enemies to attack, timing attacks, and choosing different actions for each party member based on their individual strengths and weaknesses becomes increasingly more important (and satisfying when done correctly).

Unfortunately, for all of the praise to be laid upon Adventure Age it seems to have just as many annoying or broken aspects. Most notably, it's currently pretty unstable. I have experienced (and seen many complaints about) getting disconnected from the servers, which can interrupt or erase progress even when not playing the relatively dull multiplayer mode consisting of players watching each other's parties auto-attack one another. Also, the menus occasionally cause the game to crash.

In the end, Adventure Age has a lot to like. It takes a formula that players have seen and expands upon it to make it more compelling than a lot of its competition. However, its current state is way to unstable to recommend. Some players with a lot of patience may be ok picking up version 1.0, but others will probably want to wait until it gets an update.