Freeblade Review

Hello everyone,

I’ve been really excited about the release of Freeblade and from all of the trailers it looked fantastic. I decided to play around with it for a few hours and give a review.

Summary

Overall I give this game 4/5 stars. It’s a fun game. Who doesn’t like using a machine gun to mow down orks and using a gattling cannon to blow up vehicles?

The only complaint I have is that they are using every trick in the book to monetize. It’s a bit annoying and ruins the experience. I’m happy to give games money. No need to get me to pay for paint jobs, emblems, equipment upgrades, in game bonuses, & repairs.

Transscript

Hey everyone. Patrick here and I’m going to review the new Freeblade game released this past week on the App Store.

I’m going to review the game in three parts. First the game play where you’re basically running around blowing guys up.

Then the painting. And then everything else about the game including how in-app purchases work and which ones you’ll likely need.

I’m running this on an iPad 2 and these are the standard settings that come with the game.

One last thing I want to say about before we get started. This is a free game so take everything you don’t like with a grain of salt. You can always try it before you buy if.

Part 1 – Gameplay

Let’s go ahead and click on Campaign. I’m in chapter three but some of these missions are a bit challenging so I’m going to go to chapter one and just redo one of these. They’re a bit easier and I can show you how to do everything.

I’m going to click on the last one and I’m going to choose one of these two missions here. They’re basically the same level with slightly different objectives and enemies. Once I’m done I’m going to click Loadout.

On this screen you can pick exactly which weapons you want. I think the best thing to do is click Auto Equip. And that will make sure you have the best weapons for this mission. Sometimes it will recommend the heavy stubber or the melta gun. Or the gatling cannon or the battle cannon. So it’ll pick the best stuff for you.

On this screen you see blessings which are all paid upgrades to get more EXP or loot or whatever you want. Or you can click Get Free Blessings – watch a 30 second ad and get free stuff.

I’m not a big fan of that and I don’t want to bore you on this. So I’m just gong to click Continue and get this started.

Here’s the little opening scene. It tells you what’s going on.

First thing for you to know. The game moves you for you. The only thing you do is shoot. So right now I’m shooting with one finger. At those little infantry. You can click with two fingers and shoot at the big things like trukks. So basically the small gun for infantry. Oh – you see the little blue icon. That is your ion shield. Whenever someone is shooting a rocket at you or a big gun – or a tank is going to shoot you in the face they’ll display the blue icon. if you press it you’ll absorb 90% of the damage – almost all of it. 

I’m going to double click. That’ll shoot the top rockets. That basically blows up everything and has a really long reload time.

Two fingers here – two fingers here. Oh – gotta wait for ammo. I’ll blow up the guys. There we go.

And more guys – more orks – they’re fun – who knew that a heavy stubber is so good? If you played 40k you’d know that’s not exactly the case.

So the regular guys don’t really hurt you too much but if there’s 100 of them shooting at you it adds up. And obviously some guys have stikk bombs or missile launchers so they do hurt you. That guy right there has a missile launcher. There’s my ion shield.

Awesome so you see the mega dread coming towards us – oops sorry paused the game by accident – you see the little red icon as soon as you click that you start the melee?

And this is how melee works. You just need to hit the hit button right here. And I just got a critical so if you get in that danger zone right before you fail you do extra damage. If you don’t get in that zone – if you hit too soon or too late then they hit you and you lose a ton of life. It’s pretty bad.

Afterwards you get equipment. This is a beginning – like the first level so it’s not that great. But hey it’s equipment! I’ll show you how to melt stuff down later using the Forge to make better equipment. So you can always use it. You can see it has damage and blast radius and all that stuff.

Hey I leveled up. This is where you get E̶X̶P̶  hit points, you unlock things, in this case customization options, and you usually get – the only way to get gold is to complete some quests or level up. Pretty much just level up. So gold is really hard to come by.

Part 2 – Painting

Alrighty going back to the loading screen. Let’s just take a look at basically – how you can paint your guy. I’m going to tap him and you can slide left or right or do whatever you want. You can look all the way around the model. it’s pretty cool. I’m going to click on Painting. I’m going to start with Simple. Now with simple you can click on any of these. Now you only have the top 9 unlocked by default. These are all the default ones. I haven’t bought anything yet. You can click on any of the other ones you want. You have to pay – you see the first three there that are unlocked – need ore – all the rest require gold.

Let’s go ahead and go to Advanced. And then you can click on the whole entire knight. Just the face. Just the armor. Just the shoulder pads.

So I’m just going to pick some colors here. This is pretty fun. I do like that they allow you to look at what the colors would look like before buying them. I’m not necessarily the biggest fan that EVERY single color has to be bought with gold. That’s a *little* excessive. I wish more colors came in a pack that gave you 90 colors or something them.

They do have emblems although once again you get no emblems. Just the X & Skull for free. All the rest are paid. Some of the ones you see with gold actually give you extra abilities. So 4% bonus damage for 3 second which is pretty awesome. I don’t necessarily like that they’re making appearance options give you in-game rules. I don’t love that but you know it’s how they make money.

So you can pick secondary colors. Right now blue is my main color and I’m just picking secondary colors. It’s hard to see here but it’s on the legs – on the inside of the legs. It’s really hard to see because they’re all dark colors. Let’s do it on the face. You can see the right side of his face is having those different colors.

There are patterns & layouts as well which we’ll get to in just a second. So patterns -you get a couple for free it’s hard to see but they’re mostly on the legs & mostly on the top. There’s checkered patterns. I love the flames that’s my favorite. This one is part of a customization pack we’ll get to that in just a second.

Different layouts of how the colors & do the patterns apply to the shoulder blades or not – that sort of thing. 

Part 3 – Everything Else

Let’s go ahead and take a look at everything else now. That was all of the painting you can do. There is Wargear and on this wargear page it’s not like you get new guns like the vulcan mega bolter. I wish you did. Basically there’s different levels. So 32 is going to be better than the 28 but no where near as good as the 54 level [item] that I found. You can compare the current gatling cannon to any of the extra weapons that I have.

Basically they’re all the same. They all look the same they – this one gives you 5 defense while another one gives you 6 defense.

I’m gong to upgrade something here to just show you how it works. You see those little three dots? That means I can upgrade it three times. It just costs you ore and it’s immediate. So I got an extra strength & an extra .1% chance of a critical hit. I don’t know why they give you .1% chance of doing that but whatever.

Let’s go and look for my weakest item right now. The Forge let’s you melt all of your old stuff and then make something new. I need to take the main chest piece – the Noble’s Aegis. There just giving you that warning because it usually takes you a while to make this. It looks like I have to put in 32 value of armor to make something new. So I’m going to go ahead and do that and hope that I get something slightly better out of it. I haven’t got anything the same or worse yet. I’ve always got something better. You’ll see that obviously it takes time. By default they’re going to put another piece of armor on you. You can of course pay money to get new stuff.

So let’s look at some of the extras. I just clicked on the little extras on the side. You can get all of these supply drops. You get one of course for free in the beginning just to show you how it works. You get the uncommon one or the rare one and it comes with a rare item which are the blue ones – you’ll notice I mostly have green stuff  And extra items.

Now I just clicked the little red flag on the top. This will show you the benefits of buying stuff from them you repair faster, you get more ore, you get better items. THere’s all these different things you can buy from them. Ore you can buy from them straight up. You can slide left or right. Gold is the thing you’re going to be using the most. Just because it’s the thing that upgrades everything. If you want to repair faster or get whatever you want to get – gold is the way to do it.

value packs are fun. I wish they had more value packs. There’s the starter one which gives you some really good starting gear. Basically all of my stuff is about that good. It also gives you ore and extra packs. I like these two here at the end. They gives you paints and one livery which is the whole set. And of course the little loyalty flags that you can use to upgrade extra forge slots or whatever you want. There’s the blessing which are great to give you in game benefits. Yeah that’s all of the packs you can buy. There’s a lot of stuff you can do but the thing you’re going to be using is gold. This is a free game and I have no problem spending $50 on a game if I like it so I’m going to spend – get the $20 pack of gold just to support the game. And just to buy stuff – every once in a while it’s nice to repair your [knight] instantly. 

I didn’t talk about repairing but after each battle your guy takes damage and it takes let’s say 10 minutes to heal. If you play 4 really hard missions in a row and your guy gets pummeled. He’ll be slightly weaker until you wait. I don’t show this but you can click the little [green] icon in the top left to show that.

There are these quests as well. In these quests if you get so much EXP you get a reward. In this case my current quest – the top quest – is complete three patron missions. There are events. I haven’t played an event yet to be honest. It sounds like if you’re one of the top players you get all of these awesome rewards. There are these free salvage missions every 12 hours. Those salvage missions let you get free stuff so it’s kind nice if you play for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening because you get free stuff. Or you can watch ads or whatever you want to do.

There’s basically the game. I really like it I really enjoy it. I think you should give it a try and if you like it I’m always a fan of supporting the game. Buy $20 of stuff and let me know how it goes. 🙂