FTUE: Mobile Strike

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to pocket gamer. bus first time user experience so this is where we play game um go through the first time user experience faecally the tutorial and the kind of opening user um interface experience the flow that kind of stuff so let's Ki the game off start our stopwatch normally play for about 10 minutes so as we can see the game we're playing today is mobile strike so this is um the new game from uh machine Zone actually it's machine Zone been a bit secretive it's actually a company called um Epic War which is um actually owned by Machine Zone obviously machine zone are best known for Game of War so immediately ask us if you want to have push notifications um normally I find that a bit intrusive really because if you're playing the game people we don't want push notifications most people don't I don't think so you want to experience the game first or get a good reason why you want to so I've said

not said anything there and it's presumably um defaulted to off um no don't want that no I don't want P notifications so midly um this is a game has been in soft Lun for a long time in a couple of territories so they've had a long time to kind of hone this so immediately hello General I'll be your guide typical um attractive young lady who's going to teach me how to be a general um so as we can see very obvious kind of you know like idiot proof even for Me Maybe arrows how to build a farm not interesting that we're an army General we building a farm there's the first thing in the game it's a bit odd but um these games are very resource heavy in terms of soft resources so as we go through we see a gold one there's a farm there's an oil on there a quarry so Stone oil food gold these are things that um we're going to spend a lot of time on this is a game if it's like game of war that will be very it looks to be like game of war very menu based very resource heavy um and uh very Alliance heavy or

Alliance Focus so it's saying we building this building we can do it for free speed up kind of typical thing you'd see obviously later on in the game they'll want us to spend money or resources and to do that but the moment is going to get us into the mood of getting all this stuff for free okay so upgrade my HQ to increase my power my HQ looks really rubbish so here we go you can see it's kind of like um shadowing out the screen really forcing me to um this is the thing you you you should be doing there again the free thing so you can see kind of from a very Bas psychological kind of situation it's do this um this is speed it up for free it's kind of getting me into a loop which um won't always be free of course but nothing wrong with that so an item I don't know what items are it's tell me to do this this is the store these are my items you I've got some crate what are crates I know don't know what crate is

but I'm going to use one I don't know what that is that's going to take me back to my base JY L great job so I've got reward already I'm a good General so Base mission I've done um generous rewards oh let know what I'm tapping and it's just doing stuff congratulations I survived basic training well that is pretty basic training so it's telling me I've got 24 hours of protection on my base before I get attacked by the people pretty standard for these kind of games going to continue um is it going to continue okay so as we can see here um there's kind of a lot of stuff there a very busy screen so oh okay I'm not get a chance to look at the screen I'm going to build an oil well so as we said before have the farm now we're going have the oil well probably a similar process just going to tap tap tap oh oh yeah

okay so um there is an argument about whether kind of this kind of handh holding through a tutorial is actually good because no one's really reading this text they just pressing on it um and actually when these tutorials end you can feel a bit like what did I just do what should I do now um that can be actually quite bad for attention but given that um game of war has been massively successful and machines owners had this gameing soft launched for a long time we assume they know what they're doing probably because these games are so highly monetized for a certain type a player they kind of want to hone their tutorial to get rid of players who really aren't interested in this game straight away because they don't bble with them they want people who are prepared to at least be in an alliance which is what it's trying to make me do now or pay a lot of money ideally both um so immediately he's trying to get me into an alliance that's quite a difficult um thing that's what all developers would want people in their games to do Jo join an alliance or Guild whatever you call them because that really makes it the game much stickier obviously you've got whether they're your friends in real life or just your friends in the game

um that's kind of helpful keeps them playing for longer makes them more likely to pay um so she's telling me all this great stuff about alliances but obviously the weird thing is so getting it again if I join Alliance I get 500 gold I've only got 100 at the moment you know I get help I get help with my timers from the alliance and actually the alliance structure in Game of War pres in this game as well is very deep and very powerful and anytime I buy something my alliance kind of um members also get it so it really does Drive monetization in a way we still haven't seen in lots of other games certainly in the West access to bonus Alliance missions free gifts and all that kind of stuff so but then the problem you always have with Alli is when you join what am I going to join so I don't anything about this game really part I've tapped on some things I can join the surviving the S shsn snss the Brawlers the I mean just so I'm going to come out that I'm not going to join L at this point um now I can see I mean you can see this game is graphically is not really anything to write home about 2D game oh

right okay not get a chance to look at it again so you can see the pace it's already driving it's really driving me to do these things um I'm kind of 5 minutes into the game and I'm just going through this heavy menu system um which is the game I mean this is what you do in the game you're kind of updating stuff um getting resources and the kind of gameplay really comes from the alliance system so I'm going to I'm researching scouting you also notice there's not really any music in this at all it's not it's not a kind of um a very deep graphical or or audio experience I'm going to clict rewards from from completing Mission I've complet The Base mission okay so this things I can collect cuz I built an oil well okay leveled up lovely um can I collect that one yeah and can I collect these ones I'm getting the hang of collecting things you can see it's kind of taken a bit times heavy kind database heavy um

online game in terms of the the data is not heavy amount but it's um almost like an mm RG really MMO RPG um okay so immediately not I've not popped on this but immed it's telling me there's a sale going on here so double gold sale if I spend £4 I can get 1,200 gold so and that's a limited edition one you can just see if you get a chance here around the menu there kind of stuff bouncing around there you know this thing's ending this thing know what that is that's ending as well got timer on it oh no haven't got time got going build a quarry yeah just just Relentless Pace really um and it is um you know this is very specific type of game this is not a game that many developers perhaps would want to make or perhaps would be necessarily very good at making because it is very driven um not in a traditional gameplay mechanic um build an iron M build a

mine three yeah yeah's key element all key isn't it um so my these scouting guys are researching this is a VP thing up here so VP systems are very important for the long-term um oh situation in this game where you can get different kind of um different resources different kind of bonus stuff effectively and also different missions so VIP is very important for these type of games more like subscription thing you pay VIP kind of thing maybe for a month or something so it's another monetization method um okay I got a bank and it's interesting so this is this is called mobile strike suppose it's about building a you know an army I'm not I've not really done anything in terms of armies at all not there been this could be a game about building a could be a city Builder or something you know already 8 minutes in now um training ground so finally it's is like an army thing okay that's

free so now for the first time um I can presuming get some troops there you go the weakest troops I can build some excellent they soon be ready but maybe I have to wait for them properly maybe that could be sped up properly so talking about my power my power's here there a I've got a level on level two my power's this this is my gold this is the hard currency these are all the soft currencies there's five different soft currencies also VIP thing obviously mentioned before telling me what to do oh no it's no okay so not getting a chance to think again building an Armory we just see all this kind of very quickly it's getting me into understanding of all the different parts of the game even if I'm not fully understanding it really um uh my mission is upgrade my wall probably if I don't do anything here we go it's going to is going to pop up and

time to upgrade the wall so now we're saying we've buil all these things now into a cycle of upgrading uh still free OB over time when you get into the game these things might take certainly hours going on to days to to upgrade when you get to a certain level it's all very time focused thing it's all um resource versus time remember upgrading my headquarters I'm going to go back to my headquarters it's got me in the loop again now I've got speed up item so I didn't know what one of those is but I've seen the speed up thing um so again it's I don't really can't even see what screen I've gone into which may not be useful for the future but I've got one I've used it so you have it's interesting this game you have different speed up items that speed things up for different periods of time so a bit different other games that might use a currency system um this has more item system which is a harder monetization in a way so there again I'm going to oh my HQ is leveled up and I've been wed 250

minute speed up so level four crate no idea what that is I know I used to Crate before been got these resources as well um I've leveled up to level three um I'm going to upgrade our farm to level two so we can just see so we over 10 minutes in now we can just see the Relentless pressure particularly at the first in the opening part of the game just getting to do stuff all the time and really taking you through it in um not really you have any control but um certainly making you feel like stuff's happening there's a lot of stuff to do um and giving you you know a fairly good flavor of the game really even if one that that may um make maybe a bit offputting for for many players so it's pretty interesting so mobile strike um it's already launched um last week and done um it's already they spent a lot of money marketing it as as as uh machines Z had they have a lot of money um and but so it's already in um top 10 downloading top 10 most downloaded apps in many countries certainly top 50 pretty much in every country in the world I would think that's that's worth advertising in and even in some countries it's already gone into the top

50 top grossing that's beenin a week that's pretty um pretty spectacular that's very um very few games that do that kind of muscle and particularly to know it didn't get any featuring from Apple which is obviously something that um that often um kind of kickstarts games um and interestingly the reason it didn't get any of that probably was it came out on Google play at the same time so it's a simultaneous launch they just want to address a very big audience and get people playing it um we'll come back in our monetizer section and have a a bit of a deeper look at the monetization um when we played the game a bit more but um that was the first time using experience of um of mobile strike pretty interesting stuff come back and see what we're uh what we're playing tomorrow catch you [Music] [Applause] in