RealmCraft Game Review || By Independent Mobile Games Expert
Mobile gaming is on the rise lately — it’s fast, it’s easy, and it is always in your pocket. According to App Annie, Global App Downloads exceeded 194 Billions in 2018, up 35% from 2016.
Alongside with casual games like match-3 and hidden object,
one of the extremely popular games is Minecraft — if you’re not a part of the community you’d probably be surprised to find out how many people you know are fans.
Although, many people consider it not rational to spend money on games, especially with the fact that there are so many free alternatives out there. So, if you want to try Minecraft, but you’re not ready to pay for it, you can find lots of free similar games. After all, there are so many games worth trying… they can make you broke!
So, let’s take a closer look at those free clones. If we search for “free minecraft” in Play Market, the first one we can see is RealmCraft.
REALMCRAFT 3D Free with Skins Export to Minecraft
GAME TYPE
Realmcraft is a sandbox game. A lot of people get confused trying to understand how is that different from open-world games. I would say, the most crucial difference is that sandbox games allow you to change the world around you — build and destroy anything and anywhere. They often have, but it’s not necessary.
PLAY MARKET
RealmCraft on Play Market has been on the market for 4 years, and is available on PlayMarket, AppStore and Steam. Rating — 4.4, amount of installs is close to 50M+.
IOS STORE
Realmcraft on iOS has rating 4.4, 3.5K people rated
OTHER PLATFORMS
Realmcraft on Steam — 21 reviews, 61% positive. The game has 5 achievements.
There haven’t been any updates for 9 months on Steam — but the game is available if you want to try a PC version.
Microsoft store
RealmCraft on Microsoft has rating 4.0, 254 people rated this game.
FREE OR F2P? WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?
F2P games are not the same as just free games. F2P means that you’re not being charged for downloading & joining the game, but there are in-game ads and purchases.
So, RealmCraft contains in-game purchases: you can disable ads (that option only available for Android, unfortunately), and you can buy coins, for which you can buy new skins and blueprints. But if you don’t want to spend real money on that, you can get 10 coins for watching a short ad video. There is also a daily reward for launching the game — 100 on the first day, 200 on second, and so on.
App’s Card in Play Market
Let’s have a quick look at it.
We can see a nice icon, decorated accordingly (it’s almost Christmas time at the moment I’m writing the review). Screenshots and promo video are bright and attractive, showing us some main activities and pros of the game: beautiful landscapes, building, taming, fishing etc.
Cannot wait to try it!
REALMCRAFT FROM INSIDE
Launching the game, the first thing you see is your daily reward for entering the game. Common yet efficient feature
- CREATING A CHARACTER
You probably want to start with creating your character. It may look like a boy or girl, and both of them have lots of nice skins. Free ones are more casual, but if you’re ready to spend some coins, you can be: a ninja, zombie, robot, soldier and much more. Honestly, I would prefer to look like a giant chest of drawers with two human legs, but I’m OK with available options.
Now when you chose your perfect look, you can start a game. We see 4 buttons: survival and creative modes, worlds, and mini-games. The last one requires extra attention because this mode is unique!
- SEEDS
Next step — when you start a game, you create your first world.
When creating a world, you just spawn in a random place, or you can use a seed to spawn on a specific spot.
Here is a Tellurion Mobile forum’s list of seeds. When using a seed, you can either spawn in a specific biome, representing various climate and landscapes, or you can start the game in a generated structure: village, a desert/jungle/ice temple, or a Witch Hut.
I can tell all of them are worth exploring.
Here are some examples:
- Ice flats 37196542, 281258412
- Witch Hut 554334900
- Jungle Temple 51133134
- Village 123172, 17112006, 5311999, -1938246156, -396460692, -736427202, 1223267478, 1274921990, -1977471434, 1591522716, -1722480868, 2138250600
All of the biomes and structures are unique, with their own distinctive features and beautiful textures. Also, there are people living in villages you can trade with them and buy rare items, like Diamond Horse Armor.
So, you created a world, and now you need to choose — will you play in Creative or Survival mode?
REALMCRAFT GAME MODES
- CREATIVE
You probably can tell the difference between survival and creative modes just by the names: in creating your character doesn’t have any limitations and even can fly, all the resources are available, no aggressive mobs trying to kick your ass — just create whatever you can imagine! If you’re patient enough :)
There is also a nice option for little cheaters like you and me — you can create a world in creative mode, put anything you can dream of (Diamond Armor, for example) in your inventory, build some pretty shelter, and after that just switch to survival mode and explore around with as much challenge as you want to.
Don’t forget that you can still spawn mobs, build farms, breed animals and fish in that mode, even though you don’t need food — it’s just fun.
- INVENTORY
Creative mode is a good one to explore all the variety of items and blocks available. There are 8 tabs with different categories — such as mobs eggs, furniture, food, armor & weapon, plants, blocks, and custom items. The last one has been added recently — it allows you to create your own items, using specific blocks & a hammer. Here you can find a comprehensive tutorial on that
- BLUEPRINTS
That is a unique feature, making the game a little easier and more exciting for the impatient ones. With those, you have some ready-made blueprints of houses, farms, landscape designs etc. New themed sets are added regularly: there are tabs with Halloween buildings, spaceships, new year buildings etc. Blueprints are only available in Creative mode. This is how they look:
2. SURVIVAL
In survival, you need to, like, survive. There are 4 levels of difficulty — on the easiest you can die if you try hard enough, and your resources are limited by what you can mine; and on the hardest, you can stay alive for maybe 5 minutes if you’re lucky.
For lots of people, survival mode is more gambling because of the challenges it creates. It is much more satisfying to realize that everything is provided by your own efforts.
Also, it is probably better to choose survival on your first time, because, to help you explore the possibilities of the game, there are lots of quests, that guide you through it. They are pretty simple — mine that, build this etc, but it is a very useful feature for those who have no idea what they can do here.
- MOBS
All the mobs look unique and behave differently. There are slimes who can jump on you out of nowhere, some archer skeletons, Cthulhu, Night Crawler and anything else you can think of.
Some of the mobs are aggressive, some are neutral, and there are also the mobs you can tame and breed — this is an interesting activity. You can build a farm for them, and when you feed them you can multiply your pets. You can tame wolves and ocelots, ride horses and pigs, and breed cows, sheep, chickens and all of the previously mentioned animals. That makes me feel like a kid in a candy store!
- QUESTS & EVENTS
Except for constant quests, the developer releases short-term events in this mode, from time to time. Usually themed. As for now, two new events will be available for the New Year.
— Bell Collecting. From 1 to 20 December there are bells scattered around the worlds, which you can collect and then exchange for different goods — from casual cookies to an Enchantment Table. Depends on your ambitions.
— Gift Boxes. Just as with Bells, Gift Boxes can be found all around the world, but you don’t need to collect them — you just have a chance to get some loot from it.
3. WORLDS
The third tab is “Worlds”. When you create a world, it is generated randomly, and it only has natural landscapes, and some mines and dungeons. In that world you can build houses, farms, dungeons, ships — lots of stuff — and change it in any way you can think of. Any moment you can share your world — and that’s exactly what can be found on the tab. Those worlds are beautiful, often connected with a specific theme, or they may be addressing some existing city or anything — so those are basically pieces of art you can share with each other.
Multiplayer is available there, so you can invite your friends to visit the same world as you — but all the changes you make will only remain for 24 hours. There is something philosophical about it…
4. MINI-GAMES
Last, but not least!
Besides usual modes, there are also some mini-games in RealmCraft. They regularly add new ones with the updates to keep it toned ;) Mini-games are short online multiplayer sessions on premade maps, in which you join a random team and fight against another team. At the moment they have 3 mini-games: snowball fight, egg wars, and bed wars.
- Snowball Fight is quicker and action: you and your opponents are on two different abysses islands. You have 60 snowballs and limited lives, and the map is designed perfectly for shooting: it has lots of shelters and different levels, so you can hide and shoot your opponents before they even understand where you are.
- Egg Wars are more strategic: there are 4 teams instead of 2, each has its own base, and to win you need to collect resources, equip yourself and then destroy an artifact on your opponent’s base — a golden egg.
- Bed Wars have the same mechanics as Egg Wars, but with different maps, and in that case, the artifact is a bed.
There are video tutorials for each mini-game, to make it easy and enjoyable for you :)
SETTINGS
I personally liked the User Interface, it looks nice and is easy to navigate intuitively: this is how “options” look, for example.
In settings you can change the view (third person or first person), difficulty level (if it’s Survival mode), set “always day” option, change the controllers, graphics, and find your public key — that’s your unique code.
COMMUNITY
Also, while researching the game I discovered that it actually has an active and developed community. The developer has a wiki, and active pages on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, VK and even Pinterest; a YouTube channel with 140 000 subscribers full of useful content (tutorials, step-by-step building, combat tips against different mobs, and so on).
I also noticed that the developer answers all the comments on PlayMarket — this is very rare, and it’s nice that the developer actually gives feedback and works on improving the players’ experiences.
