RealmCraft Game Review || Mobile Games Expert Checks Out New Features
RealmCraft? What, you've never heard of it? Well, your loss, because this game is everything!
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 2019, up 35% from 2018. Google Play downloads grew 5% year over year to 22.5B, while iOS downloads grew 15% year over year to over 9B new downloads for the quarter.
Alongside with casual games like match-3 and hidden object,
one of the extremely popular games types is sandboxes, and games with an open world.
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 the play market, the first one we can see is RealmCraft.
REALMCRAFT 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.
Realmcraft has been on the market for over 4 years and is available on PlayMarket, AppStore, Steam, Microsoft.
RealmCraft on Play Market
Rating — 4.0, amount of installs — 50,000,000+
Realmcraft on iOS — rating 4.4, 5.1K people have rated
OTHER PLATFORMS
Realmcraft on Steam — 33 reviews, 24 positive and 9 negatives. The game has 5 achievements
There haven’t been any updates since 19 Feb 2018 on Steam — but the game is available if you want to try a PC version.
RealmCraft on Microsoft has a rating of 3.9, 563 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, 120 on second, 140 — third, 160 — fourth, 500 — fifth, and so on.
App’s Card in Play Market
Let’s have a quick look at it.
We can see a nice icon.
Screenshots and promo videos are bright and attractive, showing us some main activities and pros of the game: beautiful landscapes, building, taming, fishing, etc. I cannot wait to try it!
What’s NEW in the 5.0.0 version?
- Brand new USER INTERFACE (buttons, windows, menu, etc.)
- Brand new BLOCKS TEXTURES
- New BLOCKS: Beacon, Lantern, Campfire, Sponge
- New ITEMS: Trident, Shield, Crossbow
- IN-GAME WIKI. Learn more about blocks and items reading their description (currently available only in English and Russian)
- MAP. It displays a terrain around a player.
REALMCRAFT FROM INSIDE
Launching the game, the first thing you see is your daily reward for entering the game. Common yet efficient feature.
Creating your character
You probably want to start with creating/customizing your character. You can choose a character’s gender: boy or girl, and both of them have lots of nice skins. I’ve chosen the coolest skin, in my opinion (yeap, ’cause she has glasses).
Standard skin you have from the start is more casual, but if you’re ready to spend some coins, you can be: a ninja, elf princess, 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 the main menu, where the player can choose if he is flying solo today (Singleplayer), or gonna need friends company (Multiplayer).
In both mods now available new helpful features:
- In-game wiki. Learn more about blocks and items reading their description (currently available only in English and Russian).
- Map. It displays a terrain around a player.
Let’s go with Singleplayer mode, first. After choosing, we see 3 buttons: survival and creative modes, and worlds.
REALMCRAFT GAME MODES: SINGLEPLAYER
- CREATIVE
You probably can tell the difference between survival and creative modes just by the names: in creative mode, 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. You can find everything you want to construct your home in inventory.
Here is my simple humble house:
Own house helps you stay safe from mobs through the night!
First floor:
Second floor:
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.
Paint animals:
Build farms, breed animals:
Leaving my farm and house on a boat, ’cause adventures never wait, and there is a world to explore!
- 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. Custom items — it allows you to create your own items, using specific blocks & a hammer. Here you can find a comprehensive tutorial on that.
Want your personal animal that will love you ’til forever? Just spawn it using a certain egg from the collection in inventory.
The choice is pretty wide: chicken, pig, lion, sheep, crow, witch, polar bear, elemental, mantis, mummy, zombie, and many more. I spawned an ocelot, ’cause it is very cute. Just look at him!
In inventory, you’ll also find food for your pets.
- 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:
— — Thematic section for season and holiday (most recent/relevant — Easter and Spring)
— — Already constructed buildings and houses to live and prosper!
— — Background, pixel art, statues — to make your mini world prettier, more interesting, and whimsical.
— — Detailed transport, — vessels, vehicles, planes, and even spaceships!
2. SURVIVAL
In survival mode, 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.
- Quests & Events
The new quest you’ll get as soon as you enter Survival mode.
Except for constant quests, the developer releases short-term events in this mode, from time to time. Usually themed.
- Backpack
You can buy items in the shop that will help you to survive in the game.
- 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, some are just creepy… And special thanks to developers, ’cause there are still cuties, too.
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!
3. WORLDS
The third tab is “Worlds”. Commonly, 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.
That’s exactly what these worlds are, and here you can find already created ones. 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.
REALMCRAFT MULTIPLAYER GAME MODE
- MINI-GAMES
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. 5 background scenarios to play.
- 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. Also 3 arenas available.
- Bed Wars have the same mechanics as Egg Wars, but with different maps, and in that case, the artifact is a bed. Currently has one arena/map, — Olympus.
There are video tutorials for each mini-game, to make it easy and enjoyable for you :)
- WORLDS is also available in Multiplayer, 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…
SEEDS
When you start a game, you can create your world by clicking the “new world” button.
When creating a world, you just spawn in a random place, or you can use a seed to spawn on a specific spot.
Features: Always day, Endless/flat world type, available only in Creative game mode.
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.
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.
SETTINGS
This is how the Game “options” looks, 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 (control settings), graphics, and find your public key — that’s your unique code, — network settings.
COMMUNITY
The game 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 182K subscribers full of useful content (tutorials, step-by-step building, combat tips against different mobs, and so on).
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.
