Remember some years ago, I feel like it was around the early 2010s, when mobile gaming was going to be the next platform to eat the world? Farmville, Cookie Clicker, and their brethren that leveraged the emerging social media platforms to spread themselves far and wide whilst also taunting you with faster progression should you only let loose a few sheckles from your wallet. Those games then faded into the background, the companies that were once the new darlings of the game development world being relegated to the backwaters when they got tarnished with the deadly words “Pay to Win”. Of course like all good diseases they never really disappear, they just fade into the background and mutate until they can rear their ugly heads again.
Then they trap people like me, the fool that I am.
Yeah I fucking fell for one of those rage-bait ads in my Google news feed. I was hankering for a mobile game experience of yore, something like Infinity Blade where I could kill some time in between tasks or when I was waiting for something to complete. So up pops on my feed an ad for a game that looked like a weird little stick battler thing, where you’d carve a path through different enemies with numbers above their heads. Super dumb, really simple and completely brainless. Exactly what I was after.
Except that ad was, of course, not for the game it was actually advertising and instead it was for Mighty Party. Whilst the game does it’s best to try and sidestep the bait and switch by actually including a kinda-sorta implementation of the thing they put forward it’s clear that they included that just to keep you on the hook long enough to play the core game: a TCG turn based strategy game that is unashamedly a pay to win mobile game. Oh for sure you can play the game, and probably even have some fun with it, without spending a single cent. But the game will do everything in its power to remind you of how painful the wait for the next increase in power is and how easily you could make that go away for just a few more dollars.
Mighty Party has been around for a good long while now and uses the standard turn based TCG format for the core game loop. In essence you collect heroes, battle them against other players, level them up, earn loot boxes and rinse and repeat that cycle until the end of time. There’s a bunch of different events and other game modes which give you different avenues to access more loot, but they all boil down to the same turn based TCG battle mechanic. What really struck me is just how many ways there are to part with your money in this game and it’s nothing small either: most of the entry level “micro” transactions are at least $5, with most of the premium packs starting at $30. Suddenly it becomes clear to me how quickly those kids with unfettered access to mummy and daddy’s credit cards can rack up such large bills in these things, it’s fucking rediculous.
But I figured hey, it’s still somewhat fun so I’ll plough on through without falling prey to any of the pay to win mechanics and just have fun with it until I don’t right? Well that’s the trap the game sets for you right from the get go. You see whilst the game says you’re battling other players you really aren’t, what you’re fighting are AI players with the squads that other players have built. So for the first, what was it, 25 battles I think, the AI is woefully underpowered and will basically lose to you by default. Now the argument could be made that all these lower level accounts are from people who’d only played for a hot minute before backing the fuck out or something, but it is 100% designed to push you into a false sense of endless, breezy progression. Right up until you hit a fucking brick wall.
But don’t worry, you galaxy brained giga-chad, you know how to optimise the meagre amount of loot that the game has gifted to you in order to buy some of the top tier heroes, and you do. Boy howdy does that feel good, now you’re back on the breezy progression train again laying waste to players left, right and center, You are a god among these low level plebeians, racking up tons of different in-game currency that you’ll surely be able to blow on the next legendary hero when you should need it.
Therein lies the rub though, that next progression wall comes much quicker and you’ll quickly find yourself wanting for yet another increase in power so you can make it through to the next gate. But you blew your wad already, so you start desperately scrolling through all the different events to find sources of gems, event currency or another way to push yourself forward. You even turn off the autoplay feature on the battles because you see the AI making mistakes, thinking that you can definitely outsmart the smooth brained AI and push through to unlock the next progression system that will definitely, certainly bring you another avenue to make more gems to fuel your habit.
Now you find yourself at a crossroads. Try as you might, optimising your playstyle and unlocking every damn reward you can possibly get your hands on, progression slows to a crawl. You can see when the next legendary hero will be available to you, but it’s painfully far away. Min/maxing rewards becomes a chore of balancing different activities in the game, ensuring that you don’t inadvertently do something that pushes your next purchase out of reach for another day. This is all the while the game repeatedly blasts you with ads for its in-game purchases, offering one time deals, packaged offerings and bonuses with your purchases. So do you give in and put your credit card on the line, or do you be happy with the meagre progression that awaits you?
For me the answer was simple: I uninstalled the fucking thing. It was clear that whenever I managed to work out a new viable build or unlocked a new legendary hero the game would up the difficulty of my opponents to match it almost exactly, ensuring that I’d probably be able to maybe get one rank up out of it before hitting the progression wall so hard it’d make your nose bleed. Even looking at the various guides, wikis and subreddits about this it was clear that whaling was the way to go if you really wanted to get anywhere in this game lest you spend countless hours mindlessly grinding things out to only reap meagre benefits.
To be sure, I was having fun with it for a while. But it was clear that Mighty Party was just giving me enough of a taste to get me hooked, hoping that the dopamine drought I’d find myself in afterwards would lead me to opening up my wallet to blast through to the other side. The worst part was I considered it for a long time, justifying it in my head that I’d already spent a good amount of time in the game for free and paying a bit to enjoy it for longer would totally be worth it. But it was pretty clear that the hit wouldn’t last long and soon enough, I’d be back at that same crossroads again, pondering whether or not opening my wallet was going to be worth it. This kind of scummy, pay to win bullshit is what killed mobile gaming and I’m glad that I’ve now vaccinated myself against it. I needed the fucking booster it seems.
Now if Google would only stop sending me rage-bait ads for other bullshit games I’d be one very happy camper.
Rating: 4.0/10
Mighty Party is available on PC, iOS and Android right now for free. Total play time was probably like 8 hours or something, I don’t fucking know. Android doesn’t keep tracked time for apps you rage uninstall.
