Tale of Elements: Idle RPG – The fake ads adventure
This is a game from Efun Game Ltd., and what’s fun about it is the completely fake advertisement campaign that took place before the global launch few days ago. The marketing department allegedly used footage from other games, or totally unrelated rendered gameplay to advertise Tale of Elements. When the final version was released, a bunch of users expressed their opinion with a 1 star review (completely understandable phenomenon).
Jump to Tale of Elements Download + APK
What happened?
Well, someone hired by, or working for “Efun Game Ltd.” had this bright idea to use false advertisements for their upcoming game. Sadly, I don’t have a video capture of the ads (I did see them), but it resembled a gameplay seen in Vampire Survivors. Even the current Google Play screenshots hint that there are waves of zombies, and you “fight alone and survive with random skills“. Nope, that’s not it and I know since I spent about an hour playing the game.
Naturally, this caused an avalanche of negative review bombardment, but Google intervened and stopped them from affecting the total score.
Yup, this sums it up pretty nicely. So even if Google removes them from their store, they can’t remove them from here.
What about the game?
What about it? We established that it is nothing like the ads, and to my knowledge there are no zombies whatsoever. It’s a traditional RPG that doesn’t even have a “Roguelike elements“, nor is an “Idle” game. The story is something I will leave out of here since I didn’t pay much attention because I was constantly interrupted with dialogs, connection problems, reloads, downloads and useless hints.
The gameplay itself is somewhat interesting. You control a party of 4 heroes and do quests for the sake of it. Dungeon maps are procedurally generated, but the events taking place are not. Battles are a mixture of strategic team deployment, class strength and weaknesses and cards that double as skills. You can’t really do anything wrong since there are no wrong moves, and the auto-battle mode proves that as well.
Here is a video of the actual gameplay, just skip to
Anything else?
Efun Game Ltd. is not the first, nor the last developer that exploits the uncontrolled ads on the mobile platforms. Especially on Android. The reason why I criticize this game on the spot is because it was planed for review 3 weeks ago, and something totally different was released instead. Oh, I almost forgot, the first time you launch the game, you get to play 1 LEVEL of the advertised gameplay, until you die or win – and you NEVER see that thing again. It almost feels like the devs felt guilty about the ads and decided to implement at least something to wash their sins.
In the end, what are they trying to accomplish here? People that are attracted to the gameplay shown in the ads will clearly not care about this, and people who download the game from the Play Store directly, didn’t watch the ads anyway.
Dejan B. – “Tale of Elements: Idle RPG – The fake ads adventure”