The AFK Journey advertising campaign is omnipresent. But is the fantasy role-playing game worth it? We tried it out and have a clear opinion
If you spend a lot of time on Instagram and other social apps, you’ve hardly come across AFK Journey lately. The advertising campaign for the new game from developer Lilith Games is omnipresent on social media. Many Twitch streamers are also being paid to show the game live
But what is actually behind this fantasy role-playing game? Just another smartphone junk full of Pay2Win mechanics or a cool role-playing game that’s worth your time?
What is AFK Journey anyway?
AFK Journey is a spin-off of the successful title AFK Arena, a classic gacha role-playing game in a fantasy setting. Gacha means that new heroes have to be drawn from loot boxes and strengthened
AFK Journey builds on the foundations of its predecessor: You draw characters, assemble a team of five heroes, upgrade them and then pit your squad against each other in fully automated PvE and PvP battles, similar to Teamfight Tactics or other auto-battler games.
Countless game modes will be available shortly after release: Boss battles, two Roguelite modes (for PvP and PvE), a PvP arena and much more. In most cases, however, this is not challenging in terms of gameplay, you just have to position your units in the classic way – tanks at the front, healers at the back
If you get stuck at a certain point, it’s usually because your heroes aren’t strong enough – you’ll have to level them up with materials that you collect automatically, even when the game is closed.
Only in Honor Duel mode do you really have to make an effort: The PvP Roguelite mode has no Pay2Win elements, each player chooses one of three artifacts at the beginning, which grant passive team bonuses and enable certain play styles. You assemble a suitable team around the artifact with limited currency
When you’ve had enough fighting, you can also explore the game world of Esperia. Here you can complete story quests, solve small puzzles, find resources and discover hidden treasures.
What do we like? What don’t?
AFK Journey looks very high quality, from the characters to their animations to the user interface, everything is on a high level – at least compared to many other mobile games.
The gameplay is simple for the most part, but for 20 minutes a day it’s quite fun to experiment with the different characters, find strong synergies for a perfect lineup and watch the battles. All the important daily quests can be completed in this time
Although there is a well-functioning PC client, AFK Journey is essentially a typical Free2Play mobile game – and that includes monetization. The game advertises that you can get tens of Pulls
, i.e. loot boxes, as well as all of the game’s heroes by logging in.
This is true so far and is enough to complete the campaign without any problems. However, the game has several leaderboards that promise great rewards, for example in the boss battles and in PvP.
Pay2Win worse than in Diablo Immortal
If you want to play at the top here, you have to invest real money, as the heroes can only unleash their full potential if you have received several copies from the loot boxes. And that will be very, very expensive
And so that my math studies are still useful, I’ll calculate how bad it really is:
- To unlock all the skills of a character, you have to reach the level
Supreme+
with him. For an A-level hero (drop chance: approx. 22 percent) you need 63 copies, for an S-level hero (drop chance: approx. 2 percent) it is still seven. - While you can limit the heroes you want to draw from the loot boxes, you must select eight A- and eight S-level heroes. This reduces the chance of obtaining the desired character to just under 3 (A-level) or 0.25 percent (S-level).
- Drawing ten heroes costs a whopping 80.33 euros. If you buy the in-game currency in large quantities (the most expensive package costs 120 euros), you still pay 50 euros for ten attempts.
- If we assume the standard price, it will cost you on average 16,869 euros (A-Level) or 22,492 euros to unlock the level
Supreme+
with a character.
Supreme+ is still not the end of the line. The heroes can still reach four Paragon levels, which do not unlock any new abilities, but increase values such as attack, defense and life by around three percent each. To bring an S-level hero to this level costs 118,888 euros – and the team consists of five characters!
So if you want a fully optimized team, you’ll pay an average ofjust under 600,000 euros – and can then dominate the game until new, stronger heroes are released by the developer.
So if you’re thinking about taking a look at AFK Journey: please only do so if you’re not planning to rock the leaderboard – even if you want to spend 100 or 1,000 euros on it. Such sums won’t get you to the top here
