Age of Guardians Review

Endless Piles of Gold

Age of Guardians is an idle RPG, where you mow down enemies and rack up resources. Once you gather new gold, equipment, and gems you can enhance your allies and fight stronger enemies. Even when you aren’t playing, your units will fight enemies on their own, getting you more gold.

What I like about this is that I never run out of money, enhancing spheres, or gems. I can level up, equip items, and create chests without worrying about resources. Even if I did run out, I could just wait a little while and get more. My biggest problem comes from gathering new equipment.

Equipment is different from the other resources. You must open random chests you create with your gems. The problem is that equipment is necessary to promote your units and make them stronger. I could plow through mission after mission, but then I’d hit a roadblock where my units just weren’t strong enough.

I don’t mind farming for chests, but you can’t even farm them here. You must wait to open them. Sure, there are items that speed up opening times, but they’re harder to come by than other resources. Even if you pop open a bunch of chests, you aren’t even guaranteed the one piece you need for your promotion.

Automatic Combat

Battles are simple. Your units will fight on their own and you can activate skills for them whenever you want. Most of the strategy comes from deciding when you’re going to activate your skills and where you place your units. It feels like an auto chess game.

At first, I was frustrated when enemies would jump over my tanks and attack my archers and mages. Then I switched one of my tanks with my backline mage. The jumping enemy was focused on attacking him instead and my mage was free to fight. Having to think out my moves before the fight made the game less of a grind fest where I just watch.

While I wish there were a way to tell your units who to prioritize, the game’s battles are relatively fair. I especially like that there’s no energy limits. You can retry a battle as much as you wish. If you feel like your units made a stupid choice, try again and the results might be different.

Lots of Battle Variety

There are a lot of different battle modes to play. If I get stuck in one section, I can just play a different set of battles while I level up. You start with only story missions, but can unlock challenge missions, arena battles, and long missions that track health between battles.

Challenge missions will have limitations on what units you can bring into a battle. So instead of a full party of six, I might only have three. Or I might have a one versus one match. Part of the fun here is trying different units whenever you fail. My wolfman might not win a fight because he’s not tanky enough, but my rock golem can heal himself while fighting.

Arena battles are fights against other players. They’re interesting, but the number of battles you have are very limited, so you don’t get to do them very often.

I prefer the King’s Treasure mode. In King’s Treasure, you take all your units through a series of battles they can’t heal between. While you head through, collect items that raise your stats during your quest. The roguelike elements mixed in make this mode extra fun. I also like being able to make use of all the units I have. In other modes I always use the same six units, but in this one, I can see the others shine.