Not Worth Your Time
I was excited going into Elf Tales. The artwork for the game looked promising and I wondered if EYOUGAME created an RPG experience worth remembering. Within five minutes I found out how wrong I was.
You start by creating an account and logging into a server, the game is an MMO afterall. You then get to choose a male or female protagonist. You’re treated to a tiny comic page giving your character some semblance of a backstory and then dropped into the game. You’d think for a game called Elf Tales there would be more tales. More lore or backstory to its world and characters. Maybe there’d be more story later on, so I continued playing.
I moved my character around the environment for a bit when a quest marker showed up. I tapped it and that was pretty much the point where my game ended, and the rest of the game played itself. My character walked to an area, fought some monsters, fought a boss, and continued to the next area. Rinse, lather, repeat. I came to realize that I wasn’t playing a game but an auto-leveler, an experience, I realized, had neither elves nor tales. Just disappointment.
Pointless Combat
I don’t even consider Elf Tales a game. Games have challenges, something enjoyable that you can take away by the end of the experience. But Elf Tales shows that you can manage to have so much and so little content at the same time. The game has lots of different abilities, armor, customization and leveling options that are enough to make your head spin. All shown on screen with some absurd UI. But almost all of it is accomplished through pressing a single button and letting the rest play itself out.
Combat consists of watching your character perform the same five attacks. After a few minutes I saw the game didn’t really need me to do anything to progress. When I looked up at my character’s level after those few minutes, I laughed, seeing I’d reached level one hundred. What an accomplishment. I got so bored with the game that I ended up creating a game for myself. I’d see how tough it was for my character to get killed. Turns out it was the most challenging quest in the game.
Best Part of the Game
I started off with the normal opponents. They practically tickle your character in terms of damage so that was a no-go. I looked to a normal boss, but my character took giant snake bites to the face no problem. It was when I went to a dungeon boss that my hopes went up. I had to move slowly around the arena otherwise my character would attack the boss, and then I saw it. My health went down! Victory was sweet until I saw my character was healing faster than they were dying.
A raid boss finally defeated my character, and I’d never been happier to see a revive screen.
That was the most fun I had in Elf Tales. The rest of the game is either forgettable or unenjoyable. There’s plenty of options to customize your character appearance, mount and companion all for real-world currency making it a freemium game, but that’s it. Nothing in Elf Tales leaves you feeling that it was worth the download.
An Empty Experience
If you came to Elf Tales looking for an enjoyable RPG experience I recommend looking elsewhere. The only fun I had playing the game was through a challenge I set for myself. If you like the feeling of seeing numbers go up on your character through minimal effort then maybe you’ll get some enjoyment out of the game. But I’d like it if there was something more challenging to a game than giving it my credit card info.
Non-existent gameplay, forgettable music, and an obvious money-grubbing ploy leaves Elf Tales a hollow experience. At least it’s free to play.
Is it Hardcore?
No.
Elf Tales is a game that plays itself. It doesn’t take long for the experience to become formulaic and in the short time you realize the game doesn’t have much to offer, you’re already at level one hundred.