With the release of 3DS title Attack on Titan: The Last Wings of Mankind this past week, now seemed like the perfect time to try out the Attack on Titan mobile game Attack on Titan: The Wings of Counterattack. Oh how wrong I was.
Attack on Titan: The Wings of Counterattack is a mobile game for cellphones—not smartphones, mind you—and it certainly shows. The graphics, while somewhat cute and stylized, are also painfully simple—a generic animated sprite with a repeating background scrolling behind it. Other than that, it is little more than a game of static pictures and menu screens.
To tell the truth, in terms of its gameplay, it’s almost a carbon copy of the terrible Tales social game, Tales of Ginza. Simply put, you tap once to start an adventure, tap once again to continue the adventure… and then do that again and again until you run out of AP (Action Points) or finish the adventure.
Occasionally you’ll run into a piece of treasure (in the form of a card). As you level up, you can equip more and more cards. You can also sacrifice your surplus cards to level up the cards you have equipped. Sometimes you’ll even run into a titan to kill—though you can only do that so many times in a row before you either need to wait or pay-to-play. It’s all standard fare for a game like this.
And really, that’s what makes this game so painfully boring: there is nothing new or unique about it. There’s nothing to differentiate it from any number of other microtransaction mobile games. But what makes it even worse is how little it even gives you to string you along.
In the three hours I played, I unlocked next to nothing. No characters, no rare weapons, no new job classes. In the end the only thing it did to keep me playing was the promise of eventually unlocking Mikasa after I killed a few more titans—but as I was locked out of titan fights until my gear became strong enough, this never happened.
It doesn’t really matter how much you love Attack on Titan or how starved you are for anything new related to the series. Even if you can speak Japanese, stay away from this title. It is shovelware at its very worst.
Attack on Titan: The Wings of Counterattack was released for cell phones on April 26, 2013. It can be played for free from its official homepage (scan the IR code on the page to play on either Mobage or GREE).
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