We will talk about a genre that is quite popular at the moment – battle royale, Battle Royal, and many games have been released over the past year and many more will be released, and there are so many experiments from the developers, just to bring something original to their game, but not too far from the already accepted canons of the genre.
So this time, the Korean company Joongwon Entertainment decided to break into the world of video games with its first project Nine Dragons Kung Fu Arena or NDKFA for short! In general, an interesting situation, if earlier the name of the genre was directly included in the name of the game, now the battle royale has suddenly turned into an arena, and I didn’t come up with this (PlanetSide Arena), apparently in 2019 we will see such “arenas” more than once again.
“Nine Dragons Kung Fu Arena is a battle royale project based on the online game 9Dragons Online, popular among many users around the world. On the bloody battlefield of Gado Island, defeat other mercenaries and find the “Jade Dragon” to uncover the legend of the legacy of the nine dragons.»
An ancient Chinese proverb says: “A good product is never cheap, a cheap product is never good” © Aliexpress
At the moment, the game is in early access in the beta test stage and anyone can test it by downloading via Steam (attention: at the time of writing this article and editing the video, the game suddenly left the open beta test and further, according to information from the developer’s discord, there will be a closed beta test)
Before installing the game, you will be https://ezcash-casino.co.uk/games/ asked to choose one of three languages, but even after choosing English, as they say in that wisdom, “this is a choice without an alternative”. After launching the game, I was greeted by the Korean language, and the only thing that was in English was the Credits tab and the names of the servers, of which there were four (Korea, Asia, America, Europe), however, by poking and searching, I finally found this treasured option, and the game became completely in English. In my opinion, the interface in the menu is quite nice and clear, despite the beta version, it is clear that the developers want to release their project on consoles in the future, but this is not certain.
Next I went to the costumes section, the local variety of clothing is quite extensive, you have one face for three costumes, and another with one costume, apparently for those who want to stand out from the gray mass, however, I did not stand out and chose a costume called, Wu-Tang. There are currently no skins for weapons, as well as the donation store itself, which is strange, given that the game is in early access on Steam! These are the values of different cultures, they let you try the game and you don’t even need to donate, it’s terrible!
The game uses, oh my God, Unreal Engine 4 (PUBG, Fortnite), and what’s most interesting is that it’s optimized quite well here, I played at maximum graphics settings and didn’t even freeze! Perhaps this is due to the fact that there are no real players in the game, but only bots, but more on that later.
The picture looks lush, green meadows, forests, mountains, it feels like the developers are trying to convey the beauty of Chinese fantasy and loads quite quickly! And all this is in beta testing, but we’ll see what happens when the servers are loaded with real players.
At the moment, there is only one single mode available in the game, select the server closest to you and the countdown begins, no, you didn’t hear it, to start playing or for the game to find, you need to wait exactly a minute. After the launch for some time, you fly as a camera, looking at the local beauty and that’s a minute and a half of wasted time, not taking into account the load.
When I was finally given control of the character, I discovered something, the landing location cannot be selected, that is, where is the plane, bus, dragon flying across the entire map? I just appeared in a random place, but what about the notorious canons of the genre, the developer?
But don’t forget that this is a beta test, so it may still be there. The task, as in any royal battle, is to stay alive, and this will have to be done in a rather unconventional way. The developers took martial arts with fantasy elements as a basis, which means that the entire gameplay is focused on martial arts.
There are currently three types of weapons available: a sword, a spear and… Chi-Blaster! Each weapon has its own unique set of attacks and abilities, and in order to strengthen it, you will have to search for manuscripts that are inserted into special cells, a la perks in PUBG, the actual number of these cells depends on the rank of your weapon, the more the better. There is no vehicle in the game, but why should you, when the Chinese deities gave you kung fu?! The battles at the moment look crooked, and you have to fight against bots; there are simply no real players yet.
The area is quite vast and connected by bridges, by the way, if you want to cross to the other side by another method, swim there for example, then sorry, there is no water here, which means that ambushes on bridges will be very relevant, well, relevant if real players appear. Next, to become stronger and level up your character, you will need to collect trophies from defeated enemies, sort of like the souls of a fallen warrior. After use and a little meditation, your level increases, as do your stats.
Sometimes marks appear on the map where you can get rare items, but you won’t be able to find these items, the fact is that an NPC appears in this area who can go far beyond the zone. Well, if you do find him, or rather her, after talking with her, you will receive those very rare items. When the time comes and you need to move away from the danger zone, here you will find that it does not squeeze you, but pushes you out. Red places on the map will eventually fill it all and the only chance to escape is to come to the indicated place in the form of a green dragon and there continue mortal battles against those who got there. By the way, in this place you can activate a certain item called “Jade Dragon”, which I never found, so I didn’t find out what it was for.
I would like to say that the project is quite interesting, since I am a fan of the online game of the kung fu legend, and indeed Asian themes in general, I hope in the future the game will be a Hypanet, and the developers themselves will bring it to mind. As the ancient Chinese proverb says, “The potential is there, but it’s not there”© Gnome2D
