Text/Yiguang Flow

Since the popularity of "Vampire Survivor", it has fed countless survivors like stand-alone games, and even kryptonite mini-games, which has also created a category ecology of survivor like with extreme involution. However, what is surprising is that this survivor like or mowing grass meat pigeon category still has innovative products emerging.

This year's Q4 "Spell Brigade" gave me the feeling that it was quite new. This game was launched on Steam in mid-September to start EA testing, although it did not become popular immediately, but after a few months of accumulation, it still received 125,000 sales, as well as 89% special praise, especially more than 1400 reviews in the past 30 days, and gave a 94% praise rate.

After paying attention to mowing meat pigeons for a long time, it is not difficult to find that this category is very suitable for small and large: with low-cost art and repeatable gameplay, with special themes, it can often win a 100,000+ sales. For a long time, entering this category has been a sure-fire deal for individual developers and efficient small teams.

For example, "20 Minutes Before Dawn", one of the first personal development works to eat this dividend two years ago, its highest simultaneous online work exceeded 12,000; In March last year, the domestic small team product "Tongshen List" also sold more than 100,000 copies quickly after 7 days of launch. Similar cases are not uncommon.

But throughout this year, the mowing pigeon games on Steam have become more and more high-quality, especially the part of the new works that can stand out, often have more detailed art performance, more exquisite modeling, more detailed special effects, and some products even have IP endorsements.

For example, "Zero Plan 2: Apocalypse Party", which was launched in December last year, places great emphasis on Lowpoly's modeling style; This February's Deep Rock Galaxy: Survivor builds on the influence of Deep Rock Galaxy's previous game; August's "Greedy Earth" directly uses Unreal Engine to portray the sci-fi style.

Zero-Clearance Plan 2: Apocalypse Party

"Greedy Earth"

In comparison, Spell Brigade is also a product of similar specifications, and this game also emphasizes a delicate and unique style of art. In terms of theme selection, based on the exaggerated European and American cartoon style, elements such as magic, wizards, and totems are added, giving people a sense of being between grotesque and Q Meng.

The accuracy of the modeling is visibly higher than the level of the pixel mowing pigeon game a year or two ago, and there are no shortcomings in the details of the characters, terrain details, and action details. The special effects are synchronized with the level of modeling, and the performance is decent.

The gameplay of this game is generally the same as the old set of mowing pigeons.

In the game, first of all, the strange sea resists pressure, constantly refreshing different kinds of zerg, so that the wizard played by the player can survive against the strange sea; The second is the random upgrade reward, each upgrade randomly spawns rewards of different quality to improve the player's combat and survivability; Finally, there are combinations and special effects, try the combination of different weapons and special effects to find the right output routine. Outside the game, you can use the points after breaking the level to unlock the initial ability and expand the living space in the game.

If you play Spell Brigade alone, then this game will have a noticeable difference in experience compared to other mowing pigeons:

First, it weakens the pleasure of mowing and increases the pressure of survival. Especially in the wasteland development period, the lack of growth outside the game, the slow upgrade in the game, the fixed weapon attack mode, the insignificant increase in values, as well as the setting of more strange seas, scattered refresh locations, and many obstacles on the map, will weaken the sense of mowing and increase the pressure of survival.

Inevitably face collision with monsters

Second, under the premise of the previous point, the tasks of the bureau have created more sense of urgency. For example, collect quest props on the map, accumulate monster kills in a specific area, unlock bosses in a specific area and defeat them, etc. During the wasteland period, most of the time players will inevitably bring a bunch of followers to complete these tasks, but due to the pressure of survival, it is likely that they will not be able to complete them in the end.

Squatting Mission

But Spell Brigade is not a one-man game, and players can form up to a squad of four people to fight together.

So the experience of these single-player games is not the same thing in a multiplayer environment. For example, there are many strange seas that can concentrate firepower with multiple people, and the task points can be scattered and can be separated to quickly complete the task, and the boss can also cooperate with each other to output, and when there are more people, you can also take different skill routes and divide labor reasonably.

Of course, the fun of multiplayer is not only about fighting together, but also about hurting each other. Bad coordination is a common small problem to walk into the monster pile together, and skilled pit goods will use time bombs, resurrection tokens and other means to create more sudden survival pressure on teammates. This detail setting, I have encountered it for the first time in a grass-mowing pigeon that supports multiplayer gameplay.

On the whole, "Spell Brigade" is a multiplayer mowing pigeon game with a decent production level and a fairly fresh gameplay mechanism.

As of now, the 0.7x version of the EA period does have some imperfections, such as the combination between different output skills is not diverse enough, and the connection is sometimes not stable. But there is undoubtedly a lot of room that can be tapped in this game, such as the expansion of output skills, the addition of props and consumables, and the in-game prop exchange function.

However, from a practitioner's point of view, what I see more on Spell Brigade is the fun and feasibility of multi-person mowing pigeons. Since the appearance of "Vampire Survivor", the majority of players have been looking forward to the emergence of multiplayer mode, but "Vampire Survivor" has finally made a local multiplayer gameplay, which has always been a little less interesting.

Vampire Survivors local multiplayer

The reason for this is that the design logic of a single-person mowing pigeon cannot be simply applied to multiplayer gameplay. But in any case, the seeds of the "multi-person mowing pigeon" have been planted, and by this year they have begun to take root and even bear fruit.

The aforementioned "Zero Plan 2: Apocalypse Party" and "Spell Brigade" are both pioneers in this direction, in addition to the new product "Extremely Tired Underworld", which tries to mow grass and meat pigeon + multiplayer PvP gameplay.

Mowing grass meat pigeon + multiplayer online PvP "Extremely Tired of the Underworld"

Back to the beginning of the article, there are now many products in the field of mobile games rooted in the track of mowing grass and meat pigeons, and new themes are emerging in an endless stream, but the gameplay is much the same, and the final volume is still paid and valued. Is the grass mowing pigeon gameplay already finalized?

After seeing the attempts of many products such as "Spell Brigade", the answer to this question is already clear. Perhaps in the future, we can look forward to a wave of exploration of mowing grass meat pigeon mobile games in the direction of multiplayer.

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