Haypi Adventure: Kingdom of Glory Review

Instead of troops, you have ships. Haypi Adventure: Kingdom of Glory (out now, free) is a seafaring version of Clash of Clans.

Your town center sits on an island, around which you’ll build various structures: iron forges, wood mills, silver mints, and defensive towers. The first three, of course, provide resources for constructing and upgrading buildings. Silver may also be used to buy heroes (who command ships), and training them.

screen480x480Haypi Adventure: Kingdom of Glory is more feature-rich, and thus, complex than most other Clash of Clan inspired games. There’s a bunch of things to upgrade. Within just the town center, you’ve got your Town Hall, Tech Center, Training Ground (for leveling up heroes), Warehouse (for storing resources), Shipyard (for building ships), and Dock (for holding the ships). Of these, the Tech Center is the most complicated. You can not only upgrade the building itself, but also various components involved in ship and resource building, navigation, etc. In addition to these land-based buildings, you’ll also have to upgrade all the resource and defensive structures you build around your island.

I don’t know that all this complexity is a good thing, however. Many aspects of the game did not appeal to me. While I’m not a Clash of Clans player, I’ve been playing another similar (and in my opinion, superior) game for months. Invariably, I compare it with all other games in the same category. Haypi Adventure: Kingdom of Glory isn’t as attractive to a f2p (free to play) gamer like me, because it’s considerably harder to earn gold, the premium in-game currency. Unlike that other game I play, Haypi Adventure awards you with very little gold for completed tasks (usually only one gold per task, if at all), and never gave any gold for server maintenance downtime and app updates.

Another downside to Haypi Adventure are the long waiting times for even low-level building upgrades. In addition, hero revival takes one hour, a ridiculously long time, especially considering how low level my heroes were. Though you’re allowed to have multiple teams of heroes, this was irritating. Worse, you have to select different heroes to guard your base. So you either have to train up separate groups for combat and defense, or waste your time switching your heroes about before attacking other bases.

screen480x480Heroes aren’t very fun to play with either. They don’t earn any experience from defending your base or attacking others. You can only level up your heroes in the training center. This is also costly. You’ll first have to hire random heroes in the Tavern, either by spending silver, gold, or rum. As I mentioned, gold is hard to acquire without resorting to paying real cash, and rum is even harder to get. You can increase your chances of getting better heroes by spending the premium currencies. The best possible class of hero you can get is orange.

Once you’ve bought some heroes, you’ll have to sacrifice the poorer heroes (such as white ones) to level up your heroes of choice. To do this, you’ll have to spend a bunch of silver. This means paying double! In the other game I play, you can also sacrifice heroes to upgrade your main heroes, but it’s to improve their skills, not to level them up in general. To me, it’s more fun and productive for heroes to earn experience through battles.

As for the heroes in Haypi Adventure, I found them dull. The same hero pictures (face portraits) are duplicated, simply changing the hero’s name. It doesn’t fill me with any yearning to collect heroes.

One more negative: If another player destroys your base, you’ve got to rebuild and repair everything for a fee (not gold, fortunately).

iFanzine Verdict: Haypi Adventure: Kingdom of Glory stands out from other Clash of Clans inspired games with its ocean-based theme, and commanding battles with ships is refreshing. Overall though, it isn’t as fun to play if you’re unwilling to spend lots of real money on gold. Waiting times are also incredibly long, and it’s definitely not worth it to pay to speed that up.