Is AFK Journey worth starting? We found out for you.
Anyone who spends a lot of time on Instagram and other social apps has hardly been on lately AFK Journey came over. The advertising campaign for the new game from developer Lilith Games is omnipresent on social media. Many Twitch streamers also get paid to show the game live.
But what is actually behind this fantasy role-playing game? Just more smartphone junk full of Pay2Win mechanics or a cool RPG worth your time?
What is AFK Journey anyway?
AFK Journey is a spin-off of the successful title AFK Arena, a classic one Gacha RPG in a fantasy setting. Gacha means that new heroes have to be drawn from loot boxes and strengthened.
AFK Journey builds on the foundations of its predecessor: You draw characters, put together a team of five heroes, improve them, and then let your squad compete against each other in fully automatic PvE and PvP battles, similar to Teamfight Tactics or other auto battler games.
Countless game modes will be available shortly after release: Boss fights, two roguelite modes (for PvP and PvE), a PvP arena and much more. In most cases, however, this isn’t difficult in terms of gameplay, you just have to position your units in the classic way – tanks to the front, healers to the rear.
If you get stuck at one point, it’s mostly because your heroes aren’t strong enough – you then have to level them up with materials that you collect fully automatically, even when the game is closed.
Only in honor duel mode do you really have to make an effort: The PvP roguelite mode has no Pay2Win elements, each player initially chooses one of three artifacts that grant passive team bonuses and enable certain play styles. You put together a suitable team around the artifact with limited currency.
Once you have fought enough, you can also explore the game world of Esperia. Here you can complete story quests, solve small puzzles, find raw materials and discover hidden treasures.
What do we like? What not?
AFK Journey seems very high quality, from the characters to their animations to the user interface, everything is at a high level – at least compared to many other mobile games.
The gameplay is mostly simple, but for 20 minutes a day it’s fun to experiment with the different characters, find strong synergies for a perfect lineup, and watch the battles. During this time, all important daily quests will be completed.
Exploring the open world is quite nice; we can often avoid enemies if we want.
But even though there is a well-functioning PC client, AFK Journey is, at its core, a typical Free2Play mobile game – and that includes monetization. The game advertises that by logging in you can… Pulls
i.e. loot boxes, as well as all the heroes of the game.
That’s true so far and is enough to complete the campaign without any problems. However, the game has several rankings that promise great rewards, for example in boss fights and in PvP.
AFK Journey charges typical mobile game prices for its currencies – but you need a large amount of them.
Pay2Win worse than in Diablo Immortal
If you want to be at the top here, you have to invest real money, as the heroes can only unleash their full potential if you have received several copies from the loot boxes. And that will be very, very expensive!
And so that my mathematics studies are still useful, I’ll now calculate for you how bad it really is:
- In order to unlock all of a character’s skills, you must level them up
Supreme+
to reach. For an A-level hero (drop chance: approx. 22 percent) you need a total of 63 copies, for an S-level hero (drop chance: approx. 2 percent) you still need seven. - You can limit the heroes you want to pull from the loot boxes – but you have to select eight A- and S-level heroes each. The chance of getting the desired character drops to just under 3 (A-Level) or 0.25 percent (S-Level).
- Drawing ten heroes costs a whopping 80.33 dollars. If you buy the in-game currency in large quantities (the most expensive package costs 120 dollars), you still pay 50 dollars for ten attempts.
- If we assume the standard price, it will cost you average 16,869 dollars (A-Level) or 22,492 dollarswith a character the level
Supreme+
to unlock.
With Supreme+ the end of the road has still not been reached. The heroes can still reach four Paragon levels, which do not unlock any new abilities, but increase values such as attack, defense and life by around three percent each. Bringing an S-level hero to this level costs 118,888 dollars – and the team consists of five characters!
So if you want to have a completely optimized team, you will pay average almost 600,000 dollars – and can then dominate the game until the developer releases new, stronger heroes.
So if you’re thinking about taking a look at AFK Journey, please only do so if you don’t plan on rocking the rankings – even if you want to spend 100 or 1,000 dollars on it. Such sums won’t get you to the top here.
