Seriously Digital Entertainment, the masterminds behind the very popular Best Fiends, has released their second mobile game, a sequel called Best Fiends Forever. If you liked the original, there’s no guarantee you’ll like this follow-up, unless you are a clicker adventure fan. But hey, maybe battling more Slugs on Mount Doom is all you really want.
Best Fiends Forever is a clicker RPG-ish adventure game with a heavy focus on similar mechanics found in the first game, which features the same favorite fiends as well. This continuation is a quest to reunite the team as they go from one screen to the next, level by level, slapping and beating up slugs. Except now, we don’t do it through a Match-3 puzzle while leveling up our Fiends. Instead, we level them up so that they can fight stronger automatically. Yes, you read that right. Best Fiends Forever plays while you are away from the game. In fact, it rewards you for not playing, giving you coins while you are away, encouraging players to stop by only for short bursts. There is no other way around it either as after a while, the coins to level up will run out and the player will have to exit the game for a maximum of eight hours for the fiends to fight those battles and earn coins in order to level up. They must do so to fight the boss slugs or for the power-ups to charge up again. That might be seen as a good thing because it doesn’t require the player to be around in-game all the time as it progresses, however it is much more a con because going away is obligatory and unless the player is completely invested, they might not think about going back to play. When they do, all they need to do is log in and press for a few seconds and leave again. This leaves that investment in the game rather weak. Most of the time, logging back in is all about beating the slug boss or completing the three objectives.
https://youtu.be/FPgScFNlRic
Furthermore, there is one feature that has us scratching our heads just a little. Best Fiends Forever has something called a portal. You use the portal to go back to the beginning of the world and start all over with our one fiend and build it all up again. Going back in the portal helps gain some gems that helps level up some up something called ‘souvenirs’ which you can equip to increase the damage or whatever other function there is. However, the game also encourages you to go through the portal by setting objectives to do it. To get back to where you were when you traveled to the portal isn’t exactly hard most of the time because the fiends are stronger at this point, but to outright rip away all the player’s hard work by being transported back to the beginning is a little enraging when it first happens.
Best Fiends Forever can be slightly hard to grasp when asking what it wants to be. It’s categorized as a “casual” game. That fine and good. Clicker games are an easily addictive formula and many casual players enjoy them. However, we can’t help but notice that Best Fiends Forever lacks creativity, rebooting almost everything from the first game and just adding in some new environments to justify the change. This helps add continuity but still, simply changing the genre doesn’t make for too much difference. In fact, as we were playing we hoped at some point it would just get back to the Match-3 formula of the first game instead. As a time waster, it definitely qualifies, but only in short bursts because it pushes its players to leave when the coins run out even if we could still be going through the levels and opening chests and beating slugs with quick tapping skills. This stops the moment we use up all the power-ups and the slug boss becomes too hard to beat with the basic skills in the time limit. This isn’t a complaint about the boss being hard, because they aren’t and have specific formulas for beat them, granted the fiends are leveled up enough.
So what is Best Fiends Forever? It tries to be different by changing up its genre but adds features that are mind-boggling in practice and sometimes a little frustrating. After a few portals, it gets a little hard to stay invested and want to go back. We might be in the minority on that, and admittedly, there’s no denying the odd addictive quality to it all, despite the recurring reluctance to want to go back. It’s a paradox.
And now the good stuff: One of the best characteristics that does get overlooked unless you read the description or move around the world map is Best Fiends Forever partnership with Oceana, an organization that strives to “save the oceans, feed the world.” Oceana has an honorable mission in which to help protect and restore the world’s oceans, and we almost missed it until we looked deeper into the game.
Best Fiends is slated to be a trilogy, so we’ll be looking to see where these fiends continue their next adventure very soon. In the meantime, read our review for the first game, Best Fiends and maybe give this one a shot. We weren’t totally sold, but for a quick pick up and play, it might appeal.