Crypto Raiders

Crypto Raiders is an interactive dungeon crawler built on the Polygon blockchain. While allowing players to explore dungeons and use different abilities in combat, it also features a questing system, a guild structure, and professions such as Herbalism. The team behind Crypto Raiders is all doxxed on their whitepaper, however, their experience is not listed, thus making me unable to comment on the expectations set by this.

The project established itself in Q4 of 2021, with the game launching in 2022, starting as a basic dungeon crawler where completing instances dropped loot that could be equipped to characters. There isn't any lore associated with the project as far as can be seen in the whitepaper or Discord server.

The hardware specs for this game are quite low, which makes it available for most to play. Crypto Raiders is available on web browsers as well as Mac, Windows, and mobile, making it very accessible for gamers.

Gameplay

The core of the game revolves around collectible characters that can be used to play in dungeons, where they can gain loot and XP. The goal is to make the characters as powerful as possible through equipping loot and leveling up their skills points, as seen below. There are eleven characters that a player can choose from, and these can be purchased on the secondary marketplace on OpenSea. To use these characters, players must create an account inside the game and connect to the game with the wallet that holds the NFT.

Inside the dungeon, the player encounters various creatures depending on the dungeon itself. Here, they battle using the abilities they have equipped. Players can also own the mobs that players may face inside dungeons. Each of these mobs is its own NFT, and if a player's mob slays somebody's character, the person who owns the mob earns the $aurum token, as well as some of the loot. In addition to this, players can make use of health potions and other items, such as damage potions, to help in their quest to conquer a dungeon.

Another aspect of the Crypto Raiders game is the ability to complete quests outside of dungeons, allowing players to gain items such as grimweed and improve their profession's skill level. These quests can take several hours and will disable the ability to run dungeons while the character is on the quest. The items acquired from these quests can be used in combination with aurum to craft potions and more.

Review

Crypto Raiders presents plenty of activities for players to engage in, allowing for dungeon crawling when actively playing and completing quests for a passive gaming experience. The overall design is decent, and each part of the game interacts with the other.

In terms of audio design, it is adequately well-designed to engage players when changing scenes or stages of combat. An area of improvement here could be enhancing the sound effects when navigating their main site, as well as during combat. When analyzing the graphics of Crypto Raiders, there is more to be desired in terms of the level of detail. Other games that feature pixelated graphic design have been able to display a great level of depth in their details, which is missing inside of Crypto Raiders.

Regarding gameplay, the core loop is entertaining and can be hard to master when it comes to battling, but there is more to be desired as a character can only run five dungeons in a week. They have the possibility to do more, but this requires the purchase of dungeon keys using aurum. This means that the main game has a set limit of playtime without the need for purchasing additional items. Moreover, the quests are easily accessible, but they lack any sort of excitement. The UI of the main menu is quite plain and does little to catch the eye.

In addition to this, there have been several problems with the game in terms of bugs that don't allow players to log into the game or play at all, which is something that I personally experienced throughout my review experience. A huge downfall for Crypto Raider is that there is no tutorial within the actual game, which is something that would greatly help newcomers. By implementing a tutorial, one of the greatest pain points of the game would be remedied.

The need to purchase an item to play without having a tutorial inside the game is an enormous friction point, especially considering the ongoing bugs when trying to play. In addition to this, the level of detail in terms of graphics could be improved alongside the sound effects.