Web games are an interesting kind of entertainment. Most of them are simple, some of them are geared towards a younger audience, and plenty of them are blatant rip-offs of bigger games. Dynamons covers all those bases at once. I decided to find out if that is a bad thing or not.
With no title screen, Dynamons starts off with a guy by the name of Jovani asking me, “Hello! Will you become a Dynamon Captain?” There is big green yes button on the screen, with no other option to pick. What if I don’t want to become a Dynamon Captain? Maybe I would like to become a farmer or fisherman instead? Realizing that I actually do want to know what it means being a Dynamon Captain, I click the button. A tutorial battle suddenly starts and so does my quest to become the very best.
A hand points at the pictures that represents my monsters attacks. These are obvious instructions that I need to follow to make my opponent bite the dust. After successfully clicking my way to victory, Jovani congratulates me, “WOW! You did it! Now choose your own…” I now get three Dynamons to choose from, Nintoise, Tailmon, and Pyropine. I of course choose Pyropine, as it is a porcupine like monster with fire as it’s element. That is just to cool to pass up.
I am now on a world map of sorts where I can walk around between nodes. Jovani explains to me that all exclamation marks are battles and all hearts are Dynamon clinics, where you can heal your Dynamons back into good health. So I walk around this map by clicking on the nodes with my mouse button. I do battle after battle, leveling up, catching Dynamons in some kind of discs that I am carrying around. After a few minutes of this, I reach an enemy Dynamon Captain that I need to beat in battle to progress. This I do in a fairly easy fashion with my Pyropine, who is now level 4. And then the cycle continues, with more battling, catching, and leveling. All this in a very simple fashion, as understanding of the level and element of your Dynamons are all that matters to achieving success in this game.
When I had beaten two out of four Dynamon Captains, I realized that I could just catch higher level versions of the same Dynamon I already used to make my team stronger. For example, I caught a water type Dynamon called Vulfrost early in the game. Later I met a level 23 Vulfrost, and mine was still at level 10. I caught this Vulfrost and mine simply grew up to level 23, rendering the leveling I did on my original Vulfrost useless, as it is both easier and faster to catch them than to grind them up to a desirable level.
If you take Pokémon and remove all the exploration, storyline, and makes it 10 times easier, you have Dynamon. It is probably perfect for kids that only want to click around a bit, look at cute characters and eye all the bright colors. To be fair this is probably the targeted audience for the game and since it is quick, as well as easy, it probably fits that audience perfectly. I do however believe that even kids games should have some originality in them and Dynamons has none of that.
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