*warning* bad english.

Despite what people say, this game is actually massively pay to win.

The developer would repeat over and over stating the game is not pay to win, saying it is build for "long term" where all monsters cap level at 20 so if you spent enough time to get your monster to level 20 than it will be a "fair" game, all you need to do is "supposedly" invest enough time in it.
Their strategy to repeating the above lines over and over is simple, to get the newbies players to stay and potentially spend. U see them repeating this all the time in discord to the newbs. And they have a dedicated team of alpha players and pay to win players who would support what they say like freaking zombies.

What they fail to mention is you are never going to get a level 20 legend without cash unless u literally spent 100years in this game. And those cashers with a level 20 legend will totally dominate and annihilate you in arena if you are not using a legend yourself.

They would vehemently state the game is fair but anyone with a functioning brain wouldnt buy their crap, here's why.

I've competed in the top ranks and I have noticed this game is ALLL about pay to win.

firstly you have to be crazy lucky to get a legend without CASH. in my one month time playing this game i have not earned a single legend card without cash. However paying gurantees a legend so the cashers would stack legends to get them to very high level and dominate the top arena.

So if u plan to play this game competitively, be ready to spent hundreds of dollars. because u aint getting legends without cash, even if u did, maybe 1 card per month. and u need tons of legend cards to upgrade just one level. I've played this game for a month, spent around 100usd , got total 9 legend cards from paying $$$, and NONE without cash. And being in the highest level arena, I realize that in order to beat the top tier players, your only option is to spent more money because all the top tier players have one thing in common. HIGH level legends. People without high level legends, no matter how good u are in this game will be at a disadvantage.

There of cos will be the usual skeptics who claimed otherwise but pay them no heed. Of cos u can indeeed kill legend monsters and still win the fight but those moments happen rarely unless you are one of the early access players who is ahead of everyone by 5~10 levels. Legendary monsters are just far superior to all other monsters, whenever i fight someone who isnt using any legends, i hardly even need to concentrate on the game. even when being outleveled a few levels it's still a simple win for me. A average player who understood the moves of all monsters and uses a high level legend will not be losing to a NON pay to win player. Ever.

Of cos there will be the "suck up" individual who would always support this game because they played this game during the alpha stage and got a massive advantage and would shut down all all the accusations. U can see alot of such people in this game discord channel. Sure this game doesnt seem like pay to win if you are not competitive, you can indeed play it non competitively, which is no fun at all. Yet playing it competitively and getting in top ranking in arena is guranteed to get you broke. Not to mention the game keeps baiting you with all kinds of pay to win packages as you progress in the game and arena.

If u despise pay to win game, dont even touch this game

So, I wasn't actually familiar with the term "Pay to win" for some time. I've sheltered myself in the gaming world, usually avoiding games that pester me to buy in-game items. I was a long-time WoW player when this P2W crap started to creep in...

Then I find this game. It seemed cool at first, and indeed the gameplay is actually pretty fun. Then it tanks at about battle number 4 of the story progression...... I was bombarded with annoying notifications of what I needed to use my REAL money for. And not just your simple.. "hey don't forget we have all of this stuff at our in-game store."...It was more like.. "hey we've got all that at our store....you can get piles of gems at our store....Our store has lots of upgrades....psssssst...hey, did I mention we have a store? if not, here are about 5 different icons on all sides of the screen that will flash constantly...just in case you forget."

I will say this, thank Darwin this game is free.... And when I say "free" its more like a conditional sort of free.. They very clearly rope you off from other players by who pays and who doesn't.... Free players cannot progress in a meaningul or interesting way without paying. Paid players can breeze through the game within a few measly hours. This is a game where the outcome is determined by how much money you spend...not time, strategy or skill.. This game is the epitome of Pay..to...win.

And Jesus..I hesitate to even start on all the fake positive reviews. ....Anyone ever see that episode of South Park, where Cartman recalls a story differently each time...and each time he quotes someone, it goes something like this: "Oh you saved the day, You're my hero! And you're absolutely not fat!" .....That's kind of what its like here.. Sometimes they're as simple as one word bits of praise, while others elaborate very specifically about how this game isn't P2W.....I wonder why they have to go out of their way to explain that..

Word of advice...Don't make the mistake of installing this game. Buy yourself some trading cards or something.

I cannot recommend this game. Mostly because it is pay to win. It appears the company moves its focus on the asian market where the design of free play and pay to win are at home the most. But even if we look over that financial model there are still plenty fundamental issues with the game that go very deep.

Design flaws:
- Initiative and waiting is deeply rooted in game design and mean everything. A quick monster gets to delay its turn, waiting out slower monsters and then essentially move twice in a row. This is the reason some quick monsters are popular requests and why many of them are best picks for esports. Unfortunately to fix this devs would need to remove waiting option and redesign every monster in the game. Or penalise waiting somehow which also would change current meta so much that half the teams would stop working.
- New monster, about once in two weeks. This probably is major revenue income for the company. Concept is to introduce a strong new monster that might change the meta, sell as much of it as possible and redesign it two months later to some degree. Overall that means new monsters are better than old ones. Some of them are so absurdly OP they break the game, but no outcry from the community is reason enough to fix the issue. Prime example - introduction of blocky ruined all other melee monsters and pushed the meta a bit in range favor. Most likely this was a design choice because most following promos and implemented monsters were ranged (cupid promo, eloi, gobi, death, now ice man). Blocky ruins anything else in melee 1v1, this makes it harder to rush ranged teams with blocky in defense. Devs "fix" to the problem was to make one purple monster immune to taunt and one underdog green card remove taunt effects with its special attack. They also lowered blocky stats by .. 5%. So basically nothing changed. Nobody would suddenly start using the "buffed" cards because they are still mostly a garbage pick. Kind of a joke, makes me expect the devs plan to make another blocky promo soon to sell him again, theeeeen they might consider nerfing him afterwards.
- Monster ballance. Looking at many top clans, the popular card requests are always the same. There are a handful cards everybody wants. Top requests atm are karissa, medusa, harrison, sabrina, bigfoot, raul, harpy, mudman. Those make probably 90% of all requests for all i can tell. You could assign each monster to a tier of usefulness and the top tier would only have a handful of greens and blues... which happen to be the ones requested all the time. There is no ballance to speak of. 30% monsters are good, 70% mediocre/garbage. Of those 30% that are good, many are orange or purple and thus out of reach for free players.
- Team readjustment. Say one of the monsters in your team got nerfed significantly or a new monster got introduced that heavily counters your setup, considering how hard it is to get a new monster to higher levels this can cripple your gameplay for weeks/months. Even promos can have such impact (cupid and death promos come to mind).
- Mine defense. AI in this game is horrid. Mine defense timer and calculation is completely off and predicts nothing of use.
- Recent changes. They removed autoplay from arena above 3000 rating in a recent patch and introduced surrender option. Split opinions, some like it some hate it. It made things worse for casual players imho. Cant afk arena daily tasks anymore, but also dont have to waste time sitting through a match you see you will lose anyway.

Esport: The only time you will find "fair" matches is esports where the level cap is set to 12 and anyone could get there in forseeable future (few months). However this game mod gives you a free entry only once a week, any additional plays require 100 gems. Esports is flawed on its own too, because at level 12 some monsters outperform others. So in a nutshell you need about 8 different monsters at lvl 12 and some grasp of tactics and you can win 5-6 matches every time. At the moment of writeup the esports meta is heavily carried by harrison, harpy, wukong and blocky. Running a meta team your biggest worry are other good players that run the same team. "Mirror" matches are determined by who gets the first turn. Its pretty stale.

Arena: The normal arena pvp has a bigger monster variety, but still ignores about half of existing monsters. Many of them are very selective picks that counter certain other monsters or only shine in certain rare situations. So about half the monsters you dont see much, leaving around 20ish monsters that comprise the majority of all teams. The arena is never on equal footing. You get matched with opponents by arena rating. With some luck and good tactics you can reach say rating 3300 with a team of lvl 14 monsters. Same time your average opponent at that rating will have monsters in level range 15-18. The better you play the more you fight uphill. Player skill matters a lot, but monster levels and rarity are crucial.

Progression: Lets imagine you are a free player and want to go with a solid, manageable team - 3 green monsters and 1 blue, all your cards are lvl 9 right now and you want to get them to lvl 20. Lets further imagine you will maximise your progression by requesting blue cards and spending all Clan Points (CP) on greens. You will require 3500 blue cards and 41280 green cards. Requesting blue cards 3 times a day (21/d), you need 166 days to reach your goal. You will also need 294 days worth of CP generation (at 4000CP/week) to upgrade the three chosen green monsters to 20. In total you will also need around 815000 gold (while generating maybe 2000 gold from mine defense per day). Taken average numbers of a very active free player and taking into account that you randomly get some cards you need from daily tasks. Your team of 3 green 1 blue monster will reach lvl 20 in approximately half a year. For this to work you will also need to spend ALL gems you get for gold chest promos and/or farming esports for gold. If you are not checking clan requests every 15 minutes, are working full time etc. your weekly CP gain might be 2000 or lower, essentially doubling the time calculated above).

After half a year of very active play you have "only" four monsters at lvl 20 which isnt even max level. If you choose to get them to lvl 23 you will need to put in almost three times the effort it took you to get to 20. The game wont be particularly fun, since you are stuck using the same team all the time. Remember this was green and blue monsters only. If you want your team to have a purple or several blues or god-forbid an orange monster, you better open your wallet because there is no way you will ever reach higher goals without at least monthly card benefits. These make you progress roughly 30-50% faster (depending on your activity, you get to donate and request a bit more, gain a bit more gold, buy more promos).

Overall if the devs say "you need more patience" as free to play, realistically that means you need more patience than this game will be alive. The top tier of arena is full of players who spent thousands of dollars on the game, unless you are prepared to do the same, you might never reach even top 100. It still offers enjoyability if you are willing to look past the fact that matches are almost never on equal terms and you have to lock yourself into the same team to get anywhere higher in the arena.

TLDR: pay to win. very slow progression and even that requires you to focus on very few monsters, matches rarely on equal terms, monsters not ballanced.

The "very positive" reviews are a result of mostly few hour players. The game is fun for a while, it gets bleak when you start looking at long term progression after playing it for a couple weeks.

For a F2P game that I assume is a mobile/social port, Tactical Monsters Rumble Arena is surprisingly a lot of fun. Apart from daily quests, PVP, clans and the rest of the F2P thingamajigs, it actually offers a very decent chunk of PVE content with a bunch of levels and even a relatively challenging set of tactical puzzles. I also never felt like I was grinding or starved for resources, so it's not like the developers were squeezing money out of me, which is good.

Unfortunately, the adventure mode got stale for me after a while—it's too simple, and hero variety is not enough. While I am a fan of HoMM-like tactical combat and the ability to level units up adds an additional layer of fun... it doesn't really add depth. Since the development of all units is linear and you can't choose abilities, it's honestly only there to keep you hooked to the Skinner machine.

Unfortunately, this also makes ladder strictly p2w/grind-to-win since your chances of victory mostly depend on how high-level an army you brought.

Still, Tactical Monsters Rumble Arena can definitely bring several hours of fun to fellow lovers of tactical combat—and for a free-to-play game that's more than enough.

It's a fun game but pure paytowin. They sell monsters so you can buy and easily compete against people who spend months to this game. Buying monsters isnt cheap either, you have to spend tons of money to get high lvls. Stay away from this game unless you enjoy beating people with your money instead of skills.

This game start out fun; lots of upgrades, new monsters, a comprehensive training arena. The rewards come fast and cheap.

Then you hit the mid-game, and this is where the extreme grind begins. Everything stalls, and upgrades happen to slowly to have any satisfaction. PvP combat is less about skill, and more about how lucky you are. Get paired up with someone with higher monster levels? Take your loss and move on. Have a distinct level advantage? ROFLStomp the poor bastard into oblivion. Well balanced games are a rarity.

PvE stuff has a hard cap, and you soon figure out which tiers maximize the effort/reward ratio so you can grind those day after day after day. I estimate it will take *years* for a FTP player will hit max levels in anything. That is not years of fun and engaging content, that is years of daily grind ♥♥♥♥.

This game is 100% all about the whales. People who will drop $100 or more in monetization rewards. There is a subscription service, there are *$30* loot chests, there are $1+ cards (of which you will need *hundreds* for later level upgrades).

I am pretty sick of this overly aggressive money grabbing strategy in FTP games. I am all for buying in if I enjoy a game, but because of games like these I always play for a month or two before deciding to purchase. This one sucks you in with the promise of a fun time, then tries to milk you *hard* as soon as it thinks you are invested. Honestly I do not even recommend you give it a try, there are more fun dollar games from developers who do not see their users as piggy-banks that need to be smashed.

Fun for the first hour. Pay to win from that point on. Your decision making becomes irrelevant after a certain point. You are chasing overleveld A.I. and you can not even grind to catch up. you have to spend money to upgrade your cards.

Just like with their previous title, Heroes tactics, I’ve no idea why you’d play this on PC over much better turn-based strategy games, such as Heroes of Might & Magic. With its mobile pedigree and relatively simplistic gameplay I’d take the near 20 year old HoMM III over this, especially as those games are so cheap now.

I’m a little perplexed as to the positive reception for this game. Perhaps it’s the free to play aspect that’s pulling people in, or maybe the PVP, but you need to play the adventure mode for a while before unlocking it. Said mode is just a series of fairly boring battles following an incredibly linear path, with zero story.

There are also loot boxes and pay to win mechanics. Perhaps that’s why they made the adventure mode so boring, so you’d be tempted to bypass the grind to unlock units more quickly.

Over 800 hours poured into this game. Some takeaways:

Good graphics, interesting strategy, and some semi challenging content.

The PvP is centered around about 20% of the monsters available, Meaning that if you've worked hard to get a team up to the Masters and that team isn't in the 20%, then you are $%*^ out of luck. The monsters are *not* balanced, ranged/aerial literally dominates the fights, void melee teams (anything with more than 1 melee monster) as 75%+ of the maps will f@&% you.

If you plan on spending money on the in game purchases, either plan to spend A LOT, or nothing but the gem subscription, anything in between and you will be wasting your time.

If you want end game viability level: Shady or Wukong as your Gold and DaqDaq or Blocky or Thumper as your purple. With your blues and greens aim for Capn T (blue) + Karissa (green). If not that then level Gobi (blue) as he's broken as all hell and Banshee (green) as she still dominates in movement, energy restriction, and damage output. Honorable mention to Dr Walter (purple) and Raul (blue). That's 11 out of 52 (soon to be 53) monsters. You literally don't need any of the others.

I would very highly recommend to NOT start playing this game. You will work hard, you may learn how to play well, and you will be stuck for months at certain tiers watching people who can and will spend more $$ than you do trounce you.

Do not start playing, as the game is good enough to lure you into a honey trap of 'challenge.' If you do start playing, only get the gems card, and only buy the promo packs taht are worth x4/x5. If you spend more than the gems card, get ready to pay $100's to become competitive, because the players at the top already have.

My biggest regret was buying the new yearly sub, because I can't get it refunded and it's not worth the life spent trying to recoup the value.

Cannot recommend enough: avoid this game at all costs. The devs will say its not pay to win, and they will maintain that lie through update after update. And if *no one else* paid for cards, then yes it wouldn't be pay to win, you'd progress at a similar pace. But *because* paying for the best team is available, more and more available, then if you aren't paying, you aren't winning.

Edit: They should remove "Tactical" from the title. While the game had a strong tactical aspect early on, they've added WAY too many random chance monsters, in the ever marching onslaught of monster bloat (looking at you Gobi), for it to retain that title.

Pay to win garbage.