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We Play: Blood Brothers 2

SPONSORED: In this quick review, we're going to look at Blood Brothers 2, a strategy RPG with a gritty storyline, fun mechanics, and plenty of content.
By
May 26, 2015
Blood Brothers 2 is a strategy RPG released by DeNA. It’s the sequel to the acclaimed Blood Brothers game that amassed over ten million downloads during its run. It’s a strategy RPG with some monster collection elements and a bit of online multiplayer thrown in. It was a fairly solid game already but DeNA recently released a huge update to make it even better. Let’s take a look.
Get it on Google Play

blood brothers 2

Game Play

For those who have never played the game before, here’s how Blood Brothers 2 works. You play as a tactician and your role is to deploy your heroes and win battles. Each hero has a small contingent of soldiers that also make up their hit points and they also have special abilities. Once you deploy your heroes and their troops, they clash with the enemy heroes and troops and that process repeats until someone wins the battle.

The game operates on a trio of roles. Each hero will either control a group of archers, a group of ground troops, or a group of cavalry troops and at that point you’re playing rock, paper, scissors. Archers beat ground troops, ground troops beat cavalry, and cavalry beats archers and that dynamic is the foundation from which all decisions in battle are made.

Each mission in the campaign contains several battles and you’ll have to fight through all of them to finish the mission. Each mission generally has a boss battle at the end. After missions are completed, you’ll earn various resources, mostly gold, which can then be used to upgrade and train your troops. During battles, you can also capture enemy commanders and convince them to join your cause and grow your army that way.

Blood Brothers 2 has one of the better stories out there for a tap to play game. You kind of get thrown into the action to start with but you get a real sense for what’s going on fairly quickly and it grows from there. It’s a dark fantasy story that’s very gritty and dirty. You’re commanding monsters and fighting in the trenches and the game does a good job of relaying that feeling to the player.

Along with all of that, you can engage in PvP combat in the arena, engage with weekly events to get extra resources and gear, and there is a tree of research that you can assign your commanders to research that will give you extra abilities, benefits, upgrades, and more.


Blood Brothers 2 review

The new stuff

DeNA has added a lot of new stuff to the game in a recent update that changes things a whole bunch. By far the biggest change is the inclusion of guilds. Each guild can have up to 50 members and there is a dedicated guild chat. Everything is fairly straight forward and typical of mobile game guilds except for a few things. Let’s discuss some of the exceptions.

Guilds have a shared mastery tree similar to the ones each player has. Guild members can contribute and complete the guild mastery stuff and each member benefits from it, even the new ones. Also, if anyone buys any Blood Sigils through in-app purchases, everyone in the guild gets a gift which is kind of a nice idea.

One of the other new features is a new slew of daily events. This is to help keep the game fresh and give players something else to do a little more frequently. DeNA has said that there will be seven dungeons that will be rotated out daily and players will be able to use these to win more stuff like gear, gold, various souls, and other stuff.

There are other new features as well. One is daily pacts that help players buy specific commanders based on what day of the week it is. This is great for those who have been around for a while and have some Blood Sigils to spare. DeNA has also included a random loot box that will drop at random times after random battles.


Blood Brothers 2 review

The good

Here’s what we liked about Blood Brothers 2:

  • The game play is consistent, simple, but still fun. You’re not asked to do a whole lot but you do have to pay attention and think a little bit in order to win. This not only includes battles, but upgrading, skill research, and pretty much everything is easy to do, but you have to make sure you’re doing it right.
  • The guilds are fantastic. During my testing, I went to bed one evening and woke up with around 45 gifts thanks to the actions of my guild members. The chat is useful for strategy and discussion, and the guild skill trees are very helpful. It was a very positive addition to the game.
  • The story is actually pretty decent for a mobile game. It’s not super deep but the dark fantasy grittiness is refreshing. Usually in mobile games you have cute little monsters and you’re trying to do good. It always looks polished and friendly. In this game, you get the trench-warfare feel and the people you work with don’t look friendly. At all. It’s nice.
  • There is a lot of stuff to do. Between the campaign, the events, the daily missions, upgrading your troops, recruiting new ones, and getting the skill trees mastered, it’s going to take you a long time to beat this game. Don’t forget the new guild stuff, the achievements, and the PvP arena also. There is just a lot to do.
  • The developers get a lot done. You already had a lot of stuff to do and DeNA came back and gave players even more with the guilds, the daily missions, etc.
  • Blood Brothers 2 does include cloud saving. It’s not Google Play Games cloud saving, but it’s definitely good enough to get your stuff to your next device.

Blood Brothers 2 review

The bad

And here’s what we didn’t like so much:

  • The menu system probably could’ve been laid out a little better. It’s not bad, but it’s a bit overwhelming at first and I feel like things could have been better labeled. Of course, once you pour a few hours into it, you’ll learn where everything is so this is a minor nitpick. Still, a few things are kind of hard to find at first.
  • The PvP arena dynamic is a bit weird. I assume that they’re going for an idea where players blindly choose their commanders not knowing what the other player will pick. The problem with this is the game relies heavily on choosing based on what you see on the field so a blind match takes away a lot of control. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it operates on different mechanics than the rest of the game and it feels off.

blood brothers 2

Wrap up

Overall, this is about as good of a time waster game as you can get. It pulls from a lot of genres, including card collecting, strategy, MMO, and RPG elements which really allows players to delve into the game and gives you a whole lot to do. The new addition of daily missions and guilds help keep the game fresh and gives it a bit more of a social aspect so you have someone to talk to while you play which we liked a lot.

There were a few things here and there that didn’t mesh well with the overall feel of the game, but at the end of the day these are minor nitpicks. The game is free with in-app purchases in the Google Play Store which means it costs nothing to at least check it out and you’ll be showing your support for Android Authority and the Android Apps Weekly show. Who knows, you may actually love it!

Get it on Google Play