This is one of my longest running games I’ve played and am still largely active on. I would rate this a 5-star even with the seemingly low summon rates because they do have convenient events for getting good mons but I still put it as a 4 star because of the longest running problem that affects the game in the worst way. That problem is the violent runes. If you play it you will quickly come to realize they are your best friend and your pest enemy all at once. The rate at which they will screw you over will astound you. Imagine a fight starts and you are by far outclassing the other team. Two of your monsters go first and you have killed one monster easily and almost killed another. There’s only a total of three in this fight so you’re almost at a win. Now on their first turn they get three attacks in a row and suddenly you have one monster left and all because of a random chance that is supposed to be pretty rare but seems to happen quite often. Violent runes are one of the most frustrating things in this game because they really should have a cap of one activation during a turn cycle but instead they have multiple chances and having a skill based combat system that is thrown into chaos by random chance is not a good way to compare skill level of players accurately. Please god cap this and I’ll change my review to a 5 in a heartbeat but until then I will never rate this above a 4 and I even hesitantly considered giving it a 3 over this.

Before anything else, if you’ve not played in a long time (say, from around or before the Assassin’s creed event), then the Quality of Life changes are insane since then. Auto 30 runs, runes no longer fail upgrading, evolving monsters doesn’t reset them to level 1, your stat towers are no longer something you have to grind—instead being tied to your level. It’s ridiculous how much more user friendly the game is, and with such a great core gameplay loop, being more user friendly is enormous. Summoners War is probably the best gacha game on mobile, and quite frankly, now that these QoL improvements are in place (and more keep coming—the day I’m writing this review, they’ve updated the game to let you save a rune set from one monster and load it on another!) it’s not really all that close. This is the one game I always end up coming back too, and I think they know it, since each time I do so, I’m inundated with rewards to help me plunge straight back into the game with no time wasted. Only complaint is that Natural 5* rates are still hilariously bad, but these days they have enough events to slightly offset this. L/D rates are not even worth mentioning. With how infrequent L/D summons are, it feels even worse on that end, though it seems the intent is to keep L/D 5* monsters very rare. 9/10. Addicting, but in a good way. Get your friends addicted too and it’s even more fun.

This is a game I always end up coming back to, it’s a very welcoming and well developed for a mobile game. The events are wonderful and seem to take into account newer players into account when they release them, so they aren’t left out of great rewards. It contains a wide variety of monsters to use and deep strategy to building the right team for each of the modes. Definitely something I would recommend at-least trying for a while before you make a decision on the game for it can take a second to really get started a get a sense of what you are doing. But afterwards you really start to take on the challenge of building a strong team and improving you monsters. There are many guilds and helpful players in the community though which is a very fascinating, because it can be very hard to Find a healthy community in games. There are a couple of negatives I find with the game and developers though, as the micro transactions are insanely expensive and you’ll get them flashed on your screen quite a bit while you navigate the menus, you can easily just click them away though. And rising in pvp ranks can be quite a hassle as there are many lvl 50 players who just sit in the lower ranks with max lvl monsters as their defense, which makes it very frustrating for newer and mid level players to climb. All in all I am very satisfied with this game and will always come back it. 😀