Worlds of fantasy are not always beautiful and spectacular, but dark and cruel. The world of Stormfall: Rise of Balur awaits strategy fans to defend the lands of Darkshine from evil and turn its inhabitants back to the light. Gather resources, build up your castle and fight endless battles with rival Leagues for the control of the land!
Stormfall: Rise of Balur is a strategy MMO from the developer Platinum Global. You might have heard of their previous works such as Vikings: War of Clans, Total Domination – Reborn, Color Smash Story, PlaySlots or Poker Shark.
Stormfall: Rise of Balur has a 4.4/5 stars rating in 2016 on the Google Play Store, while it also enjoys 4.5/5 stars on the Apple App Store. After its huge success as a browser game, it returns in a separate mobile version for the happiness of fans and new players. Let’s see how it fares on a vastly different market!
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The general principles behind Stormfall: Rise of Balur are the following: contacts, preparation and strategic planning. As the game is set in a world full of other players, you will be heavily reliant on your interactions with them. Will you befriend your neighbouring castles or will you try to destroy them? The choice is yours.
All players who join the game has their castle placed randomly on the massive world map. Your location is important, as it decides your neighbours and your distance from other players. Your castle starts off weak and for that reason each new player has a 3 day long protection against attacks from high leveled enemies. What should you use these 3 days for? Let me give you a few ideas!
I mentioned preparation as a main principle and by that I meant organizing your castle and making sure you are in a good shape and ready both for raids and defending your home. The game has an extensive tutorial of 50 quests that all teach you the basics. Part of the basics is to gather and hoard resources, of which there are 3 different kinds: gold, iron and food. Gathering any of these resources is done by building Townhouses, Mines and Farms. After you have a few of these buildings, they will keep producing resources for you.
Now that you have some resources, there must be a way to use them, right? A huge part of Stormfall: Rise of Balur is battling with other players and raiding computer controlled encampments, so you will need an army to do that. Training new units costs various amounts of resources. You can train 4 different types of units, starting with Infantry such as Pikemen, Archers and Paladins. Then you have the Cavalry with Nomads, Knights and Barbarians. The non-human types are the Occult units such as Golems, Warlocks and Demons. Then there are the Bestiary units: Griffins, Dragons and Chimeras.
If you want to train any unit other than the basic Pikemen, then you have to research the Lost Arts related to it. To train archers you need to research the Composite Bow, while to train Nomads you need Horsemanship. These Lost Arts are built in a tree style, so before you can advance to the most powerful units, you have to unlock weaker ones.
Let’s get back to the first principle for a while, aka contacts. It’s one of the most important things in the game to make friends, otherwise everyone will raid you without consequences and you won’t have much of a success maintaining your castle. One of your first duties is to find a League of players to join. Leagues are much like guilds, so if you join one, then you will be part of a community. Making friends with these players can help you make sure that you have backup in case someone attacks you, and since the League’s tag is visible near castles on the world map, people might think twice before attacking someone who is part of a powerful one. You can also send and request caravans with resources, so you can help and be helped by your League mates.
Leagues are also important because most powerful ones control parts of the world of Stormfall: Rise of Balur. If you take a look at the world map, you can see League territories indicated by colors. Leagues with the most influence near you are probably pretty tough, so think twice before attacking them!
Of course raiding other players is not part of the plan yet when you are just getting to know the game and trying to make the best out of your castle. It will soon be one of your priorities though, but before going on a raid think about the third principle: strategic planning. Using the option to train spies and spy on units and defenses of an enemy castle can hold a lot of useful information on whether it’s a good idea to raid someone or not. You can also raid computer controlled settlements and gain resources from them.
Once you start a raid, your units will move through the map at a speed depending on travel distance, then once they reach the destination the battle instantly concludes. The battle report is your best friend in assessing the situation after each of these raids. After a successful raid you steal resources and destroy some of the targeted player’s units, but you might also experience some casualties. Dead units can be resurrected by using the premium currency of sapphires.
Stormfall: Rise of Balur has a lot of persistent players, so you might expect some retribution after attacking neighbouring castles. Enemy raids are shown as a notification before they reach you, so you can prepare accordingly. You can either set up a lot of defensive units, ancients statues and hide your most important creatures, or just leave all of them ready to fight.
The game also includes a leveling system, which gives you bonus items and currency as you level up. It also unlocks some of the Lost Arts to be ready for research. Leveling is also important as it allows you to upgrade buildings more effectively, and a high level might intimidate other players, if they see you as a powerful enemy.
The game also has a Bank and a Black Market, both of which serve mainly a sapphire related function. In the Bank you can purchase sapphire packs and unit packs by spending real money. Sapphire packs start from $4.99 for 750 pieces and go up to $49.99 for 18,000 sapphires. Unit packs are also similar in prices, ranging from $9.99 to $49.99. Most of these packs include units that are very hard to get early in the game. The Black Market also has powerful creatures and boosts for sale, if you have enough sapphires to spend.
Don’t worry though, as there is also some help to players without funds to spend on the game. These include quest rewards, as quests remain a tool to guide players even after the tutorial. They always give out resources and sometimes even units. Then there are 24 Daily Gifts, which you can redeem every 5-10 minutes depending on how good the present is. These usually contain free units or sapphires.
Stormfall: Rise of Balur includes leaderboards as well, both for individual players and for Leagues. You can see the most powerful players and Leagues who rule the game at the moment, and maybe try to make alliances with them! No matter who you choose as your ally, making friends is one of the most important parts of this strategy MMO!
There are a lot of general tips for Stormfall: Rise of Balur, but these don’t always help as much as potential cheats. Whether you would rather hear tips or cheats, I’m here to give you what you came for!
Probably one of the easiest cheats you can get is the 3 day immunity at the start of a game. This makes it so that high leveled players can’t raid you, but you can still attack anyone without immunity or near your level range. Use this to your advantage to exploit small castles and steal their resources by raiding. It’s not a nice thing to do, but can be great help in your journey to fame!
You should always be ready for any counterattack as well, especially after your immunity is over. Other players might also think the same way and try to exploit your castle for their needs. Set up ancients and train defensive units, so you can survive raids easier.
Another tip to keep in mind is travel distance, as there might be times when you need to raid a player who is far from your castle. Your units might take hours to get back home and during that time you are fully vulnerable to enemy raids. For this reason try to keep your defenses high and only send out your attacker units, or request defensive aid from one of your League mates.
If it’s not obvious yet, you should also keep doing quests anytime you can, as they provide you with much needed resources and units that you can’t get otherwise in the early game. This can place you at an advantage over players who skip the quests and go on their own. It might not be as fun to follow instructions all the time, but it pays off more, especially when they include sapphires as rewards.
As a last tip, collect your Daily Rewards is as many times you can. There are 24 gifts each day that you can redeem and some of them can even contain powerful units such as Wyverns. These impressive creatures can easily put you in front of players with only basic units. These same gifts can also contain sapphires, which you might use to unlock rare creatures like Undead Dragons at the Black Market.
I personally never played Stormfall: Rise of Balur as a browser game before, but its gameplay mechanics were familiar to me from another game called Travian. Stormfall is definitely a much darker and serious game though, with a lot of features.
If I said I was lost in the game at first, but I would be lying, as the tutorial quests are really extensive and don’t leave any space for doubt. When the quest told me to build and upgrade a Barn, I did just that. When it told me to train some Pikemen, I did it. There was no reason to differ, as each quest had a very generous amount of resources or highly useful units as rewards. As I completed all the 50 tutorial quests, I can say I got to know the game pretty well. Quests remains even after the tutorial though, which is nice, as I always had something to do because of this.
I tried out raiding both the computer controlled settlements and the player castles, carefully choosing ones that were lower level than me, so my success was guaranteed. I must say though that managing my castle was more fun than the raiding aspect. Other than spying out castles and making sure my units are more powerful, there was nothing exciting about raiding. Your units move through the map, then the battle instantly concludes without any interaction on your part. The store page of the game has pictures that suggest the game has battle animations at least, but there is nothing like that.
During the first few days of my playtime I had nobody attack me either, which was probably because I managed to join a powerful League. Players in the same League seemed to be nice and helpful, giving out advice to newcomers all the time. The chat functions are also nice, so you don’t have to manually mail each player, but can easily plan out strategies.
I also must mention the deal with sapphires, as the game tends to throw them at you as quest rewards or daily gifts. The problem is that reaching 255 sapphires in my case barely did anything, as most things are much more expensive. So you either have to spend some real money on the game to really utilize sapphires, or stay patient. The in-app purchases of various powerful units also seemed somewhat unfair to me, as they can make low level players extremely powerful from early on, if they decide to throw some money at the game.
Overall, Stormfall: Rise of Balur is a stable strategic MMO with a lot of focus on battling other players, Leagues and the possible glory of controlling the whole land. Most gameplay mechanics are fun, but raiding and the somewhat unfair in-app purchases can be somewhat disappointing. Still, if you wish to try your skills at battle planning and management of a whole castle, then you might want to give a go to the game, it’s free in 2016!
Ratings
Artwork: I give the artwork of Stormfall: Rise of Balur a 6/10. Most of the game is made up of text based menus, which I found to be pretty basic and somewhat boring to look at. The map and your castle’s interiors on the other hand are almost hand drawn and beautiful, I just wish there was more of that and less of the gray and dark red colored menus.
Music & SFX: Regarding the musical tracks and the SFX, the game gets a 7/10. The game is full of beautiful melodic songs, which are very calming to listen to. It’s a good contrast to the ongoing raids and the stress of keeping up your castle’s defenses. The SFX of unit voices and battle sounds are acceptable, although not as realistic as they could be.
Story & Originality: The story and originality of Stormfall: Rise of Balur deserves a 5/10. The story is not expressed too well and it’s hard to really know much about it if you didn’t pay attention to the herald at the beginning of the tutorial. The gameplay also doesn’t really reflect the ongoing battles with evil forces, as you mostly care about enemy players and not the supposedly evil encampments.
General Gameplay: The general gameplay gets a 6/10. While mechanics wise the game does a pretty good job, they still are not as exciting as they could be. Managing your castle is limited, but fun, while the raiding part is pretty boring, with not much interaction. It’s also somewhat disappointing how paying real money can give a huge advantage to players and how after a powerful enemy attack on your castle you can hardly recover. Joining a powerful League is the only option if you want to stay in the game for long, otherwise you will probably get destroyed after your immunity is gone.
Addictiveness: The addictiveness of the game gets a 6/10 as well. I really wish I could say the game is addicting enough, but for me personally it got repetitive pretty fast. It takes a long time to amass a great enough army and level up to take on serious raids together with your Leagues, and until then the game can get stale. If you manage to get into a powerful position on the world map though, then the game will no doubt be much more fun.
Overall Score: 6/10
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