As a full disclaimer, I have been an avid player of the mobile game Blood Brothers for the past seven months. I freely admit I am addicted to this free-to-install and play Arcade and Action RPG for Android and iOS phones. Players select one of eight vampire Warlords to journey through the fantasy kingdom of Arnashia to fight Galbraith the Dynast-King, his imperial forces and assorted monsters. As you do so, you can bind familiars – other characters with unique abilities, to your Warlord, allowing you to use them as allies in your quest.

The real fun of Blood Brothers is in the Pay-Per-View Battles, the Events, and the Bazaar. As you travel through Arnashia, you are occasionally summoned to battle other players. You occasionally will be summoned again for another three battles until you either lose (which resets your win streak to 0) or until you win 30 battles in a row. As you progress to 30, you get increasingly better rewards. Further, every five to eight days, there is one of four types of Events, wherein you are engage in battles in either different locales, with other players and/or with new familiars. In the Events you can earn lots of items, and new familiars. The Bazaar allows you to trade familiars with other players for familiars and/or items. You can determine the quality of your familiars very quickly through a perusal of the Bazaar.

There’s a lot to the gameplay – more than I can detail here. You’ll pick it up fairly quickly, if you download and play. So I’ll briefly discuss some of the pros and cons.

The good thing about Blood Brothers is that the developers are constantly making changes and improvements. I’ve seen a number of them over the past seven months, including:

• The ability to give your warlord up to three unique abilities derived from other characters;
• The ability to view who has recently challenged you to a Pay-Per-View Battle, the results, and the chances to immediately challenge them for revenge;
• The addition of Blood Clashes, which allow you to use ten familiars in a battle rather than five;
• The addition of new lands in Arnashia on an ongoing basis; and
• The offering of items and familiars as gifts to regular users. They also did this when the game hit nine million downloads from Google Play.

These are just a few of many changes in Blood Brothers that I’ve enjoyed. There’s also a constant influx of new familiars you’ll find yourself salivating over. The artwork is very solid – you’ll often find yourself wasting items (and/or real money) on a weak familiar simply because it looks nice. However, the animation is limited compared to many mobile games. It also requires a working data connection, and has chewed up my data plan more than once. And while the gameplay is fairly intuitive, many aspects of the interface are not. For example:

• It is not easy to access your familiar’s stats (the option is three screens below the homepage).
• Searching for familiars is fairly clunky.
• If a player has made an offer for a familiar, it’s impossible for another player to counter.
• You can only make five trades per 24 hours.
• Accessing the rewards list for the events can be fairly tedious.
• There’s no information on Perfect or Over Perfect Evolution of familiars in the game itself (you have to find that in the discussion boards).

There are enough interface issues for me to write a long bulleted list. But many of them will not be immediately apparent to you until you’ve played for a few weeks at a minimum. I will say that none of them has stopped me from playing yet.

If you review some of the discussion boards, it’s clear that some players likely cheat by opening multiple accounts, openly purchasing familiars through PayPal, and using scripts to automatically fight battles quicker than you or I could. And customer service for Blood Brothers is terrible. I have a couple of horror stories that I may include in a later post, if I care to relieve the experience.

But all in all, Blood Brothers is a fairly engrossing game. You can spend a lot of time on it  – I have. You can also spend a lot of real money on items and familiars – again, I know I have. I highly recommend Blood Brothers. Don’t be surprised though if you find that you can’t stop playing.

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