Tried out “D&D Arena of War” on iPad… It’s kind of a mess of a game.
At the core is an arena match very similar to Squids, which if you haven’t played it, has a mechanic which plays like a cross between angry birds and billiards. You pull back and release your character, they run over and attack the enemy character you aim them at. Additional damage can be done by hitting an enemy into a wall or a bomb (bombs are scattered on the playfield).
Ok, that’s all fine… weird match for the D&D license, but whatever. On iPad with retina display, graphics are an odd mix of high-res and low-res, with the main gameplay and powerup cards in high-res and the rest of the interface in crummy-looking low-res. Not terrible, but not polished. It lacks polish overall, some things don’t have sound effects, like “Fusion” to combine powerup cards plays a choppy animation of the cards spinning around, but no sounds other than the continuous background music. The tutorial shows you the basics but leaves most things a mystery.
Which brings up the main problem, it’s a confusing mess of things. You have potions (needed to retry missions), treasures (used to get cards), cards (equipped to use as special abilities in battle), fusion (combining cards to make them better in some abstract way), bingo (kind of like a checklist of micro-achievements to get some reward, I think), gold (to buy more stuff, and of course you buy gold with real money) and an inbox (messages to tell you to buy things, that don’t seem to want to mark as read). Actually, when I list it out like that, it sounds a lot less confusing then they manage to make it in the interface.
Overall as a game it’s kinda meh, kind of fun in a mindless way, but as an interface it somehow taking a simple concept and ends up making it as confusing as possible.
I’d say play Squids instead, it’s prettier, has more character, and has essentially the same gameplay but with bigger maps with more of a mix of combat and exploration.