Final Fantasy XV: A New Empire Reviews

I have been playing this game for over a year. It has been very fun building my empire and connect with people within my realm and others. There are a lot of good people in the game, but to every great thing there comes a bad.

Over the last few months of playing, the developers have royally screwed the game up. They started giving things to people for free and not to others and then taking away items that have been purchased without any form of compensation. We had a couple of guild members stuck in another realm where they couldn’t get back for over a week and therefore missed out on several prizes for several events while the developers kept telling them that our realm had merged with the one she was stuck in. (We had no merge. This was obvious by the fact that nobody else was in that realm from ours.) They post BOGO packs where you buy one pack at full price and the second pack is half off with less than half of the items in it. (They won’t do anything about that either.) There have been several times with multiple players reporting issues and the customer support replies with some copy and paste statement that says “it is working as designed”. It doesn’t seem that the customer support nor the developers really care about the stuff that goes wrong in the game. If they could get their heads out the ground and actually care about customer service and player concerns this game would actually be a great game again.

So being an FF fan I had to play this. Since it was a fresh game, it offered and once in a lifetime deal for $5. Played a little more, found interested players, so still on. I've never played MS or GoW but everyone in the game says it's the same. Because I don't play these games the experience is new and fun, but I can see how this can get old fast. Already having issues building because of bullies. Most players are cool. But there are a lot who are not. The main things tho, this game has very little to do with FF. Besides the Main character and the 5 Chocobos and 3 baby Chocobos that run around on your farm, there is nothing else related to FF. So kind of a double whammy there, little to do with FF and quick repetitiveness. If I didn't spend that $5 I probably would not still be playing...Oh well, just a little longer till it gets really boring I guess.

UPDATE: I hate this game and the P2W players in it! After playing since the start, this game is extremely P2W! You get a couple people who spends a thousand on the game and that's it. They run the entire Realm. You can try to rally, but they will always just throw more cash at it during fights and that's it. There's no way to win, making the game utterly pointless as soon as they started playing. Plus getting merged ruined our Clan, we went from #9 to #50 overnight, without so much as a warning it was coming. Bottom line: if it's not made by SquareSoft, it's not really Final Fantasy!

This game is very fun and interesting to play, but it seems like only the players that are able to spend $200-$300 per month are able to level up. You should not spend any money at all when you’re playing this game, because as soon as you buy any kind of material slowly clear up, another player that has spent more money than you will steal them all.

If there were two sets of worlds, one for people who pay to play and another for people who are just playing for fun, it might be more fair. I played for three months and spent weeks saving up materials to build. Everything gets wiped out overnight as soon as you hit a level 20. Luckily I’ve only spent $4.99. I would play this game if it didn’t cost so much, but I am only playing for fun so it really isn’t worth it to do this.

Another part that would make this game more fun to play or at least allow lower level people to grow, is prevents people from high levels from attacking people who are a fraction of their level. Level fives can be attacked by people that are level 60. It seems very difficult to level up, because people then playing longer than you take all of your materials. Also within a matter of minutes, the same player can hit you 10 to 20 times. There should be a limit that the same player can only hit you maybe three times in a 24 hour period. Otherwise you take a break for 10 minutes, and the same player has hit you 20 times.

Compared to base games like clash of queens and clash of clans , this game is literally trash. They give you one advanced teleport and a few name changers at the beginning and they leave you literally on your own. Resources are hard to come by at the beginning it seems you have to be mining for your life. The tax rate for your allies to send you resources is so high that you can't even get help from them or you both would be losing. Tax rates for sending resources starts from 50% and that's an utter disaster. Map Is confusing, you can teleport out of a hoard of noobs to only have more noobs teleporting around you, it's literally a disaster. You can't get anywhere in this game without investing money in it. You can't even view the strongest players or guild because they don't even have a ranking system and board as yet. I understand this game is fairly new but with this type of marketing they're doing you have to at least come a little clutch or lit before marketing like that. You're marketing is at 95% and then the product is at 10%. It actually feels like we are the beta testers. I've seen many games start out a little bad but this is the worst I've seen. The sad part is you guys don't even have a support button where you can take feedback from the players who know a thing or two about these type of games. Anyways I don't mind playing but come on. Handle your stuff guys. Could be a great game you guys gotta plan out the stuff a bit better and you'll be fine.

This game has a pretty simple set up. Build up buildings. Research different areas to increase all around stats. Hunt people or monsters. Join guilds and help each other out. Simple enough. Once you have this down, things can change quickly with a little money. This game allows you to increase buildings, build defenses, or research to better yourself, but at the cost of resources and real time. You can lower these by spending real money and purchasing “packs” that lower things by a specific percent. Unfortunately, eventhough you can reach 100%, it doesn’t actually give you it for free.
An example would be if a building requires 24 hours to build, at 100%, it will still take around 7 hours to build. At which point you can purchase speed ups, to finish off this 7 hours.
There are people who have spent well over $10,000 into this game, so unless you have the money, you will never catch up. I have spent $25 into this and am stuck at level 41 unless I buy packs that have what I need to continue upgrading.
Packs- 1st pack $5. 2nd pack $20. 3rd pack and beyond are $99. They will have random ones pop up for $50 and $80, but they are random.
My recommendation is to play the game to understand how it works, and if you do plan on spending money, buy someone’s account. There are plenty for sale that already have what you need and are high enough in level to prevent you from waiting to much to still lose, but feel like you can catch up.

I started playing this game thinking it wasn't that bad. Building my empire was going smoothly, I found a nice guild to call home, and my power was going up at a decent pace. Soon after I realized that the only way to get anywhere in this game is to spend money. The time you need to wait for buildings to finish, troops to train, as well as time to research all increase exponentially. So unless your willing to spend money you'll be idleing for days or weeks.

Also at some point during your time in this game someone in your realm, who probably spent hundreds if not thousands on this game, will continuously attack you and probably take on your entire guild. If you complain the devs will probably tell you that they know it's frustrating to continually be attacked my a stronger player and that there are strategies to beat even the strongest player. That strategy is to spend more money than the other. It takes 6-10 people at level 35+ to beat a single level 32. Most of the lower level people in my guild have quit playing because it's impossible to take on a single person that high if he keeps spending money to rebuild while getting attacked. The player that are stronger than can't fight back either unless they group together and keep attacking for hours to see who has the deeper pockets.

So, all in all, unless it have to money to make yourself strong enough to not be bullied or harassed I do not recommend playing this game

ETA: I’ve seen mention of VIP levels that will become available “soon” beyond the ten currently available. I still feel scammed since these only exist on one server, it seems, and the official site only lists the ten VIP I’m at now. Don’t advertise a pack on servers that can’t use it, that’s just bad business. I have no problem dropping some cash on a cell phone game I enjoy, so when I first saw the reviews about this costing money to play I shrugged it off. However, the first packs I bought were designed to let me bring up my VIP level quickly, as I wanted the perks. Max VIP level costs 2,000,000 points, it turns out. After buying that pack I have 88 items worth 1,000,000 VIP points each sitting in my inventory that I can’t use even to unlock VIP time because using two of them put me at max VIP level. They’ll sell you a pack that looks like a good deal but is garbage because you don’t need anywhere near all the items before you reach max and then there’s nothing you can do with them anymore. I made it to a citadel level 12 before I started getting hit by the bullies that have power levels in the millions compared to my 60k at the time. No wonder there are so many seeming abandoned low level structures. This game is a joke. I spent $60 on it and I’m strongly considering trying a charge back through PayPal since they sold me a bunch of items I actually can’t even use in obvious false advertisement that I needed all this to max out VIP.

I’ve played this game since the beginning, loved it and supported it by buying the packs, but the longer i play the more disappointed i get. It’s a pretty much buy to play game, which I’ve known that from the beginning, but what you buy and thought was special, turns into a joke the next day or week. The things you work so hard for and bought is instantly gone the next moment with some ridiculous updates. Level 85 empire, you’d though your defenses were great with lots of mercenary guardians, millions of troops, high level heroes and lifetime boosts bought to defend your empire, but just from one hit, everything is gone. What is the point of me buying and playing if everything is lost in one hit. Makes me think it’s all a scam. The defenses and offenses in this game is so out of proportion, it hards to keep up. The only thing that i enjoyed all together was the chat functions, meeting new people and working together on events. The customer support initially were good, but then as the game progresses it has been a let down. Seem to be automated responds and no help in whatsoever. Sadly this will be my last time playing this game. So disappointed with it that I’ve given my account away. Forget about all the money I’ve spent for it to enjoy the game, it’s just not worth it anymore.

Never again will I ever play a game released by this company. While there are some great aspects to this game (great people you get to know being top of the list), the negatives just outweigh all the good. My guildmates and I have decided to move our entire guild to another game by another developer because we like each other but have lost all interest in playing this game. The devs have set you up for failure if you are not independently wealthy. I know many people who have spent thousands (yes thousands) of dollars on game packs only to have their empires still fall behind when the devs pull an “oops” and release unlimited resources to a few select players and not to the general player population. Today a select few players received so many free items (yep free. No request for said items. No pack purchased.) they were able to skyrocket their power and become completely unstoppable, creating the biggest gameplay disadvantage I have ever seen. The devs refuse to respond to most messages and give canned auto responses 90% of the time they do bother to respond. The few who did receive a response to today’s latest incident were basically told. “Whoopsie! Didn’t mean to send out all that stuff. Sorry but not really going to do anything to make it better.” If you have unlimited resources to invest (both time & money) then this is the game for you. If not, look elsewhere. This game is a class action lawsuit waiting to happen.

I Actually really love and respect this Game but it’s not fun anymore like it used to be their should be a way where you can block a player and they can’t find or find your empire anymore ! For the past month and a half I have been getting CONSTANTLY HARASSED and Bullied by a very powerful player and the thing that’s not making it fun or appreciate is that I’m level 21 and he’s level 40 and he’s always attacking and stealing my hero taking my food stone & resources it’s very disappointing and discouraging because I pay not as much as this guy does but I’ll put 5 dollars up here and there and I’m not even able to enjoy my own resources because this guy is taking them and stealing them all up before I get to use it ! Would love your input advice or help if you guys have anything against a powerful empire only picking on little empire constantly! I have been severely bullied in high school and he’s bringing me back to that same headspace I know bullying and this is definitely it and I’ve talked to my guild about it their saying be strategic and build up my empire I’m trying but it doesn’t do anything with him attacking me I’ve sent him & his guild messages asking him to please stop and no one seems to mind and keep telling me this is a war game I totally understand that and that’s the reason I joined but he’s taking it to another level of harassment.

It was fun until I hit citadel level 10 or 11... suddenly people starting attacking me with level 4+ troops (you only have level 1 at my level), heroes at least 10 levels higher, and troop numbers 10x mine. I messaged one such person and said - is this how this works? You just crush people far weaker? Is that fun? The response was pretty typical... so I deleted the game. Could be fun, but really needs a matching system to make it so. Otherwise you get high enough to draw notice, then get stomped by losers who find easy battles amusing.

That aside, the game would get 3 stars. It’s pretty involved and fun, if you like city building and tech advance mechanics. They have a pretty generous amount of speed-ups, in my experience, and it was just really getting interesting when I apparently got a target pasted on my city. What knocks it from 4 stars down to three in gameplay would be the heavy purchase pushing. Heavy, heavy pushing of in-app purchases. Like every time you launch the game there’s a splash screen for some $5 offer or other with a forced delay before being able to close it, and the whole time you play there’s a banner ad to buy gold. I understand these things take money to maintain, and I’ve spent accordingly on games I enjoy, but this was over-the-top, in-your-face pushing that detracted from gameplay and cost it a star.

The reason I rated this game so low is the cost of play. Sure you can get to level 15 without to much of a slow pace but from there on out it takes a lot of time or money to build a better empire and by a lot I mean $$$$. It starts low on cost oooh a $5 pack, once purchased those cheap little packs disappear and are replaced by $20. Ok, not great but you can swing that. Then those packs are nowhere to be seen once you purchase one. Then the packs increase again and again up to the final cost of $100 for a pack and trust me you will need them just for the ability to speed your knowledge and build which can once you get to a level 22+ can take not just days but weeks and even months to progress. And you will get stomped all over by those that have deep pockets and have no problem dropping a grand or more to be the best. Some areas of progress in the game require two to three $100 packs to get a select building in your empire to its top level. If you can’t at least drop $500 don’t even down load you will get extremely frustrated spend what you can on it then quit. The realms are a veritable wasteland of abandoned empires of frustrated players. So is the game free? Only the download!!!

It could be really great. It COULD be really fun. Instead, you get “support” that just doesn’t care about anything wrong with the game or the fact that it’s really nothing more than a great breeding ground for online bullying, which they don’t do anything about. It started out with at least the ability to use some strategy to be able to push forward then the developers decided to see how badly they could screw it up. Now it has become nothing more than a spending money contest. The funny thing is that those who spend ridiculous amounts of money can’t even hurt each other so all they do is make sure that smaller players who don’t blow hundreds of dollars a week on a game can’t even play or enjoy the game. It’s seriously a joke, and not even a funny one at that. I have had to watch hundreds of good people quit playing a game they used to enjoy because it’s no longer a game. There is no strategy that can help you, other than spending hundreds of dollars a week. It’s really sad and pathetic that these developers think they’re doing a good job, and even more sad that iTunes even allows a “game” like this to stay in FinalFantasyXV store.

Save yourself a lot of wasted time and headache and find a different game to play. One that is actually a game and not just a scam to Line MZ’s pockets.

I would have given negative stars if the rating system allowed me.

As many of the other reviews state, this game encourages bottomless spending. You must join a guild to pass level 5 with your empire (you can leave again, but you will find others smooth the way a great deal). The game is geared to make it almost impossible to get by with a single account/empire. The initial players had to have waited years or paid hundreds of dollars trying to gain the resources to level skills (and the speed ups to hurry along the timers associated with building and researching). Monster Tactics 4 research was 64+ days and millions upon millions of resources. Without purchased speed ups and looted speed ups, the research would be ongoing still. Such is much of their tactics. Their math works oddly - a 50% off boost isn’t really 50% off (working as intended, not as advertised), so beware what you purchase or craft, and their bundles/packages are determinedly obscure in their descriptions of certain items, leaving you to guess or assume at their meaning. But, like so many games, the hope that the devs will hear and listen to the outcry instead of the cha-ching, has yet to happen. It can be fun. Just don’t expect that money grubbing aspect not to edge in sometime and spoil your view. Or the totally weird math if you can add, multiply, divide, or subtract, and have anyone else’s account to compare your numbers to.

This game has a lot of potential, but the developers are definitely in it for ALL the money. They gift you item unlocks, but then you have to spend real money for the item to do anything/upgrade. Resource and research/building requirements are on an hundreds of millions scale, sometimes venturing into the billions. After you reach about level 15, after they’ve suckered you in, thinking everything you need was available for free somewhere throughout the map, it becomes a world for the pay to players. And now that I have idiotically sunk hundreds of real, hard earned money into this game, they think they can get away with false advertising. They offer their packs (that *only* sell for 100$, and usually only offer one or 2 items of real consequence), then leave off items, and hope you don’t catch it. When confronted with screenshots or evidence that the item is missing, they claim there is nothing they can do, and cannot complete a refund because the package was delivered. I do not recommend this game unless you have A LOT of money to burn, and even then, I wish you wouldn’t just so they don’t get to keep raking in money they aren’t earning, but stealing... I would hope they’d see this and at least feel bad, but they don’t care, and it’s obvious by their shoddy, unorganized, non-functioning events and event items, among other things..
Yours Truly, Empire Leader, LisaPetey

The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. Dev responses to tickets do not reflect blog posts. Devs do not listen to players requests and concerns. They continue to show that their only concern is for a players wallet. AppLovin was supposed to be an improvement when they acquired game however it’s just more of the same crap just from a new company. It’s the people playing the game that keep me coming back, but I refuse to spend another cent on game until major changes occur. Including improved customer service, and truly displaying they hear the customers concerns. They recently created a player discord channel for select players to help with feedback however without consideration of the many playing styles available from paying to free play once again greed wins and the representation is for paying players. Once again free to play and mid level spenders are neglected. The devs have made it clear mid to low end and free players are the ugly red headed step children of game and only the golden child(aka big spenders) get a voice. So if you wanna a game where you can advance and have fun with the actual game part then this game is not for you. If you wanna play a game where you experience getting screwed by people who view you as less important than your wallet then this is the game for you.

The game is really fun and engaging at first. Then you get to a wall where progressing is extremely difficult and will literally take a year but wait! There is a $5 purchase that will take you to the next level! This is the early sign of how pay to win this game is. There is next to no strategy or competition if you play against another player who is spending money constantly. There are a lot of games that people say are pay to win but I assure you they have not yet played this game.

To top it all of the developers will change game mechanics of certain troops after you have purchased a pack and they will do so without alerting anyone of game changes. This game has some of the worst tutorials or explanation I have seen in any game. After the first minor tutorial you are completely on your own to figure out how everything works. This can be fun as it’s like a puzzle. Only issue is as stated above the developers will change the mechanics of troops without any type of notification leaving you frustrated having wasted your precious resources on these useless troops. If you bring this to the developers attention don’t anticipate any type of help or explanation. They will basically tell you to screw off.

To summarize this is the biggest pay to win game on the market with the greediest and least helpful developer support you will encounter

I love the people that play this game. Friendships have been fostered because of this game. I detest the way the developers made a great game that the only way you can “win” is to pay ridiculous sums of money. It’s disheartening. They’ve actually created a world that throws aside all the wonderful ness that the FF franchise has created and makes you bow to the almighty dollar. Players that spend ridiculous amounts are trapped in a realm where lower level players are and they have no choice but to attack people several (million) power levels less than them just to play and not be in FarmVille. I get tired of the “relax, it’s a war game mentality”. I’m a power player and even I can see the bullying that goes on in this game. It’s ridiculous. I’ve even had the “pleasure” of being told by some of these power players to sext them or burn. Well I can block their messages but I cannot escape their ganging up on me to destroy me. I just have to take the video game “gang bang” then rebuild with the help of my guild. Some people might wonder why I’m still playing after these comments. The truth is my guild is the only reason. I won’t leave them to burn or be harassed alone. I am a strong person IRL. A game will not break me. Hopefully the developers will actually start looking into the NUMEROUS emails they get about bullying and sexual harassment. I personally doubt it, but one can still hope.

This game is atrocious and the devs are the worst kind of people. Please heed the immense 1 star reviews and stay away from this game! Reading some of the 5 star reviews, I'm positive fake reviews are being posted because there is no way anyone who plays this game wouldnt call it a pay to play. You can't open the game without constant ads about "sales" where the package is 99 dollars. Do you know another game where the base price is 99 dollars? These people are criminals. How this game can possibly rate 4.2 is beyond me with all the one star reviews. It's shady at best. You start out in a new realm and quickly realize who the big spenders are because they already have 1 mil power and are terrorizing everyone. Then they merge your realm into an older one where there's huge fish in the pond and now there's nothing for you to do but roll over and die because if you happen to be smart and realize the game isn't worth 99 dollars let alone 10,000 dollars, you won't spend more than the 20 dollar deal they gave you after the 5 dollar deal. You'll hope they let the price come down again so you can try and compete but they won't, because it's not about the game, it's purely about the money. The big spenders rest on the delusion that their money had somehow made them important, completely unaware that they have been conned. It's sickening.

Do they have zero star rating? This game has a lot of great qualities to it and it’s really hard to mess up something so popular But the developers have managed to do it... I am in a dying realm, Many players have spent thousands of dollars I myself have spent over $1000 on this game and all the developers can do is push more packs down our throat while not giving us a decent event in over a month! the last realm boss event Nobody received their prizes. They had advertised a monster slayer title for the winner I myself spent money and finished 10th in the event to receive nothing, And I know the winner of the event was very upset and emailed, pretty much the whole realm emailed, Their response comical... that they didn’t offer A title for the realm boss event and that we should be getting prizes shortly that was two weeks ago I have emailed multiple times since then to no response.... Since then most of the serious paying players Have realized that this game does not care about players and what they have spent only about selling another pack...a lot of players have quit and I’m just hoping for a merge so maybe I can sell my account for pennies on the dollar. I couldn’t even sell my account if I tried this realm is dying Its Friday night and they don’t even have an event running but they are pushing a new pack for $100