Road to Valor: Empires Review – A Stop Gap Release?

Editorial Disclaimer: Krafton India gave an early access APK file to IGN India for the Road to Valor: Empires review.

Krafton has just launched its latest smartphone game, Road to Valor: Empires in the Indian market. This free-to-play Player vs Player Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game ventures in a different direction than the past games from Krafton. However, arcade-like RTS games are not something out of the ordinary for smartphone games in the market. Some of the most popular games in this list include Clash of Clans, Plague Inc, Company of Heroes, Rome: Total War and Clash Royale.

Road to Valor: Empires is now available to download and play both on Android and iOS platforms. It is also worth noting that this isn’t a new game on the market. It first launched across the globe in 2022. The current release brings the game to the Indian market with localization support including Hindi-language user interface. Here is our complete review for the Road to Valor: Empires.

Gameplay mechanics of Road to Valor: Empires

Before we talk about the different aspects of the game including gameplay mechanics, story, and progression system, let me familiarize you with the game. Players command “Guardians” along with armies of their choice to compete against other players in Road to Valor: Empires. They have a larger variety of unit types across multiple civilizations to make the perfect army of their choice.

The hero-units called “Guardians” lead the “eight-unit” army to win the game. Players have the choice to select one guardian from a list of 12 and 8 units from “more than 60” (86 units, buildings, and abilities to be exact at the time of writing) across four factions (Civilizations as per Age of Empires terms). The list of civilizations includes Roman, Persian, Norman, and Japanese. Each civilization offers a choice between three Guardians. The starting choice of Guardians includes Caesar, Cyrus, Beowulf, and Hanzo.

Guardians in Road to Valor: Empires

Looking at the Guardians closely, each comes with one passive skill that applies to all the units in the army and two active skills. Active skills are more like abilities that the player can use in battle to give themselves a competitive edge. However, they need to wait for the “Skill meter” to charge before they can use any of the two available skills. Once the Skill meter depletes, you need to wait for some time to earn the required skill meter. Here are all the choices with the corresponding active skills:

1. Roman: Caesar (Catapult Launch, Heroic Presence), Hades (Definite Strike, Hellfire), and Athena (Goddess’s Protection, Incarnation).
2. Persian: Cyrus (Reassemble, Royal War Elephants), Angra (Death, Decadence), and Spenta (Holy Blessing, Reincarnation).
3. Norman: Beowulf (Viking Mead, Hero’s Saga), Loki (Imitate, Memory Regeneration), and Odin (Gungnir, Ragnarok).
4. Japanese: Hanzo (Phantom Clone, The Infiltrator), Susanoo (Kusanagi no Tsurugi, Breath of Orochi), and Amaterasu (Wind of Abundance, Dance of the Sun).

Army units and combat system

The four factions include elements from the corresponding civilizations. This includes the type of army, mythical creatures, buildings, siege units, attacks that cause splash damage, and more. Players can mix and match the Guardians, the army units and more to create the strategy deck (loadouts) of their choice.

Road to Valor: Empires features an interesting, two-tier combat system to keep things engaging. Broadly the Infantry units can take over the Spearmen while the Spearmen can take on the Cavalry. Players can use Cavalry to take on the Infantry units like Melee, Shields, and Ranged. Among the Infantry units, the Shields can take on the Ranged units, while players can use Ranged to take on Melee and Melee to fight the Shields.

The game also has a mechanic around the number of troops as part of a single unit. The brief version of this mechanic is a small number of troops in a unit are vulnerable to a single attack and strong against ranged attack. On the other hand, several troops in a single unit are vulnerable against area attacks (with splash damage) while strong when fighting units with single attacks. Each of the more than 60 units has their corresponding strengths and weaknesses and the game classifies them between Common, Rare, Elite, Mythic, and Epic.

In-game functionality and UI

Road to Valor: Empires offers players five tabs on launch including “Shop”, “Garrison”, “Battle”, “Social”, and “Challenge”. Shop is easier to explain as it allows players to buy the “Empire Pass”, different “Chests” (loot box mechanic), Daily Deals, in-game equipment crafting, and more. It also allows players to purchase Gems and Gold to buy Chests. Chests allow players to unlock newer army units, equipment, earn other Chests, and upgrade existing units and equipment.

“Garrison” is where you manage your Army loadouts including the ability to choose and upgrade different units and Guardians. While selecting the “Battle units”, players can check all the details of the units they are selecting including attack damage, HP, deployment area, speed of the movement and attack, passive abilities, strengths, and weaknesses. One can also equip their units with all the equipment they have crafted or purchased.

“Battle” tab is where the players compete against other Road to Valor: Empires gamers for Rank Points. During the battle, both sides have same number of buildings (2 guard towers and 1 Head Quarter (HQ)). Each battle is 3 minutes long with a 2-minute-long overtime in case both sides have destroyed the same number of guard towers. During overtime, the side that destroys one more building wins the game. One can also reduce their effort by directly targeting the HQ and destroying it. If no side can destroy one more building during the extra time, the match is drawn.

Players compete against each other to earn Rank Points. The more Rank Points, the higher your rank and ability to unlock different “Battlefields” (maps), army units, Rank point-rewards and unlock other aspects of the game. However, the actual layout of the Battlefields remains identical including placement of the defense towers and the main HQ. This tab also allows you to conduct “friendly battle”, “2 vs 2”, or “custom” matches. I was not able to test the robustness of the “Social” or battle your friends feature. Players can also earn different achievements”, check “Inbox”, tweak the game settings, get daily attendance rewards, check “rankings”, “battle logs”, and more.

The “Social” tab allows players to add their friends in the game or create (or join) “Alliances” to earn Chest unlock keys. “Challenge” tab is more like an endless trial mode that only unlocks after you reach Battlefield 4 (More than 1200 Rank points). Once unlocked, it offers players a “Guardian’s Trial” challenge to win rewards. Road to Valor: Empires has added an attempt limit on these Challenges.

Progression, upgrades, and story

At the starting stages of Road to Valor: Empires game, things are quite easy, and you can quickly make your way to unlock Battlefield 2 and 3. The game feels a bit repetitive, but it does not take that much time to progress upwards. However, once you reach 1000 Rank Points, things start getting challenging with tougher opponents. It is likely that the level of difficulty scaling may increase early on as I was likely competing against bots during my time reviewing the game.

Once you reach the challenging stage, things become far more interesting and exciting as you need to invest yourself to select your “Battle Units” while upgrading them carefully. You also need to be clever and timely with the use of the Active Skills of your Guardian as battles get close and challenging. The only way to make things easier is upgrading your units, Guardians, and craft equipment. Like any other smartphone game, things tend to seem a bit grindy where a rising difficulty level makes the RTS title fun.

I didn’t find much of a story around the game during my 10 days with the game. The only motivation I figured was to unlock, find, and upgrade my army to fight the rivals. The only semblance of a story is so called “Battlefields” across different factions that don’t offer much variety in terms of the map. Once you cross Battlefield 7, you enter the Champion’s League followed by Divine League. To keep things fair and balanced for new players, Road to Valor: Empires features League Seasons which reset your Rank points at the end. On the story front, it would have been great if the game featured some sort of voice acting or static cut scenes to tie together these different Battlefields with a cohesive story.

Music, Graphics, and design

Though Krafton claims that the game features “stunning graphics” with “realistic” battles. It falls short in both these departments when compared with other PvP RTS smartphone games in the market. Beyond the impressive detail and variety in the number of army units, there isn’t enough dynamism as a proper Age of Empires or Clash of Clans-like RTS game would have.

The lack of proper dynamism in approaching the enemy or maps makes it difficult to judge the design element of the game besides the number of units and the gameplay mechanic. The developer has done a decent job adding as much content as possible to keep fans busy. Overall, Road to Valor: Empires appears more identical to chess with the amount of strategy and timing involved than most recent RTS games. Finally, there is not much to write about the music as it does an okay job.