by Jordyn Newsome
Many mobile games are simple shovelware cash grabs with no love or thought put behind them. They simply exist to overload your senses with advertisements or scummy business practices to get you to spend money. If you play mobile games as I do, you know how frustrating this can be. Fear not, Cookie Run: Tower of Adventures, is a diamond in all this rough.
Cookie Run: Tower of Adventures is a top-down co-op action mobile game that shines through its inferior competition. It is a mix of complex and simple that is understandable for both casual and competitive players. It’s rather F2P (free to play) friendly compared to many other live service gacha games, which means you won’t have to dry out your wallet to have fun playing. While the game isn’t perfect, it’s definitely something I’d recommend.
To start with the positives: the gameplay. There are three classes a character can be a part of, these being fighter, support, and tagger. Fighters are the main damage dealers, and while they have a few sub-categories, the most important part is if they do ranged or close-up damage. Both are capable of doing good damage, so it all depends on which playstyle you enjoy more. Taggers power up attackers by placing spells on enemies that place a bar on them; if you attack the enemy enough to fill up the bar, it causes a burst of damage to shred the enemies HP. This works especially well if the tagger and the fighter share the same element. Support characters are just what they sound like; they support your team. They do this by either healing or buffing the stats of their allies. They do the least amount of damage (with some exceptions, as Crushed Pepper Cookie is rather proficient when it comes to damage) but they are especially good in story mode, where you’ll need healing for difficult bosses.
Speaking of story modes, Tower of Adventures is filled with different and varying game modes. Story mode lets you play through the story mode of the game, where you go through different floors of the elusive pancake tower and meet new cookies along the way. Each floor has a wildly different theme, which means with each new world, you’re getting a new experience, with new enemies and different mechanics. Raid is a game mode where you fight bosses from the story mode with varying difficulty with three other players. There are four different skill sections, so no matter what point you’re at in the game, you’ll have a place to play the game.
Champions raid is much more geared towards experienced players; it has a high skill requirement, and you need five other players to play it. It focuses around doing as much damage to a certain boss as possible, which means it favors fighters and taggers specifically. Seasoning dungeons simple enemy spam that help you get certain materials, such as EXP potions, coins, or ascensionists. Tower rift is much of the same, except it helps you obtain gear. You can play all of these modes by yourself or with a friend, including Raid and Champions Raid. If you don’t have friends to play with, you can simply pair up with randoms around the world.
The art style of the game is definitely special. Since all the characters are cookies, it allows them to stand out from other similar games where the characters tend to be humans with rather boring designs. While the cookies usually are modeled around flavors, they also diverge out of that, with cookies such as Werewolf Cookie and Rockstar Cookie. This also affects the environments they’re in, as they tend to be modeled around sweets or different foods. It makes the game much more visually appealing than others of its nature.
This game is not perfect, however. It is in part a gacha game, which means it has gambling aspects. This is, rightfully, something that turns some players off. Though, the game has pretty fair rates, with a 17% chance to get an epic cookie, which is better than some other gacha games. It also has a season pass (called a tower pass) and while you can get good rewards from it without paying money, the game does show you the things you’re missing out on by not spending money as a way to goad you into buying the pass.
Cookie Run: Tower of Adventures can also be difficult to get certain materials such as super epic gear and superb equipment fragments, which are valuable and are needed to be efficient in certain game modes. As of the newest update, due to player feedback these materials are not as rare and can be mor easily obtained, but it’s no walk in the park. While these do not kill the game by any means, it’s something to keep in mind when deciding if the game is for you.
Overall, Cookie Run: Tower of Adventures is a very promising game, and one I would recommend if the gameplay, art style, and other aspects listed in this article seems appealing to you. While it is not without its flaws, it overcomes them to be a fun and worthwhile game, and it is much higher quality than most of its mobile competition.
