Doom & Destiny Advanced is an absolutely brilliant RPG – managing to be both classic and highly feature-rich and original. Four heroes – “a pastafarian cleric, a wizard, a barbarian and a chef” enter a dungeon. From there there’s a lot of classic RPG-ing combined with humour, tonnes of loot and secrets to find, and a huge world with many towns to explore. There’s also an arena for local-monster or online fighting.
One of the most interesting features is that the characters can find and unlock different classes, such as Knight, Black Guard, Rogue, Bard, which can be switched between when you reach a large crystal. These classes enable different abilities. You’ll need Francis to be the Rogue if you want to spot secret passages, but he’ll need to switch to the Ranger to pass thorns damage-free. Nigel will need to be the Sorcerer to absorb a mana source (and sometimes thereby clear a path to a chest) but he’ll need to be the Wizard to use magic portals.
There are quite a few large crystals about the place, including in the inns in each town. Upgrading classes (“affinity”) is done with gems you collect, whereas upgrading/levelling characters is the usual way, with exp. So your Level 5 character might be an Affinity 4 Wizard and an Affinity 3 Sorcerer.
You also collect resources such as food, tools and alchemical equipment, which you can use to heal and also to carry out certain battle actions. The characters don’t need to eat, but food can be used as a healing potion.
The game is reasonably challenging. I found it made sense to go and grind a bit before entering the sewers to the Mage Tower. That’s recommended from Level 6, but I found it more doable at Level 8.
The game took me a little while to get into, largely because I find the controls (menu rather than movement) very sensitive on the iPhone 11. It takes a feather-light approach of careful tapping and nudging to navigate them, but you should get the hang of it after a while. There are hours and hours of gameplay here – the overland map, in a wonderful retro style – is huge. You can also travel about by boat.
Links:
Official Site
iTunes