With a lot of my male gaming friends pre-occupied playing Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros I decided to take a peek in the App Store for some nice cool new app games and stumbled upon Faraway Kingdom-Dragon Raiders. Now, I’m a big fan of dragons. Well, in my fantasy novels and movies anyway ( I still have a dream of once owning a sweet little pocket dragon) so maybe that’s why I decided to give this one a try. The game isn’t available everywhere yet at this moment, it came out in the US last week, has been available much longer in Canada and was spotted in New Zealand and in Korea as far back as 2013. Seems the game has quite a history of being pulled back again, but let’s hope it’s here to stay now, and that it gets released in Europe soon too.
The first thing I noticed was how it reminded me of Tiny Tower, one of the first games I played on my iPad. Same format of building levels, this time not in adding floors but in adding dungeons to fight foes underground, even the same 8-bit sized characters, only this time they are not little employees but little warriors, mages and priests. The side-scrolling landscape that you can expand reminds me a lot of Happy Street. You try to manage your little fighters by assigning them to a dungeon where they are happiest fighting, which provides you in turn with the best profit.
Of course it happens a lot in app gaming, borrowing each other’s ideas and adding your own touches to it, not necessarily a bad thing. We have seen the blatantly copying Zynga did when they made Dream Heights with Tiny Tower in mind. But this time it’s different: a whole different perspective is added: the game is an RPG too. Choose your best team, add some help from friends and off you go slaying some more monsters. I like it, though I would have loved it even more if it had been turn based battle. As it is now all you can do is take a good look at the stats, make sure you have the best balanced team with the best equipment, and send them in. 
All the help you can give them is tapping the power ups and coins that fly about. It’s a far stretch from a real full fletched console or handheld RPG, but it’s still a very nice addition to the game, and I find I really like it. And don’t forget: this game is free, and the makers haven’t made it too difficult to play this game without spending money, at least not yet at the levels where I am. If you want to give it a try, there’s just one thing: it has a steep learning curve, and they crammed such a lot in there, that I just couldn’t keep up with all that was being taught at the beginning. But don’t worry, the game will show you the way as you go!