SAMKOK JUNIOR (Romance of the Three Kingdoms) is a turn-based role-playing and strategy game you can play on your phone or tablet. And it’s a lot of fun, as thousands of Thais are finding now that there’s a Thai-language edition.
Officially launched here on April 28, with the characters actually speaking Thai, the game has beautiful graphics and colourful animation that consistently plays smoothly. Chinese developer Pandora Games has made versions for both iOS and Android devices.
Although the game uses characters from the classic Chinese novel “The Romance of Three Kingdoms”, the story unfolds differently. Cao Cao, Dong Zhu, Guan Yu and other well-known folks are encountered along the way, but meanwhile you’re busy pursuing various missions assigned in each chapter.
Every chapter involves seizing a city before access is granted to the next one. At first glance it all seems terribly complex, but tutorials guide you through the basic functions at every level.
Once you get the hang of it, it’s a lot of fun – to the point of becoming quite addictive. If you’re the type who demands to know precisely why you’ve suffered a setback or lost a round and you want to learn all the skills to master every situation, count on spending many enjoyable hours with Samkok.
Play starts with the creation of your main character, a fighter or team leader. By fighting your way through the missions you earn experience points and achieve new levels. The higher the level and the more characters you can recruit to fill out your team, up to six others.
The second character can be picked up at Level 2, the third at Level 3, a fourth at Level 9, a fifth at Level 16 and the sixth at Level 26. The characters are colour-coded according to class, with the orange ones the best and the green ones the least capable, though they’ve all got a role to play. Along the way you have to decide how and when to arm and protect them, while at the same time taking your turn in setting the overall strategy.
Unless you set up a human opponent, you’re “taking turns” with virtual characters, of course. When a fight breaks out, your team takes turns with the enemy team in attacking. If you have more members, you get more moves.
So you can see how strategy relies to a large part on the quality of your team members. You need both fighters and at least one “supporter” and one defence character. The supporter can use magic to heal injured squad members and the defender can call up a force that protects them. With nothing but attackers, your whole team is apt to be quickly killed off for lack of shields and medical attention.
There are also characters that can launch “special” attack moves when paired together, and the team leader’s ascent through the levels lets you recruit supporters who can boost your luck in every mission.
You have to make sure all the members rise in level too to enhance their fighting and defence capabilities. This is where you use the experience points that your soldiers and other characters earn as rewards for winning battles. You can also use gold to buy baby dragons, each one carrying up to 20,000 experience points that drive up the team members’ levels.
You earn bricks and gold from each battle or on completion of certain missions or – here’s the shortcut – buy gold with an e-payment service such as an AIS 12Call airtime card, Dtac’s Happy airtime card and TrueMoney.
Of course you can play the game for free – you don’t actually need the gold to enhance your team’s performance. There are several ways to do this without whipping out a pay-card.
For example, you can choose as your mission a hunt for a helmet, a weapon, armour and a belt for each character, and then spend your acquired bricks on upgrading the equipment. You can also hunt for special stones with which to forge your weapons and equipment, giving them higher classes.
There are two main groups of battles. In the first, you pursue a series of fighting missions in line with the story. There are also “daily” missions to complete to earn special rewards and missions that involve fighting particularly difficult enemies.
In the second group, you can take on other players to climb the rankings. You might do battle for the chance to hunt for treasures or accessories to increase your team’s performances or upgrade accessories. Or, again, you can fight the toughest opponents to earn bricks and “war signs” that can be used to buy equipment. There are also two special campaigns for seizing territory and suppressing rebels.
While all this is going on, the background music is pretty entertaining and the special effects are always fun.
Requirements
– Device: Android smartphone or tablet, iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch
– iOS: Version 7.0 or later
– Android: Version 4.0.3
This source first appeared on The Nation Life.