Let me put it bluntly, the so-called Three Kingdoms games on the market now are all based on SLG, and they are all based on card-drawing and krypton gold. It costs 648 to draw a general, and you have to draw again to raise a star. Opening a treasure chest and giving you some fragments is like charity. Playing a game is like checking in at work. You will feel anxious if you are not online. After you top up money, you will be treated like a wild monster by the boss. Disgusting, so damn disgusting.
So when I saw "Fanren Holy Three Kingdoms Shu Han Biography", a pure stand-alone chess game with a 0 fee model, I almost cried. This is the game, not the money printing machine.
This game has a standard old-school SRPG gameplay, with two parts: plot and battlefield. You play Liu Bei, starting from the poor guy selling straw sandals, recruiting troops step by step, and competing with Cao Cao and Sun Quan. The battlefield is a classic grid positioning, with restraint of arms, no fancy automatic battles, no one-click sweeps, all relying on brain calculations. At every step you take, you have to weigh the strength of the enemy and our own troops, and you have to consider the terrain and seize the advantage. This is what it feels like to be at war! It's not the kind of mindless fun where you charge up 100,000 yuan, click Auto, and watch the general mow the grass all the way.
The training of generals is also clean. There is no messy card pool to mess with you, you just collect cards steadily as the plot progresses. The Five Tiger Generals, Crouching Dragon and Phoenix Chu, these famous generals are obtained through plots and battles. Cultivating them gives you a sense of accomplishment. It feels like they are brothers who conquer the world with you, not a bunch of cold data. Treasures are also obtained by meeting conditions on the battlefield, which tests your tactical layout. You have to think about who to equip what you get. After playing this set of development, it is much more interesting than opening a blind box to pump cardiovascular and cerebrovascular packages.
What surprised me the most was the plot of this game. I originally thought it was just a chess game, but it turned out that I wrote the text seriously. In it, the historical events such as Three Visits to the Thatched Cottage, the Battle of Red Cliff, and Borrowing Arrows from a Thatched Boat are not mentioned briefly, but are described and performed in detail. When playing, you feel as immersed as reading "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms". Sometimes before fighting a key battle, the dialogue and situation analysis can really make you think about the general trend of the world at that time. These days, where can you find free games that allow you to learn some historical knowledge while playing games?
Of course, it is a fan-level work after all, and the graphics are definitely not as refined as those big-factory CGs that often produce several gigabytes, and the UI and art style are also relatively retro. But the victory lies in the depth of battlefield strategy. Once you get into the game, you don't care about it at all. I would rather play this kind of soulful pixel villain walking on the grid than play those glittering hot chicken dynamic card surfaces.
If you are also a player who has had enough of the torture of drawing cards and wants to get back the original fun of the game, I sincerely recommend that you try "Doujin Holy Three Kingdoms Shu Han Biography" next. There is no need to try for luck, no need to compare recharges, just open the game and do it. The joy of winning a tough battle with tactics is a hundred times more satisfying than withdrawing money ten times in a row. I'm crazy about this game🔥