Farming for coins and fusion: The Squad Busters’ way

However, with Squad Busters, Supercell’s first full global release since 2018’s Brawl Stars, the studio hopes for not just a successful game but an experience that will reverse the studio’s downward sliding fortunes and help it hold ground against platforms like Netflix and TikTok.fgane on

Hyderabad: Supercell’s five games have cumulatively exceeded six billion downloads in their various lifetimes and aggregate 220 million active players, numbers that tell you how successful the Finnish studio has been since the launch of 2012’s Hay Day and Clash of Clans.

However, with Squad Busters, Supercell’s first full global release since 2018’s Brawl Stars, the studio hopes for not just a successful game but an experience that will reverse the studio’s downward sliding fortunes and help it hold ground against platforms like Netflix and TikTok.

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Thus, this review comes in the midst of Supercell’s unique five-minute ads where Hollywood star power in Chris Hemsworth, Christina Ricci, Ken Jeong, Will Arnett, and Auli�i Cravalho try to convince us that Squad Busters is worth our time. Squad Busters is a 10- player multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) where you select characters from Supercell’s universe, use them to collect coins and gems to farm, and then combat other players.

Each game lasts four minutes and you beat NPC characters to collect gold coins and/or gems and then access chests scattered around the map for more characters to add to your troupe.

The game’s strengths lie in the unique abilities that each character possesses – abilities that resonate with the characters’ identities in other Supercell games – and in elements like fusion where three of the same characters merge into a single large character. The game offers incentives to take down other players and the mechanics (vines and gem mines) encourage you to go to the centre of the map for a final showdown. In non-play elements, Squad Busters rewards players for finishing games and in classic Supercell fashion you unlock chests.

The better you finish in a game the larger/rarer the chests you find, and they offer you shards to level up characters and unlock skins. However, the number of chests one can unlock is limited as players need tokens to earn them and each token takes three hours to refill.

This scarcity/time wait mechanic is both annoying and dated (from the days of Clash Royale) as it limits play time in a game where a match lasts just four minutes while also limiting progression.

For example, I have woken up after eight hours of sleep only to find I have not replenished my tokens and am empty 10 minutes later. Wait for another 10 hours, I guess. The repeat-login format is punishing and after a while seems too much of a bother. MOBAs traditionally have always been about skill, progression, strategising and marathon play sessions.

Squad Busters, though, offers neither the time nor the opportunity to master any of these elements making me wonder if this was the right kind of iteration for a mashup between the MOBA form, the live service form, and freemium gaming. Not a great experience but worth a try. It’s a Supercell game after all and is bound to be fun for a while.