Is visual polish enough to make Vimala Defense Warlords one of Indonesia’s best games? (review)

Vimala Defense Warlords looks great. That’s what attracted me to it in the first place. Developed by Indonesia’s MassHive Media, this strategy game is probably one of the best looking and most ambitious mobile titles to come out of Indonesia so far.

But is it a good game? Let’s find out.

Vimala Defense Warlords – we’ll call it Vimala for short – is a turn-based strategy game with two modes of play. A skirmish involves battling it out with the AI over a single map; the dungeon remains locked until you conquer four skirmish maps, or fork over slightly more than US$1. From what I can tell, the dungeon mode looks to be a more story-oriented one, with skirmish maps angled toward getting a player familiar with how the game works.

On the actual map, player and AI will take turns hiring troops, amassing armies of up to six units, and marching forth towards the enemy. Battles only happen when you invade an enemy node, or vice versa. While many strategy games have employed turn-based combat to great success, Vimala falls a little short in this respect.

Instead of allowing players to take control of all units within one turn, only one unit can be given orders per turn in battle. It’s easy to see why MassHive Media has decided to do this: a status effect, dependent on the weather in game, triggers between turns. This affects units at random. Units also replenish their mana – essential to attacks – with every turn that passes.

While this combat system lends the game a lot of depth and stretches it out, it takes things a little too far. Every battle in Vimala is incredibly long for a mobile game, and as a player, I quickly grew tired of it. It took four different sessions for me to finally conquer one skirmish map – and I’ve got four more to go before I can try dungeon mode.

Slow combat aside, you’ve still got to give MassHive Media kudos for the depth of the game. In the skirmish map, players can opt to send their hero units on quests, which, when completed, award hard-to-obtain potions that can be used later on in battle. Units can also be trained, while items can be combined to form more powerful ones.

Visually, Vimala is one of the better games to come out of Indonesia. It also sounds amazing, and from what I can tell from its credits, music and sound for the game was done by just one person!

Vimala’s characters, while sporting roughly-finished portraits, show better stylization than the usual anime-inspired or pixel-based art Indonesian developers tend towards. The game’s user interface is also well designed, and this is coming from someone really nitpicky about UI. What I find a real pity is a lack of a true storyline in the game: it seems much more focused on the battle system, and doesn’t take full advantage of the rich storyline it could have had.