Axie Infinity: Pokemon on the Blockchain?

Recently, we had the chance to test the beta version of Axie Infinity, and it was an amazing experience!! The concept of the game is very simple: buy small creatures called Axies, train them and send them as a team in the arena to fight an opponent.

For those who want to know more about the concept, here is a very good summary of the game, and the Whitepaper.

Just follow the tutorial described here to test the beta version too.

[This is not a NonFungible.com sponsored article and has been objectively written by someone who is not a member of the Axie Infinity team]

Gameplay

What is extremely pleasant is that the game manages the different levels of involvement of a player perfectly.

If you do not have much time to devote to your little creatures or their training, no problem, you buy it at a good level, and send it directly into the arena! In this case, you do not have to be an advanced user to understand the logic and get into the game.

If you are a little more patient, the game immediately takes another dimension!

You will have hundreds of factors to take into account to optimize your battles and to be victorious in all the arenas.

The characteristics of your Axies:

• Experience
• Health Point
• Speed
• Skill
• Morale

Their special attacks : You’ll have to think about the combination of several special attacks, and how you can counter-balance characteristics with special attacks.

The constitution of your team : Each team is composed of 3 Axies, so it creates an incredible amount of possibilities when you own several Axies.

What we appreciated

Like almost every game, the only way to measure the fun, is to play! We did, and in Axie Inifinity we experienced the deeply addictive aspects that we all discovered in games such as Pokemon or Digimon.

At first sight, we note two main differences between Axie Infinity and these games:

• The number of creatures and possible variants are almost endless, unlike a game like Pokemon, where it was very likely to cross the same creatures regularly
• The game runs on the Ethereum Blockchain: which enable much wider development possibilities, and a possible interconnection with other applications and games thanks to the non-fungible, ERC-721 standard.

Axie Infinity’s team also paid special attention to story telling and building a rich and consistent universe around their creatures. This universe is described in the encyclopedia that we recommend you to read if you want to dive deeper in their universe.

NFT Gaming is still a very young field, and we were pleasantly surprised to discover that the project is already extremely advanced, it has a rich graphical universe, the sound design is neat, and we never felt like we were playing an experimental game.

Some final adjustments

First of all, we have to specify that we had the opportunity to test the beta version of the application! It is a safe bet that the points we have identified here are corrected or improved for the public launch.

• We regretted not being able to watch live arena fights and shudder as our creatures fight for victory. It is however possible to look at the fight after, to understand the outcome of the fight.
• To date, Axie Infinity uses MetaMask to interact with the blockchain, which involves going through MetaMask pop-ups validations for each action (team formation and a complete battle are considered 1 action each). Although this point can not be put on the account of Axie Infinity, these numerous validations harm the overall user experience (the UX is very fluid outside of that). Jihoz has notified us that Axie Infinity recognizes the barriers with MetaMask and they are actively working towards a solution to these barriers!

Our global feeling

We had a warm welcome on our first connection on their Discord, several members came to offer us help or information to discover the game.

Although it is still a beta version, the experience of the game went very well. Even if we are not regular players of this type of game, we understood the logic of the game and started to adjust our strategies very quickly.

In summary: We got hooked on the game immediately.

We wish the Axie Infinity team great success and congratulations for the work already done!

Learn more about Axie Infinity

• Discuss with the team on Discord
• Subscribe to their Medium account