Speak from the heart. In the past two years, the poor status quo of "sending one to invert one" in the second-game market has become very clear to all readers. Therefore, when the new game "Endless Dreams" of Kuaishou's self-developed label "Finger Universe" was initially announced to open its first external test, it seemed that the skin of the second game did not arouse my interest - the new game in the summer vacation file is still too much to play, so why spend time gambling on this luck?
But not long after the test started, some positive peers kept sending optimistic signals from the front line, which gradually made me waver. "The most comfortable mobile game in the first half of the year", "probably the best domestic meat pigeon"...... All kinds of praise are full of praise. Seeing that the game's TapTap user rating has soared to 9.2 and the players' "tap water" is getting more and more turbulent, I finally couldn't hold back and decided to download the game to find out.
After personal experience, I concluded that these seemingly "rainbow fart" feedback from the outside world are actually not too exaggerated. As one of the "pioneer" products of Kuaishou's self-developed game label "Snap Finger Universe", "Endless Dreams", which is still in the testing stage, has already shown the potential that many popular products should have: quality - the appearance and feel are already good; Distinctive - the core differentiated experience of "volume play" can stand; Most importantly, this is an "ambitious" product.
As the name of this test "Meat Pigeon Evolution Experiment" suggests, this game chooses Roguelite as the core gameplay of its own characteristics, but the R&D team is not satisfied with tuning on the basis of the meat pigeon experience of existing products, but directly calls the entire track, not only challenging the multi-terminal research and development of PC mobile games, but also bringing a "super evolution" to the entire meat pigeon category.
In the official test preview video, the game producer "Bobo", who has a doctorate in biology, appeared as a cartoon image of a "mad scientist", and put forward a rather brain-inspiring "scientific research" research and development idea to players: take out the rigorous attitude of biochemical experiments, and by constantly adding new variables, let the game engrave "fun" into its DNA in continuous self-iteration, and finally achieve the ultimate goal of creating an "action meat pigeon that sweeps 1.4 billion dreams". Judging from the form of this test product, "Endless Dreams" is subverting our imagination of meat pigeons.
The young team's "national pigeon dream"
Counting the fingers, the Snap Finger Universe, which was founded in September 2021 with the back of Kuaishou, is still less than three years old, and "Endless Dreams", which was still called "Codename Sleepwalking" at that time, was also one of the first products that the label appeared in its first exposure last year. And this game shouted the slogan of "1.4 billion dreams" when it was launched, and it seems that it intends to point in the direction of big DAU. Is this a bit too high for a fledgling label?
But in GameLook's view, it is precisely this kind of "dare to think and dare to dream" that matches the youthful vitality of the snap universe. The leading manufacturers have taken the initiative to "seek stability", so that all tracks are generally homogenized at present. And if you want to make a big career, you can only take the road that others have not taken.
This is where the most impressive first impression of "Endless Dreams" comes in, and many of its underlying frame designs are aimed at breaking the path dependence of existing products and opening up new opportunities through creativity. With ample R&D funding from Kuaishou, the game set sail and challenged uncharted creative territory.
For example, compared with the second-game products that swarm around the art style, character building, and plot world view to open the "involution", "Endless Dreams" directly and easily, while achieving these elements to a considerable level, began to dig deep into the "gameplay" to expand the life cycle experience of the game. "We want to make the most fun, fun, and highest-quality meat pigeon game!" This is a statement that producer Bobo has been throwing out on various occasions recently. At a time when the second game is becoming more and more "dramatic", "Endless Dreams" wants to return the game to the essence of gamification.
Often used as a secondary game of the meat pigeon, in "Endless Dreams" is "righted" as the core experience, the game's main story levels, resource copies and other content, all revolve around the experience of the growth of the meat pigeon. The design of "Endless Dreams" with no physical strength limit and procedural automatic generation of random maps seems to show that this team wants to use the high replayability of meat pigeon gameplay to eliminate the concept of "long grass" in the traditional second game.
From the trial, it can also be felt that "Endless Dream Back" has subverted the design logic of the traditional second game that takes character development and training improvement as the core growth line. Since the strength of the character is more reflected in the ability building in the game, the basic character mainly serves as the function of the buff "detonator", so compared with the out-of-game equipment entry, it is more the player's operation and matching of the in-game buff ("echo") that determines the character's in-game performance.
This also makes "Endless Dreams" a game with "no waste cards" for characters - because the in-game performance is not linked to the strong ability of the character, this makes the player's favorite low-star R card also have room to play. Not only can the R card be equipped with SSR skills to increase its strength, but even if it is only used as a backstage station, the echo of the R card can be used in combination with the game to have an unexpected effect. Players also don't need to pursue character strength, krypton gold chasers, which reduces the pressure of paying. All kinds of designs have opened up a differentiated position from the traditional character monetization two-game products.
The three-star character "Lao Tie Dream", which will give players "Rocket" and "666", has been widely loved by players before
In today's tightening of the game industry and the steady development of more and more leading products, innovation has become the most valuable quality. As a latecomer, "Endless Dream Back" has recognized the idea of "not breaking and not standing", and relies on subversive positioning to create more imagination space for the future performance of the game. In the tide of homogeneous products, "Endless Dreams" is one of the few products that gives people a sense of brightness.
Thousands of reverberation gains are matched as you like, creating the "coolest meat pigeon experience"
What does not match the "age" of less than three years old in the snap universe is the overall level of R&D quality of "Endless Dreams". It is understood that although this label is new, the core team members are all "veterans" of a large factory with many years of experience in game research and development. Clearly, in the not-so-short start-up period, the entire team has established a highly mature R&D workflow.
For example, as soon as the interface is opened, the overall art perception of the game is enough to make people call "exquisite". Although "Endless Dreams" defines itself as a gameplay-oriented rather than a content-oriented product, the overall content quality is still quite good: in terms of art, each character has a set of exquisite dynamic vertical paintings, card images and 3D modeling, and the conventional art treatment is directly "full". The characters in it have both beautiful and gorgeous types such as "Dream of Getting Rich"-
There are also characters like "The Dream of Social Fear" and "The Dream of the Meat Pigeon", which seem unconventional, but can impress people at a glance. As mentioned in the producer's recent communication with players, this is also the direction that the project team wants to try in the future in terms of character design: there are many interesting designs in this world, not limited to handsome men and beautiful women or even humans, why not open up the "pattern" and "brain hole"?
Following the main plot, players become dream catchers all the way, and the fantasy and beautiful art style and the worldview setting of the game in a dream are also combined quite harmoniously, shuttling and fighting in the "Dream Nest" map with different themes such as the deep sea and assessment, making people feel as if floating in the clouds.
The best way to experience the developer's skills is naturally the meat pigeon gameplay at the core of the game. Many players who saw the test video were deeply impressed by the punch-to-flesh sense and dazzling skill effects of "Endless Dreams". But these are the elements that make the game look great, and that's just the surface. Inside, the developers have a good grasp of the basic cycle of "looting-building-becoming a god" Roguelite, and skillfully apply it to create a cool feeling for players.
The cornerstone of this cycle is the "Echoes" system, which we can simply think of as buffs. After each level is completed, players will need to resonate through the classic choice of three buffs. The design of the Echo Buff is the most exquisite part of "Endless Dreams" - the general idea is to split the skills of more than 40 characters into more than 1,000 Echo Buffs and hand them to players, allowing players to build them with full freedom.
In the early experience of GameLook, I did not encounter water-filled reverberations such as "damage increases XX" and "defense increases XX", on the contrary, most of the reverberations can bring real mechanical bonuses to the character. The buff types are further refined, and each character can get a variety of echo effects, such as "Exclusive Echo" that can be triggered only by themselves, "Trigger Echo" that triggers effects under special circumstances, or "Brilliant Echo" that causes qualitative changes. The mechanics of the reverberations gradually multiplied each other, eventually increasing the strength of the single character.
If the design of these characters' abilities is still within our conventional understanding, the emergence of "Echo of Connection" has completely changed expectations. By obtaining the required number of echoes, the player can trigger a combo effect between two characters, allowing the player to take advantage of the attacks, buffs, or shields of the background characters while playing the foreground character. Combined with the game's six genres with different specialties in summons, rays, melee combat, etc., and through the appropriate combination of character effects in the front and back courts, the overall construction freedom of the game has undergone drastic qualitative changes through this combo mechanism. Under the reasonable selection of echo effects, the characters of the same team can achieve an explosive combination effect of 1+1+1+1 that is far greater than 4.
In the end, after accumulating a complete set of combinations to form a complete set of formed constructions, "Endless Dreams" continues to actively create a "mowing grass" environment with full-screen monsters up to 100+ for players, and truly realizes the explosion of "meat pigeon coolness" through explicit art effects and damage figures. Let the player's sense of accomplishment explode with a screen full of rays, bullets, and damage numbers, and push the fun of this "god moment" to the limit.
As far as my personal experience is concerned, since I drew the five-star character "Dream of Getting Rich" during the test, I pulled in three- and four-star "Inspiration" cards such as "Dream of Meat Pigeon" and "Dream of Overtime" to form a "Summoning Stream" team around her. At the beginning, the genre resonance Buff of "every summon can increase damage by 0.5%", and then by selecting echoes, several teammates in the background continue to summon summon units with the attack of "Dream of Getting Rich", which not only allows "Dream of Getting Rich" to eat high damage, but also brings super high damage to the summon itself, which can be called "stepping on the right foot to the sky", this set of BD has been tried and tested in major dungeons. Although the "pigeons" summons all over the ground make the battle scene a little "scary", the perception of "cool" has been fully bound to "Endless Dreams" in my mind.
After fully experiencing the game, we also learned where the team's ambition came from. Under the seemingly unattainable slogan of "1.4 billion dreams", this team has a very clear self-awareness, has come up with solid game quality, and has made down-to-earth support for this "dream of meat pigeons for all". This also makes us want to believe that maybe this product is really a "miracle"?
Kuaishou "Lao Tie", fired the first shot of the meat pigeon
As the test progressed, more and more player reviews began to emerge. In addition to the praise feedback of "the art style is very unique", "I can't stop playing", and "the meat pigeon element is very addictive", the voices of "seeking to open the server" and "seeking qualifications" have occupied the mainstream in the comment areas of major platforms. All kinds of phenomena are proving to us that the innovative exploration made by Kuaishou "Lao Tie" in this meat pigeon game has been initially recognized by players, and it has firmly established its reputation in the first external test.
However, objectively speaking, there are still some problems in the details of the experience at this stage, for example, GameLook noticed in the experience that the feedback of some remote characters is not particularly prominent, and the commercial design still needs to be considered. But when I came back to my senses, the game official had already helped players act as a "mouth substitute" - two days ago, producer Bobo directly had an online face-to-face communication with forum players and personally answered questions. Even on such a pointed and sensitive topic as "insufficient PVP experience" and "male and female ratio in the card pool", the producers did not shy away from it and gave a positive response.
These actions from the official also give us more confidence in this game. First, the overall framework of the game has been preliminarily verified to be feasible, and secondly, as these problems are officially positioned, it is undoubtedly expected to come up with a direct response plan in future tests. This attitude of not avoiding problems and actively correcting can undoubtedly make "Endless Dreams" go further on the road of realizing the "evolution" of meat pigeons.
For me personally, regardless of how the game performs in the future, participating in this round of testing of Endless Dreams has been an eye-opening experience. For example, this may be the first time that we have witnessed a domestic development team present a game experience comparable to that of console and terminal game action pigeon masterpieces on various platforms, especially mobile games. Even, it is more likely to rely on uncompromised innovation to create a new paradigm of commercial integration of action meat pigeon cool travel, for later generations to learn and emulate.
After this "Meat Pigeon Evolution Experiment" test, I have more expectations for the performance of "Endless Dreams" in the next test. We can confirm that the success of the snap of the fingers universe has laid a glorious start to their journey of chasing their dreams.