It seems as of late I’ve been on a small binge of mobile GPS games. Mostly just something I get a little extra reward for from being so active. I’ve gotten to a point where I’m a bit bored of Pokémon GO so I thought I’d see if anything else mobile-wise caught my attention.

I have never been a big fan of mobile games which is why I’m a bit shocked I was already on the hunt to find another one. I did some research to see what kind of games other people were playing. One game that kept popping back up, again and again, was Orna.

One of the downsides to playing a game like Orna is the GPS information that is being shown and given. It makes it a bit more tricky to want to write about and show screenshots since the data it’s showing is not something I want to share.

So this would be yet another game where I’d need to take screenshots of the game itself during certain moments when I’m off doing other things in life. That was not an issue at the start since I was in the middle of a move anyways.

The game starts rather simply. You get to pick one of three classes. Later on, as you advance you unlock and switch to other classes. If you decided you did not like being a warrior once you could afford to you could simply unlock and switch to being a mage instead.

This I thought was quite a cool idea. Even further along I discovered as I unlocked more advanced classes that I switch into that gear restrictions between the three main classes became less of an issue. The warrior I started with soon upgrade into some other classes that could use thief gear as well. I even found myself at one point using some mage drops as well.

I also liked the fact at the lower levels as I advanced I unlocked further spell and attack slots. This made unlocking the next class feel even more rewarding. On top of getting new attacks, spells, and improvements on them. I welcomed being able to have further slots unlocked.

Every 25 levels or so if I had enough Orns I always took the next class upgrade that seemed interesting. After a while, I amount enough Orns to go back and unlock the starting branches of other classes just so I could play around with them a bit as well.

I however for now at least am sticking with melee as my main focus. While I was more focused on defense-style play early on. I do find myself enjoying being more of a higher damage output if possible for some quicker kills.

Death seems to lack any major concern at the lower levels other than spending some gold to heal backup or potions. I have even amassed quite a large amount of healing potions to self-heal in combat or out. When out of combat you can even just press and hold to auto heal on the window that opens the potion belt.

One thing this game seems to solve that I always found to be an issue with Pokémon Go is when you are staying in one area for quite some time in the middle of nowhere more or less. In Pokémon Go, you can easily deplete an area of Pokémon to catch unless you are at a high-traffic area like a college campus, casino, or mall.

Orna on the other hand since you attack creatures for resources, gear, experience, and in-game currencies has quite a generous respawn timer. I’ve yet to deplete an area of creatures even if a lot of lower stuff spawns in that I can one-shot. This almost ensures I want to keep playing just to attack whatever new thing just spawned in.

This game has quite a few different things to do combat-wise. At the basic level, you can be hunting normal creatures something a bit more challenging like this boss I found. The cool part is if you get killed there is simply a five-minute timer before you can go engage back in battle. You don’t even lose progress on these easier creatures that spawn around you.

Since it was a boss type of creature it dropped far more rewarding loot than what I had encountered. Thankful you have unlimited bag space as I found myself quite quickly looking for the auto dismantle option in one of the game menus. Everything can be broken down into resources that can be later used once you have built a blacksmith to upgrade items at.

I have found these types of encounters to be rather rewarding experience-wise. They might require a couple of attempts but it seems some also spawn in depending on the kind of quests I get. Some of them also became rather trivial once I unlocked a damage type that they were weak to.

There are however more challenging single fights once you zoom out on the map and those will reset health. Those are however time fights and you gain a rather unimportant bonus that could be daily, weekly, or even monthly for resources such as gold.

Along the way, you can also find and earn gauntlet keys. This is also where the cash shop seems to come into play a little bit. Sure you could buy the keys needed to partake in different things like dungeons. The game at least allows you to find drops and even earn a few along the way.

As far as dungeons go I’ve been having a blast when I find one. You have 13 separate single encounters and as long as you are not killed you can keep going. They do require some thinking of when you feel is a good time to heal and restore mana vs burst out damage to get something dangerous down.

Dungeons appear to be a random spawn. I was lucky for a while where I was at that I had one within range. After a couple of days, however, it was gone. Sometimes the floors would be easy to clear but I did have a couple that gave me a couple of losses till I got some better gear.

Spending a key to not make it to a dungeon end for the final loot was finally part of the game where it seemed getting killed had some kind of consequence. Sometimes the loot was amazing and other times I did not care too much for it.

Most interestingly and this did not happen all the time. I would sometimes be clearing out the single creature that was easy on my way up to the higher floors and it would drop another gauntlet key. More or less making the run a free one. Other times I would not loot a key at all and I’d have to wait a while to find another one before entering into another dungeon.

Final Thoughts

While quite a simple game it’s enough there to keep me entertained for a short while. I am overall starting to like it more than Pokémon Go. There is a lot of grinding in this game even more so when it comes to buildings. I need quite a lot of stone and I’m finding only small amounts of it per day so far.

This is going to be one of those games I’ll keep playing at least for the short term. I’m sure once a build a new computer this game will take a back seat to everything else going on in the gaming world. For now, at least it’s a nice little distraction when I find myself with some free time.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Orna: The GPS RPG.