Game Review: NCT Zone

 Hello everybody and happy 2024! I am now going into new territory: a game app review.

As this is related to the Korean entertainment world, and I previously reviewed a BTS book, I might as well also venture into reviewing video games. This is not a professional review, but a casual player review. I am not paid to write this review so please support my efforts by visiting an AD on this website.

I consider myself a casual gamer who loves simulation and idle games because I simply have no time for games. Currently, I have 56 game applications on my iPhone so this is a hypocritical statement, but I do not play all 56 games regularly. I also want to give a shoutout to my brother who works as a Senior  Software Engineer for a game company, but I will not consult his expertise in game development for this review because this is a casual game review. I don't consider myself an excellent game player or the smartest player or the person who spends money on games as I am a F2P (free to play) player. I suppose playing games is meant to relax me and I have played war games in which my heart was pumping so I want to stay away from those thrilling games like PUBG or LoL (League of Legends). I liked RPG or MMORPG games when I was younger, but now I have no time for it.

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NCT_in_2021_Universe.jpg

I spent some days playing NCT Zone. For fear of copyright, I will not be posting any direct pictures of the game in this post so this will be strictly based on the review.

 SM Ent. & TakeOne Company has launched a card battle and building application game on 27-DEC-2023 based on the members of NCT. Anyone who is a fan of NCT and/or any of the NCT subgroups should play this game. However, there are no NCT New Team members featured in this game, but I am not sure if they will be added to the game at a later time because that is a possibility. Business is business, so if they end up adding the NCT New Team members, I would be thrilled. I also think this game could be geared slightly towards females with gift-giving and intimacy levels with the members involved, but I think male players can also have fun in the game.

Source: https://picryl.com/media/bts-at-the-white-house-on-may-31-2022-02-f522f7

For those who are a BTS fan and have played "BTS World" before, which is also a card battle application game from the TakeOne game developement company, then they will see that it has similar gameplay. I started playing BTS World a long time ago, I think, in 2019 for a short while at a time when I didn't know who the members of BTS were and who is who. I knew their music, but I am not at the level of knowing each member's names. This game, in a way, helped me recognize each member of BTS. However unfortunately, life got in the way and I stopped playing the game. The game itself has shut down recently on 26-DEC-2023, one day before the NCT Zone game launched. Is this some type of conspiracy or has the TakeOne contract simply expired with BTS World? However, Netmarble is also involved with the BTS World as the game publisher, so maybe things simply didn't work out among the three companies along with Hybe Corporation, BTS' management company. I wish I played the BTS World game a little longer so that I can do more comparison for this review. If any readers played BTS World and NCT Zone, I would like to read up on the comparisons between the two games.

Seeing how BTS World shut down eventually, I am not having a good feeling that NCT Zone game will last forever, so I recommend trying this game as fast as possible to play it before NCT Zone possibly suffers the same fate or however their collaboration contract is written.

I am aware that SM Entertainment has a "SUPERSTAR SMTOWN" rhythm game to tappity tap, but I am not interested in rhythm games in general. Again, it makes my heart pump with stress so I just stay away from it. I love music, though as you can tell from my blog, but I don't think I can handle the rhythm game stress. My daughter loves rhythm games though. My thumbs would probably die and I was once a avid piano player.

Before I begin to write about my review, the "NCT Zone" game can be found at the following official link https://nctzofficial.com/ so those who are interested can obtain more information or play the game right away for free where purchases are optional.

The game is available in Apple store or Google Play.

However, for those who download the game on their phone, please note that they would need extra storage in their phones because while the game itself has a 315.5 MB file size, once they download the game, they need a lot more to download all the videos and more videos of the boys as they collect them. They can't download this game when their phone storage is about full so I recommend to free up a few hundred MBs of space to start the game.

It was a bit funny to think about now, because initially, before the game launch was revealed, NCT fans thought that "NCT Zone", when registered as a trademark, may be the name of the new NCT New Team, but come to find out, it was the name of the new NCT application game.

I like their OST song, "Do it (Let's Play)" for the game. I'm glad they released it for our audio pleasure. The above video seems to be the instrument only with background voice track. The below OST song seems to only have a few NCT members singing the actual song: Jungwoo, Jeno, Yangyang, Chenle, and Xiaojun.

Sypnosis:

There is a storyline in this game. The player has entered the dream world in which all the NCT members, who are agents, have nightmarish dreams. The player's job is to clear those nightmarish dreams with card battles in Kwangya so that the NCT members can have sweet dreams again. Nightmares causes the Neozone where the NCT members reside to collapse in toxic fog. Basically, the player is on a dream cleansing mission. However, in the NCT member's dream, the NCT member must not know that they are in a dream. If they realize that it is a dream, the dream will collapse. This logic gives me the "Inception" movie vibes.

At the same time, players can rebuild the Neozone, a place where all the NCT members gather to make items, collect items, and expand the neozone territory with sweet dreams.

Players need to collect each NCT player's CCOMAZ, like a communication device so the player can communicate directly with the NCT member. The CCOMAZ can be leveled up so that the NCT members can perform more tasks.

Once the NCT member's CCOMAZ is collected, players can gave the NCT member different outfits and also give the NCT member gifts to increase intimacy. As far as I know, increasing intimacy only gives me rewards, but no other game benefits.

Positive Points:

The storylines are fun to read and experience. I like how some of the Kwangya missions are tied to the members in real life such as the Haechan 37.5MHz radio mission and Nana's coffee lab mission. Haechan has his own radio show called "37.5MHz HAECHAN Radio" and Jaemin is known to be obsessed with coffee.

Watch one ad a day in the game to collect a reward. This is an optional task. This is better than watching multiple ads a day or throughout game play, which disrupts the game play.

If the player collects multiple NCT CCOMAZ and more than one NCT member is roaming in Neozone, players can move the NCT members onto each other and any nearby NCT members will also join in dancing to NCT songs in Neozone. This is so cute and never gets old (or tire out of it).

Players can choose their favorite NCT member to be displayed in the main Lobby menu, assuming that they have the NCT member's CCOMAZ device with the outfit and background that was selected in the "member room."

I love Haechan's voice whenever he announces "Combo!" during card battle. He is so enthusiastic and into character. I love using his cards and hearing his voice, especially his idiolect.

I love Taeyong's reactions to me giving him a gift with a slight surprise. He says, "Wah. Kamsahamnida." I am motivated to give him all my gifts. By the way, I selected Taeyong as my first CCOMAZ contact since he is THE leader of NCT. If one does not talk to the leader when there is trouble, who does one talk to?

Taeil's video is creative. When you give him a gift, he catches a gift box and exclaims, "Thank you" in English.

Depending on which menu the player goes to, there is different NCT song. This could be a positive or a negative aspect of the game because while it is nice to listen to different NCT songs, if I leave my phone open for a while, the same song is repeating over and over again and for those who are not super NCT fans, this could be exhausting to hear the same song.

When card battling, there is no time pressure, which I like, but who knows? The developer might decide to have PvP battles in the future where players can battle each other and I would think it would be real-time battles. As a normal battle tip, I recommend setting up all the elemental battle items by color before dragging the items to a card. If there is a color item where I do not have a card with the same color, I set them up in combinations of three as much as possible before I drag a different color item to its corresponding card to eliminate the unneeded elemental items.

I learned something about NCT along the way. I didn't know who the caracal flag represented so upon a Google search, it was meant to represent Johnny.

Negative Points:

There is a lag in the game in which clicking on a menu or item has a delay. This could be frustrating as playing a game should not have any lag. This is my biggest complaint about the game. I have a iPhone 14 Pro Max with 1 TB of storage space (though obviously some of that space is used), but still, there's lag.

Loading screens can also take some time.

Storage item inventory count takes a while to update. If my storage is full and I use some of the items, it takes a while before the system recognizes that the storage room is no longer full. I keep clicking on the storage room to update the inventory count.

I wish there was a way to control the quantity of items I want to use because it is a bit hard to control, such as when upgrading NCT cards with NCT memory chips. Either I click on the item once to add quantity or I have to click on a slider to indicate the quantity which is hard to control. When I am creating an item, I have to drag it to be made. I wish I can press a button to get it on the queue automatically to be made.

There is a friend feature, but I don't see too much benefit in making friends in the game. We can help each other create items, send gifts, but there is no real benefit to making friends as we do not directly play together. I saw some Korean user profiles state that they only want to be friends with Korean speakers only, but really, there is no conversation between friends in this game, so why would that make a difference?

If we go based on what happened to the "BTS World" game, then this game might be only available for a limited time. This is only my thought, but there may be a possibly that the game may shut down if it is not profitable in the future. Or this game may be so well received that NCT fans are going to keep it going for a long time.

Every gift received goes into the mailbox to claim. I would rather all the awards go directly to storage as this is an extra step to claim the awards.

As far as a FAQ or how to play, the game doesn't explain it too well. I don't see any game explanations on the website either. I didn't know how to make NCT dance together until I consulted videos on the internet. I had no idea how to complete the mission. I probably slept through some instructions.

As far as NCT cards are concerned, the Normal cards are useless. I have never used it once during gameplay, but probably great just for the collection of it. I am also beginning to wonder that it is probably not worth upgrading rare status cards either. I would only concentrate on SR (super rare), SSR (super super rare?), and I think there are higher cards than SSR, because I have seen it somewhere on social media.

Some NCT members are really into character in the videos and audio files, but others are not too enthusiastic into their character. In the voice files, I was disappointed in some of the members voices when I hit combos or mega combos with less than enthusiastic voices.

I am not a big fan of waiting for items to be created so I usually do the Neozone activities on the side when I am working or not actively playing because normally there is a wait time to create items. However, I like that there are different activities to do besides card collecting and battling.

As I mentioned earlier, I would like to have the NCT New Team added to the game in the future.

Conclusion:

The "NCT Zone" game is here to stay with plenty of things to do in the game. So far, I like the cute graphics and it has a lot of what I like such as card battling, card collecting, making a NCT Neozone town, NCT character dancing, NCT videos and audio. NCT fans would have fun. There is certainly room for improvement to make the game even better with more features, but that would also mean we need to download a bigger file to play the game.

I would like to also write a note of caution that this is only a game and players are not actually meeting NCT in real life so players should plan to not spend too much money on a game and have a budget in place. The situation can easily get out of control once real money is spent on the game to get all the benefits from the game. This advice can apply to any game with pay to play features. Card collecting in the real life world is already big business so just keep in mind these are digital items.

With that stated, I hope everyone enjoys the game and it could be pretty fun and time consuming. Maybe I'll see my readers in NCT Zone. I look forward to collecting all the members!

If this becomes a hit, maybe we'll see an Aespa game within Kwangya.

If you would like to know what I have so far, my player ID is BoChui, level 12, and I have Taeil, Taeyong, and Kun so far in Neozone. My dream lab is level 10 at the moment. Feel free to add me. Do it! Let's play!

References:

https://nctzofficial.com/

https://www.takeonecompany.com/

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/superstar-smtown/id890937532