Shakes & Fidget is a free to play game which is pay to win. Let’s be blunt about that. You don’t need to pay a cent to enjoy the game, but if you don’t pay, you won’t get into a top guild and you won’t be at the top of the hall of fame leaderboards. As long as your ego can stand that, it’s a fun game!
S&F is available to play on a number of platforms; as a browser game, through Steam, Google Play and the Apple App Store.
The basic idea is that you play a warrior, mage or scout and you fight against monsters and other players. There’s a surprising amount of content, including adventures, arena fights, fortresses, a scrapbook, guild wars and guild raids, dungeons, portals, towers, mirror shards, pets, a witch and a special toilet.
The general idea is that you have 100 minutes to adventure per day. To go on an adventure, you select a quest and wait until the quest is done. This makes S&F a good game to play while watching TV or while playing another game. When you adventure, you get gold and experience and possibly items. You can do other things, which have cooldowns of various lengths of time, from five minutes to some that are only reset when the server’s day starts. Many of these cooldowns can be bypassed using mushrooms. Mushrooms are the special rule-breaking currency that lets you spend up to 300 minutes adventuring, fight in the arena more often, go to dungeons more often, buy special items, you get the picture. They’re very special shrooms that you’ll find every day when you adventure, which of course makes you want more and more and more and that’s where they make their money. Shrooms are addictive!
S&F is a nice combination of player vs player (PVP) and player versus enemies/monsters (PVE/PVM). It’s also very relaxing for a PVP game. If you get attacked several times overnight and lose them all, you might lose some ranks in the hall of fame, and maybe some gold, but nothing that matters too much. There’s little rage involved, when many PVP games result in a lot of insults being slung etc. So I would have to call it a casual game with RPG, PVP and PVE elements, with fierce competition available for players that want it.
It’s also a game where it’s almost compulsory to be in a guild. When you’re in a guild, you can get more XP and gold, as well as better quality gems to increase your stats by more. Of course, there’s the social teamwork aspect which is really good, but some people won’t care about that part of the game.
