Despite presenting itself as a vibrant, engaging game with a robust player-driven economy in which players could potentially earn money by investing in the game’s ecosystem, 9Lives Arena is well and truly dead.
At the time of my review, I was the only person online, and most of the leaderboards lacked enough players to fill a top 100 player spot in that activity, a figure that is recorded globally.
You may ask how a free-2-play game can do so badly that it struggles to attract even 100 players who play long enough to get on the leaderboard. After spending a little time exploring what little there is to explore when no one else is online, I can tell you exactly why no one sticks around.
It is one of the worst games ever made, and that is saying something.
While there is much to say about 9Lives Arena’s problems, here are a few of the most serious issues contributing to its assured demise.
Image credit 9Lives Arena - Published by Stargazer LLC and developed by Touchhour.
While there is a time and place for indie developers to use asset store assets to speed up game development when a title is almost entirely comprised of barely related store assets (as if the developer simply grabbed the cheapest items they could find and threw them a game engine), there is a serious underlying problem, and that is especially damning when the main selling point of 9Lives Arena is players being able to buy NFT character models and trade or sell them to others.
The developers gave me $100 worth of in-game premium currency to test the game. Honestly, I couldn’t find anything I would want to spend it on, let alone spend the type of money they are charging for some of the skins on their website, such as the generic-looking gladiator character models, which are listed for over $8600.
Generic Gladiators aside, the low-quality goblin npc has 3 trillion skins available and is slightly more affordable, with players purchasing an egg (lootbox) for $9 and premium skins for $99; however, none of these are worth buying, as the model is not that good, and the game is as we already established, almost entirely dead.
Everything (including character models, skins, and animations) looks awful and is of very low quality, and the $100 worth of currency is sitting in my account, never to be used.
Honestly, once I finish this review, I will never touch 9Lives Arena again unless I have to update this review for some reason.
Image credit 9Lives Arena - Published by Stargazer LLC and developed by Touchhour.
I have never played a game with a worse-designed user interface, and I have played plenty of terrible games, but 9Lives Arena, with its barely readable font and mismatched interface elements, takes the proverbial cake.
It appears the designer learned to design interfaces by studying the worst-designed Geocities of the late 1990s. While that is undoubtedly not the case, it certainly appears that way to someone old enough to remember exploring the web in those strange and wondrous times.
Ugly design assigned. The developers seem not to wish to (or know how to) conform to established design standards by requiring players to stand on a stone disk to access basic interface elements such as inventory and crafting instead of allowing players to press a button such as I, B, or the Tab Key. While this isn’t a game-breaker, it’s odd and does little to improve the already awful user experience.
While I could go on, I will instead show a screenshot, and allow it to do the talking, as words alone could not describe just how awful looking it is.
Image credit 9Lives Arena - Published by Stargazer LLC and developed by Touchhour.
I must preface this by saying I believe in cryptocurrency; I feel it serves a purpose now and will serve a greater purpose in future; however, in its current form, it’s just not ready for widespread adoption, and until crypto game developers find a way to make buying and selling Crypto as seamless as purchasing Call of Duty Coins or Fortnite vBucks, even the very best crypto games will not achieve mainstream success.
Cryptocurrency is a viable and growing technology, and I have personally invested in it and will likely do so again; however, poorly thought-out and executed titles such as 9Lives Arena will not convince anyone of the viability of the play-to-earn business model or blockchain games and I would strongly advise any blockchain developer to think long and hard before launching a play to earn title for PC or Console, to ensure that their project is of the quality and standard that gamers expect in 2024 and beyond.
Image credit 9Lives Arena - Published by Stargazer LLC and developed by Touchhour.
9Lives Arena is a action video game developed by Touchhour and published by Stargazer LLC, it was released on December 27, 2023 and it is Free-2-Play.
9Lives Arena is available exclusively on PC.
As of September 2024, around 100 people play 9Lives Arena on a fairly regular basis.
9Lives Arena is essentially dead, and finding full lobbies in a reasonable amount of time is difficult in well-populated regions, and next to impossible in less populated regions.
9Lives Arena does not support cross-platform multiplayer.
9Lives Arena offers the following matchmaking options:
The 9Lives Arena in-game store sells:
The following peripherals are officially supported:
9Lives Arena is rated PEGI 16+ and contains:
Image credit 9Lives Arena - Published by Stargazer LLC and developed by Touchhour.
9Lives Arena is one of just a few games where I have literally nothing good to say about the game or the developers behind it.
It looks, feels, and plays like a low-effort attempt to cash in on the NFT craze of the early 2020s.
While I believe there is a future in gaming for blockchain games, and even NFT to a certain extent, low-effort, low-budget, low-passion titles like 9Lives Arena do nothing by reinforcing the stereotype that cryptocurrency is a scam and that there is no future for the technology when blockchain and by extension cryptocurrency would solve many of the problems gamers, developers and publishers face with modern gaming, by allowing players to sell their unwanted games and items to the players, while developers and publishers received a commission on every item or title sold, this technology that already exists today (NFT).
This system would all but destroy the grey market sale of accounts and ensure that players had a legal and safe way to cash out skins and items when they either no longer used them or had moved on to other games entirely.
Don’t get me wrong—I enjoy playing Fortnite and Call of Duty. Still, I wouldn’t hesitate to do so if I were allowed to legally sell the vast majority of my no longer obtainable skins to other players via a developer-supported marketplace.
Overall, it’s a terrible game, and I am surprised that Tim Sweeney and, by extension, Epic Games allow it to stay on the Epic Game Store. Quite frankly, titles this poorly made cast everyone and everything involved in a poor light. I would like to see EGS pull such games from its storefront in the future for the sake of its reputation.
