Infinity Blade is pretty much a medieval/sci-fi version of Punch-Out. Depending of your equipped weapon, you have different options of blocking, dodging or parrying. Between fights, you gather materials, gold bags and other items, you get experience and can level up, gaining skill points to place between health, shields, attack and magic, your gear also gains experience until it levels up and grants you more skill points. You can slot gems in certain equipment pieces, you can brew potions, upgrade your mastered gear, and much more. Even with all that, there's plenty I don't like in this game.
I'm not even sure I like the basic gameplay, there's everything that rubs me the wrong way in almost every system this game has. I hate fighting enemies that punch of kick or headbutt me because I can't parry it and even if I think about blocking, it might be the wrong direction. I can parry giant tree logs and huge maces but not punches? Also, enemies that hit you multiple times if they land one hit, it's just frustrating to try and block or dodge something only to be hit and then being unable to block the other hits also. I don't like the scenes in-between fights because of the nature of the game; when you die, you come back alive and can try again the same level, you just want to fast-forward to the next fight, but gold bags and crafting items are scattered around randomly and you need to pick them up, so you have to fast-forward, tap on them, and sometimes it's difficult to pick them up and the camera moves in some obscure angle. To make things worse, if the boss at the end of a level kills you, you have to do the whole level over, and it can take many, many times to get it right.
This game has a premium resource system (weird, since it's 6.99$ ) and you can buy gold anyways, but you need these tokens to buy potions and keys (there's a skill that allows you to open the two lower-tier ranks of chests without keys). You get tokens by achieving certain things (do 50 parries, do 250 parries, etc.) and a special skill lets you accumulate tokens by fulfilling special conditions in fights (never get hit, parry 10 times, etc.) so it's not that much of a problem, except that items can be really expensive and after a while you're going to need to grind, I'm fine with that in a free game, in a 7$ one, not as much.
I love watching bars fill up. You level up your items and master them to get skill points. After that, you're free to sell them (because you'll want to buy new items to master them to get skill points from them too), it's a completitionist's nightmare to try and get everything, but in Infinity Blade 2, it felt like it was doable. Here, you can bring your mastered weapons to a craftsman which will level them up and reset the experience on them, allowing you to master them again, I don't like that, now it's even more difficult to try a little bit of everything if you can just pay huge sums of money to keep using the same weapon, it also takes a few hours to upgrade a weapon. You craft potions with the materials you find, and it also takes real-time minutes, and like weapons, you can pay tokens to make it go faster.
Potions only last for one fight anyway, so they're not that useful, gems have plenty of weird random effects that probably won't help you - except if you sell or fuse them - and if you slot them into an item, you can't sell it until you remove them with a special skill. I love the skill system, now you get abilities by putting points into your stats and the abilities change how the game plays. Special charged-up attacks, regenerating health, unlocking chests, getting more gold, more experience, reviving once when you go down, you have plenty of choices. It's just too bad that the game is kinda frustrating and boring to play now, it feels too much like stuff you've seen before with plenty of other random mechanics thrown in.
Oh, and the bonus experience at the end of matches should be a bonus % on top of what you gain, while it's fun to wail on downed enemies, it's less than one percent right now, it's negligible.