Heroes & Dragons: Tactical RPG

5-Star Gameplay! Incredibly fun if you like tactical rpgs... … but it’s got everything frustrating about today’s gaming industry: subscription options, pay-to-play, pay-to-win, loot boxes, micro transactions, xp throttling, pop-up ads, watch ads for rewards, and variable pricing. Developers need to get paid, but I wish I could pay$12/month or $60 flat for unlimited access, What they do to make a profit is a bit extreme.

I’ve really enjoyed playing this game. It’s fun, strategic, and not terribly complicated.

After downloading and trying this game, I gave it a 2-star review and deleted it. The devs told me that if I played a bit longer, I’d see that the “survival mini game for action lovers” is just an intro, and the core of the game is a “deep turn based RPG with complete class system, skills, artifacts and everything you’d expect (just as advertised)”. So, I decided to give it another try. While downloading, I skimmed some other reviews, and… apparently the actual game is a PvP gacha hero collector game, and the whole “turn based RPG” thing is a minor PvE sideline that you just auto-play? Wow. But anyway, I got up to, I think, fight 7 of stage 1-3, and hadn’t seen any of that yet, so that’s just hearsay. What about the part I actually got to play? Just remember that I am still apparently in an incredibly long tutorial intro, so who knows how representative any of this is… It looks like they took three different “teach yourself to be a game dev” Unity nanogame samples, reskinned and renamed everything to make it “unique”, and sutured them together. And the reskinning is a pretty slapdash job. For example, the fire-ice-earth-neutral elements are renamed to force-wisdom-faith-valor traits, but with the same colors and icon shapes, and the same RPS mechanical effect, and they’re even called “element” instead of “trait” outside the help screen. The “RPG” consists of walking a linear path (and picking up free gold and gems on the way or not picking them up) to get one line of story or a battle and repeat. Every odd battle (not just the first one) is that “survival mini game for the action lovers”. It’s even worse than I thought—because there is no rogue-lite progression, they just had to make the battles so easy you’d have a hard time losing. The even battles are that “deep turn based” gameplay that they advertise. Well, they are turn based. And they do in fact have the class system, etc. that really are exactly what you would expect (being from a generic sample game and all). But that’s all in service of a series of (up to) 5x5 fights on tiny maps, each one a little different but all ridiculously trivial. This is the Banner Saga or Bravelands, it’s a sample of the mechanics of a (generic ripoff of a) game like that. Maybe I could make a fun puzzle out of trying to find a way to lose without just skipping every turn? I threw my archer in front of my shield guy instead of behind him—and I still won. I wished I already had that auto-play that other reviews mention. And then I remembered that the thing I want to auto-play past is the thing they’re advertising as the actual game, so what I actually want is to just not play this game. And then I remembered that this is just the lure for an even worse non-game addiction-pump, so what I actually want is for trash like this to stop destroying mobile gaming (although it’s probably way too late for that). Why did they ask me to give the game another chance? They can’t actually believe that they’ve made a “deep turn based RPG” that I would enjoy if I gave it a chance and then raise my review from 2 stars to 5, can they? Are they even hoping to rip people off for money in some way that I can’t see, or are they just doing this for the evulz? Isn’t there anything lower than 1 star that I can give them? These eternal mysteries will go unanswered, as I delete the game again.