After spending the better part of a week slaying orcs, humans, and other heroes, I finally understand why all my friends were raving earlier this year when Hero Academy launched for iOS. It’s fantastic. Underneath the deceptively cute art style lies a surprisingly deep strategy game that takes hours to really even begin to master. Far from being a casual game, Hero Academy plays more like chess, where great minds that think ahead and understand both their own capabilities and that of their enemies will come out ahead. Asynchronous and cross-platform multiplayer cinches the whole package, making Hero Academy far too easy to play for hours on end, whether at home or on the go.
Hero Academy lets two player-controlled teams battle it out on a game board in turn-based combat. After selecting which team you want to play (currently there are Orcs, Humans, Dark Elves, Dwarves and the Team Fortress 2 soldiers), you then deploy them onto a random level. You can only take five actions per turn for your entire team, so you have to put your smarts to use and figure out the best way to either destroy the enemy team or kill their crystals.
As you’d expect from any action-points driven strategy game, how you spend your points means everything. Other turn-based strategy games typically assign different actions varying point values, but in Hero Academy every move costs one point. Whether you’re using this point to drop a new soldier onto the battlefield, attack an enemy, give one of your own heroes a buff, or simply move to a different tile, you always use one point. It keeps things approachable for people less familiar with turn-based games, and also makes it easier to rapidly knock out turns. You can also start to predict what the enemy team will do a bit better, since you know exactly how many moves he can make.
Ease-of-use really is a mantra throughout the design of Hero Academy, and whether you’re new to turn-based games or seasoned you’ll appreciate its smart rewind feature. After taking all your actions you can simply click your action points wheel and rewind to the start of your turn (or even regress move-by-move if you wish). This means you can try out your strategy and see how well -- or poorly -- it’ll do, adjusting accordingly. It encourages a lot of experimentation because there’s no risk -- only reward. It’s an utterly brilliant feature, and does away with a lot of the pain many new players would otherwise feel as they simply learn by getting stomped on by skilled opponents.
It’s really good that Hero Academy encourages you to experiment, because gameplay gets much deeper than you might first expect. Sure, it sounds simple: take five actions in a turn, kill the other side or their crystal. But each team of heroes plays differently from the next; they’re not symmetrical. Every team has some basic archetypes like healers, warriors and ranged damage dealers, but they each have special rules that set them apart. Units don’t all have the same movement values either, so, like chess, it’s important to understand not only your own forces but those you’re up against. Add to this the special abilities of each army and that every game board has special buff-giving tiles, and every action becomes a hard-to-make choice. You don’t even have access to the entirety of your army every turn, but are instead randomly dealt units and powers from a virtual deck of sorts, making you further adapt your strategy based on what’s available to you on a given turn. You could take what's there, or, if you're unhappy, swap some out at the cost of action points. Quite simply, it’d be overwhelming if you couldn’t try things out noncommittally because there are always so many choices available.
If that all sounds a bit too intense, don’t fret -- Hero Academy has a lot of resources available to teach new players. You can start with the in-game tutorial levels and then move onto the in-game guide. If that’s still not enough, or if you’re just looking for a change of pace, you can play Challenge levels for each team you own. The Challenge levels aren’t only great little tweaks on the gameplay that feel similar to a puzzle game but they also teach you the intricacies and capabilities of individual units by letting you see them in action.
Image is from the PC version.
If you’ve got access to both a PC and an iOS device, then there’s always a reason to have a game of Hero Academy going as it supports cross-platform functionality. The games are pretty much identical between the two platforms, with the one substantial difference being that iOS players get the human team for free, while the only way to access the game on PC is to buy it for $4.99. Still, that’s not a bad price, especially considering that this also nets you both the human and Team Fortress 2 teams, which you can then use on the go. It’d be nice if the PC version supported different resolutions, but the nice part about it being so minimalistic is that it can quietly run in the background without being a resource hog. It even gives you notifications when someone else takes their turns, enticing you to return. Devilish and effective.
Because Hero Academy is asynchronous you’re encouraged to have a large number of games going at any time. Quickly knock out all your turns, start up a few new games, and then return later when you’re friends or random opponents have taken their actions. If they still haven’t, you can quickly start up some new games. There’s basically never a reason to not be playing against someone, and you’re never pressured to take a turn. You do things at your own pace.
Source : feeds[dot]ign[dot]com
