Screenshot from Battleheart
Title: Battleheart
Genre: Action RPG
Requirements: Android 2.0+
Price: $2.99
Battleheart is the kind of game the Android platform has needed for a while. Or rather, it’s the kind of game that Android needs more of. This game has an intuitive control scheme that stays out of the player’s way and is fun and simple to use. The game itself is fairly standard RPG fare; you start with a Paladin archetype and a Healer archetype. You level these through a battle or two until you can afford to hire another character for your team. You then level your team up, train them, buy them new items and weapons and upgrade those as well as hire more stand-by characters for your team to change out as needed for battles of varying degrees of difficulty. And that in a nutshell, is Battleheart. Simple, fun, and addictive.
Gameplay
You control each character in your party independently of each other. Sadly there is no group selection option here which would be really nice for avoiding explosives. You simply tap, press and drag to direct a given character to a position or enemy to attack. The same goes for healing or buffs. Your characters will not evade enemies or auto-heal each other. Your healer however, will continually cast a heal on whomever you last selected for her. To use a characters’ special abilities you simply tap them which brings up a series of tiles on screen with all of the options available. The interface is very intuitive and flows well. But without a group select it can be hard to control your entire group in a really busy battle. I hope to see an option for this in a future version.
Graphics & Sound
The art in this game is great; it’s not overwrought or too simplistic. It has a very basic, comic strip sort of feel. It’s almost like you are playing a stylized web comic. The animations are fluid and I’ve never noticed any jittering. The game is nice to look at and there is enough variation in enemy designs that things don’t get too boring. I do think that some environmental animation would be nice, but that is a minor request rather than a gripe.
The sound in the game is equally as good. Even on the tinny speakers of my HTC Flyer this game sounds nice. The music in the opening splash screen is crisp and well-defined and the sound effects in the game are pleasing to hear as well.
Overall
I have nothing but good things to say and a few humble requests regarding this game. I can’t wait to play it later today and I can’t wait for a sequel! I’d love to hear what you guys think about it. If any of you have creative strategies or party builds for beating the end boss let me know!
Thanks for the review. It looks like Battleheart is a pretty good game. I’ve had my eye on it for a while and I have heard only good things said about it. Perhaps I’ll have to check it out.
William. I’m pretty certain you will dig this game if it has even remotely piqued your interest. And check out my Android games round-up here for more good games. Let me know what you think about these mini-reviews. I may try to make them a regular thing.
This isn’t mentioned in the review, but this game is available on iOS as well.
A different kind of review, from a developer.
The team at Mika Mobile (makers of Battleheart) are wonderful. The game is written in Unity, a cross platform game engine. They go out of their way to help new game developers on the Unity forum with basic questions and concrete examples directly from their games. They had some early success on iOS with Zombieville and OMG Pirates! but they still find time to help out the community that was there for them early on. I support those types of game developers by purchasing their app.
Jared,
I completely agree! The folks at Mika Mobile do a lot to support the community and I hope that the community will work to support them.