Game Reviews

Legendary Heroes

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| Legendary Heroes
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Legendary Heroes
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| Legendary Heroes

For a developer, getting the feel of a character right is far more important than getting its look right. When you're playing a hulking barbarian you need to feel like you can crush the life out of almost anything that stumbles into your path.

If you're a lithe magician, you need to be slippery and quick, a blur of lightning bolts and arcane blasts who can get away from trouble with some wizard-y trickery.

It's a feat that Legendary Heroes fails to pull off, in spite of its interesting visuals and solid premise, leaving you with the distinct impression that you're neither legendary nor heroic.

Heroically running away

The game is a straightforward isometric 3D action-RTS, although it leaves an awful lot to be desired in the S department. You control a team of three heroes, aided by a bunch of disposable minions, with the aim of destroying a variety of enemy control points.

The key to winning a round is the mystical source, which sits in the opposing team's base. Once you've managed to smash that to bits it's Game Over, and you're left to reap the spoils of the slaughter.

Those spoils come in the form of gold and gems, which you can use to buy various buffs at the start of each round. Of course, this being a freemium title, you'll never have enough to get what you really want, but the model isn't quite intrusive enough to be annoying.

Not that advanced hero quest

The basic gameplay is really simple. You control one of the three heroes, and can swap between them by tapping on a bar at the bottom-left of the screen. More tapping controls movement, and your current hero's powers are displayed in a menu at the right of the screen.

Combat is a case of tapping on an enemy, then spamming your special moves until one of you falls over. It's an ugly system, and you never feel the heft of your blows or the exciting swirl of a magically concocted hurricane.

There are eight heroes to choose from, each with different strengths and weaknesses, some of whom need to be unlocked by defeating them in Campaign mode. Levels have different mini-quests for you to complete, and doing so unlocks gems.

No one special

The problem is, you never feel in control of what's happening in front of you. The different heroes have their different powers, but they're too easily destroyed by the other side's minions and tower defences to make them interesting.

Add to that the fact that you have no control over what your own minions do and you're left with a highly unsatisfactory hack-and-slasher, albeit one without much hacking or slashing. On-screen buttons are a little too small as well, so you'll often find yourself accidentally wandering into the field of battle.

It's a shame, because the underlying concept and art style work really well. But more often than not Legendary Heroes feels more like a cash-in on the action-RTS trend than an attempt to make the genre work on iOS.

iOS version reviewed.

Legendary Heroes

Very much a case of style over substance, Legendary Heroes looks like an exciting action-RTS game, but plays like a freemium PowerPoint presentation
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.