Legends of Heropolis review - Holy confusion, Batman!
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| Legends of Heropolis

Kairosoft games are a dime a dozen now, and if you've not played one by now, then you're doing an excellent job avoiding them.

If that is the case, and you're looking to jump into their catalogue of games, then you probably shouldn't start with Legends of Heropolis.

It's messy and confusing, with far too many mechanics and systems thrown in that don't gel together well enough to make a cohesive experience.

Some assembly required

It starts off fairly simply - you're given an empty town, and you put down a building to attract a villager you create.

Then your town gets attacked by baddies, so you have to beat the heck out of them with a couple of heroes.

Battles are pretty straightforward – you hammer the attack button until you run out of energy, wait, then hammer the button again.

You can recover health by holding the attack button, stopping energy recovery but giving you a little boost of health should you need it.

Fight for long enough and you can Heromorph, turning your characters into superheroes with upgradable suits and special abilities.

Finish a battle and you get a bunch of loot, and then you're back to looking after your town.

All in a day's work

You need to build a farm, then harvest crops, which can be sold to tourists. Or build a new house so you can attract a new hero, but only if you meet a bunch of other requirements.

You can also use crops to level up suits, collect meat to use special abilities in battles, unlock new special abilities, enter the stock market… it's all a bit much.

Not helping the onslaught of content is a confusing menu layout, which does a great job of hiding everything useful under a series of layers that take too long to navigate.

Instead of having so many systems layered on top of each other, Legends of Heropolis could've done with focusing on some of its better aspects.

As a town-builder, it works pretty well, with a steady stream of new buildings and products to build and manufacture that keeps things mixed up.

And working through battle scenarios, while fairly simple, is also quite enjoyable, as you slowly open up a map by fighting numerous baddies.

No more heroes

But while it has it spots of fun, Legends of Heropolis is just too much a mess to be a game that will actually encourage continued play.

Navigating menus is a chore, and the number of steps required to do something as simple as levelling is frankly ridiculous.

If you like games menu-heavy and bewildering, then this might be for you, but otherwise you'd do best to play a different Kairosoft game.

Legends of Heropolis review - Holy confusion, Batman!

Legends of Heropolis has a few moments of fun, but it's bogged down in messy menus and too many mechanics
Score
Ric Cowley
Ric Cowley
Ric was somehow the Editor of Pocket Gamer, having started out as an intern in 2015. He hopes to take over the world the same way.