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Hands-on with Call of Duty: Heroes

Clashic

Hands-on with Call of Duty: Heroes
|
iOS
| Call of Duty: Heroes

Price keeps saying "another day at the office" like it's a catch-phrase I should be aware of.

He says it every time something happens that he's involved in. Sometimes it's so frequent that the quips roll into one squished together bark of gruff manly nonsense

Is it really another day at the office Price? Has anyone in an office ever assaulted an enemy encampment with armour clad juggernauts in a thinly-veiled Clash of Clans clone?

Has anyone in an office ever described themselves as a "dominating presence of the battlefield"? Do you even know what an office is Price?

This is Call of Duty: Heroes, Activision's attempt to breach the lucrative, dictionary-hating mid-core market, and it's just been soft-launched in Australia and New Zealand.

The game sees you building a base, mining for resources, training up troops, then invading places and stealing stuff thanks to your superior firepower. It's modern colonialism in action.

You also need to build defences around your base, because for some reason your highly trained, crack soldiers all appear to go and hide in a bush when the 'bad guys' show up.

So stick a gun turret here, a gun turret there, and make sure those overly-entitled jerks don't have a chance in hell of stealing back the resources you stole from them. Who do they think they are, eh?

At the start of the game you've got a fully armed battle group at your disposal. There are stompy walkers, multiple types of troops, and a couple of perks for you to throw in the face of the silly people standing in the way of your grand economic vision for the region.

There's a drone missile that you don't have much control of, and a helicopter fly-by that lets you take control of a big spinny gun and shoot at things on the ground for a bit. Just like the CoD we all know and have become numbed to.

Then you're back to basics. Teach some men which end of the gun to point where, dig a hole so you can suck some gold out of the land, that sort of thing. Tap-tap-tap, spend your premium currency to speed things up.

Call of Duty: Heroes forces together a bundle of ideas that are essentially mutually exclusive. CoD is about bombast and explosions, but here it's dulled down into a series of top-down, hands-off skirmishes with walls. They're probably foreign walls, but it's still not the same.

There's a little more depth to proceedings than you get with your usual CoC clone, with a variety of unlockable 'heroes' who can add extra buffs and boosts to your attacks. But there are also multiple currencies, plenty of IAPs, and a dull grey hue to everything.

Call of Duty: Heroes is what it is, an inevitable reaction to the mobile market by Activision. In a way it's a surprise it took them this long really.

Of course, the game is in soft launch, so all of this could change by the time the game lands on UK shores. It won't though.

If you're in Australia or New Zealand, or you have an iTunes account for one of those territories, you can grab Call of Duty: Heroes right now for nothing.

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.