Battle Quest: Rise of Heroes

When I think of games from Mobage - the company behind Battle Quest: Rise of Heroes - I immediately think PvP, free-to-play, card-battling, and heroic fantasy.

Blood Brothers, Rage of Bahamut, and Marvel: War of Heroes have all been great successes, but they all follow a similar path. The company doesn't seem to deviate from much an obviously lucrative formula.

From what I've seen of Battle Quest: Rise of Heroes before jumping in to play it, the game looks to be more focused on action and shooting than previous efforts, and its art style is more cartoonish too.

Being a fan of the company's earlier works, I'm keen to see how it handles a change of pace like this. If you're curious too, you can join me as I spend the next week playing the game.

Battle Quest: Rise of Heroes is an auto-runner, with some of the elements of card-battlers that make them so compulsive. I'll focus on the auto-running elements in this first impressions section.

You run forwards automatically, and can swipe the screen to move between the three channels of the course. When there's a corner to be turned, you need only be in the appropriate channel: left-hand side to turn left, right-hand side to turn right.

When an enemy appears before you, as long as you're in the correct lane, you'll strike it with ranged attacks. Enemies have icons above their head which are either red, green, or purple. Each character in your party is strong against a particular colour - Warrior against red, Archer against green, and Mage against purple.

Though there's only one character on-screen at any one time, you can cycle through them by swiping up. If it all gets too much for you, a powerful special attack is available after you've collected enough Mana from fallen foes.

As the world speeds past you also spot treasure chests that can be tapped to be collected, and the equipment you find in them better kits out your heroes. Each character also has its own XP bar, and this fills depending on how much it got involved with these high-speed battles.

It's entertaining enough so far, if not exactly the freshest idea for a game I've seen in recent months.

Auto-runners tend to lose me after a few days if I don't have a group of friends who are playing the game along with me, but Battle Quest: Rise of Heroes has managed to hold onto my attention. That's mostly thanks to its level-based structure and RPG-esque play.

Finding cool loot and levelling my characters up so that they can make use of shiny new equipment is as appealing here as it always is, and better kit does make a difference to your feeling of power during stages.

Since each stage is completable, it feels like I'm going on a long quest too, which imparts a pleasing sense of structure - whereas if this game had been an infinite-runner I doubt it would have felt like much of an adventure at all.

A few problems have arisen over the last couple of days of play, though, and they're souring the experience.

First, the items you pick up cost Coins to identify. You can't tell what an item is when you pick it up, so you have to spend soft currency. But there's no guarantee the weapon you just grabbed is better than your current one - especially if you've spent time and resources enhancing it. Therefore it's a bit of a gamble as to whether it's worth you identifying the chest in the first place.

Second, though the game wants you to swap between characters to defeat enemies effectively, if you focus on levelling-up one character, you can pretty much flatten any enemy with any hero you like, which is a waste of gameplay potential.

Third, sometimes you feel a little cheated by the game's objectives. It might ask you to rescue three hostages, but if you choose the wrong path you could only see a total of two before reaching the end of the stage. There's no indication of which way you should be headed, and when you combine that with the game's energy system, it's frustrating.

They're currently the only quibbles I have, though, which I'd say is a good sign.

Day 7: Run down

The same issues persist after a week with Battle Quest: Rise of Heroes, though I've had fun despite them.

The experience hasn't changed or deepened, and I'm already a bit tired of this Coin system governing my unlocks, but the standard gameplay of running X distance and killing Y baddies is just as enjoyable as when I started.

And there are balancing issues. In the early stages I spent some of my time enhancing the items I owned with scrolls, but this became unnecessary for such a long time that I forgot that it was even possible, and the scrolls mounted up in my inventory.

There's a similar problem with helpers. You can select your favourite hero to be available for other players to call upon to get them through hard levels, but you never need to do this because the most frequent reason for failure is picking up the incorrect number of items because you never saw them on the paths you went down.

The auto-runner, as a genre, is drawing to a natural close. Games like Battle Quest: Rise of Heroes feel like the last hurrah before it slinks off to hibernate and be reborn later down the line. You've certainly played a lot of games like this one, but the RPG twist is just enough of a variation on the formula to make it a worthwhile time sink.