Fire Emblem: Heroes is a tactical RPG featuring various characters from Nintendo's franchise
Coming to Android on February 2nd, and iOS "soon"
Fire Emblem: Heroes is a slimmed-down version of Nintendo's tactical RPG franchise which is coming soon to iOS and Android, and features a bunch of your favourite characters from throughout the series's history.
It makes sense of this by casting you - yes you - as a summoner, who's striving to prevent the Emblian Empire from taking over all of the worlds. You're a member of the Askran Kingdom who's trying to prevent it.
New FEH characters will feature, and fight alongside recognisable heroes and allies.
Battles are played out on an 8x6 grid which takes up the entirety of your phone or tablet screen - there's no scrolling here.
Aside from that, they're largely as you'd expect. You swipe your character around the screen, and drag and drop them over enemies when they're close enough to attack.
You can also play the old school way by getting close to an enemy, tapping your character, then selecting an action.
Visually, it's reminiscent of the pixelated NES, SNES, and Game Boy Advance games, as opposed to the recent Wii, GameCube, and 3DS versions which feature fully 3D visuals.
Oh, and the rock-paper-scissors weapon triangle system remains in place, in which sword beats axe, axe beats lance, and lance beats sword. It's based on colours - green, red, and white - with each colour corresponding to a weapon or magic type.
To unlock new characters, you need to gather orbs which can be used to summon them gacha-style. These are either obtained during missions, or bought via an IAP.
Summoning costs five orbs initially, but if you repeatedly summon in the same session this cost reduces. You can also choose a colour to give you a chance at getting a character, or character type, you want.
Each character has a rating out of five stars, which denotes their battle abilities but you can level them up to learn new skills, and increase their stats and star ratings.
There are a variety of different modes to fight in, including a single player campaign and training mode which are self-explanatory.
But then there are arena duels, which challenge you to take on successive waves of enemies, special maps, which function as special seasonal events, and hero battles, in which you take on a certain hero and unlock it if you defeat it.
There's certainly a lot of meat on Fire Emblem: Heroes's bones, and you don't have long to wait to dig in if you're on Android. It launches for free on February 2nd on Google Play, while iOS users will have to wait until it's available "soon".
