Tiny Heroes

The right to defend your property against unwanted intruders must surely be considered one of man’s most vital liberties, but a thought should be spared for those who aren’t necessarily on the right side of the law to begin with.

You assume the role of one such individual, and you’re charged with keeping your treasure safe from wave upon wave of heroic adventurers.

These clean-cut do-gooders march brazenly into your damp and dismal abode with their beady eyes set on your copious piles of gold, and you’ll need to use a wide range of traps, monsters, and weaponry to make sure not a single penny goes missing from your beloved stockpile.

Should any of your precious haul make its way out of the front door in the arms of a plucky knight, you’re docked points at the conclusion of the level. This can drastically impact your chances of getting that all-important three-star rating.

Tiny Heroes is essentially a cunning combination of tower defence and PopCap's Plants vs Zombies. With a shrewd deployment of obstacles, you can funnel the incoming warriors along certain routes in your dungeon, increasing the chances of slaying them before they get too close to your treasure.

As you progress, you gain access to new tools which will aid your desire for grim security. Rubble can used to block pathways and delay progress, buzzsaws can be applied to narrow corridors, and orc-like bouncers can be stationed at the entrance of your dungeon to keep the riff-raff out.

Just like the various flora need sunlight in the aforementioned Plants vs Zombies, you require a steady stream of mana to build your network of traps and defences.

Pools of this magical purple resource can be found bubbling up at various points, but to increase production, you’ll want to lay down mana crystals. These give you more material to work with, boosting the number of units you can create.

Tiny Heroes doesn’t really do anything that we haven’t seen a million times before - in fact, it borrows ideas quite liberally from past classics, including Bullfrog’s seminal PC smash hit Dungeon Keeper, which had an almost identical setting and objective.

What it lacks in originality, it makes up for in execution: the controls are precise, the game engine is solid, and the tutorial sections are well-written and informative. And while the game may not be graphically stunning, everything fits together in an appealing fashion.

The real question is, can you endure yet another tower defence-style title when the App Store is already bursting at the seams with similar examples of the genre?

Tiny Heroes doesn’t really do enough differently to stand out from the crowd, but if your appetite for this type of caper is insatiable, then there’s no reason you won’t love it to bits.

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