For the last few months, I’ve been playing a ton of Let’s Play Heroes of Dragon Age. For professional reasons, I can’t review the game, but I’d love for you RPadholics to give it a shot. It’s available on iTunes for iOS devices and Google Play for Android devices. So please, please, please give it a download and give the game some time. When you’re done with that, kindly share your (completely unfiltered) thoughts on the game in the comments section.
For those of you that need more information, Heroes of Dragon Age is a strategy game of sorts. You take a team of characters and (kind of) battle your way through different parts of the Dragon Age universe. Different periods of history are explored. There’s a huge collectible aspect to the game as well. You’ll be able to earn or buy some really cool characters — including heroes and villains from the videogames.
Here’s an excerpt from the official description:
Collect the heroes. Become a legend! Build a party of famous warriors and epic monsters from Dragon Age lore. Battle other players in strategic, CCG-inspired 3D combat. Fight bosses on engaging quests from the award-winning, dark fantasy RPG games.
Like I said, I’ve been playing a ton of Heroes of Dragon Age. Part of it is due to habits developed from work and part of it is that I’m addicted to collecting the characters (it’s the Pokemon nerd in me). I love the Dragon Age role-playing games and while I can’t say that I love Heroes of Dragon Age, I admit that I’m addicted to it — worts and all.
But I’ve probably said too much. Ha! That’s where you come in. Let’s do this as a fun group activity. I’d super appreciate it if you gave the game a whirl. Please note that the early going is slow and you’ll probably need to spend a couple of hours with it before things get interesting. At that point, I’m sure you guys and gals will have lots of interesting things to say about the game. Fire away (please)!
So far so good! The best part of the game for me is that it satisfies my rpg craving without the intensity of and rpg. Set it and forget it!
This game is not for me. I gave it an honest try and I’m just not getting into it. I’ve classified this game as an automated, turn-based RPG, but every time I play, I feel like turning it off and playing Ogre Battle 64, instead. In my mind, that is the best automated, turn-based RPG I’ve ever played. Dragon Age Heroes doesn’t even come close. It may be that I know nothing about the DA universe or care about any of it’s characters, classes, lore, etc. I’m judging this based on a purely “fantasy game” genre. Maybe there are some people out there who are die-hard, hard-core DA fans that I’m sure would get a kick out of seeing these seemingly generic fantasy characters all come to life in this “one-step-better” than a board game.
To be fair, there are some interesting concepts in this game. All the standard-fare tactics that you would expect are here in addition to combining units, “consuming” units (eww) and a whole slew of power ups to help turn the battle in your favor. One of the complaints I have with this game is the sheer number of things that the game throws at you in rapid succession. You are never given a breather to soak in what you learned because at the start of the very next fight, there’s another thing to learn. The clunky user interface doesn’t help either. It is the very definition of non-user friendly. I’m starting to get really irritated by game companies (and other software developers) who think that they can just create some image on a button and be automatically universally recognized by everybody as to what that button does. For example, if there is an icon of a sword on an interface button, does it mean attack, next battle, shop for weapons?! I don’t know until I click on it. This may lead to disastrous results, especially when it catapults you into the next battle unprepared.
Now, why do I bemoan advancing unprepared, you ask? Because if you move on unprepared, you will likely get slaughtered and if you get slaughtered, you’re going to have to waste valuable resources on getting new characters or improving the ones you have. This costs either (real world) money or time. While you can theoretically not spend a single dollar in this game and still purchase items/characters, the difficulty curve makes it very hard not to do so. Granted, it’s a “free-to-play” game so you can choose just how much you want to get into it.
This model was probably another let-down for me. It could be that my generation is biased or even spoiled by the fact that purchasing a complete copy of any software meant that it was yours to do as you pleased, blemishes and all. Heroes of Dragon Age follows the modern trend of games being a “service” that you never really own but “rent” from the publisher. While HDA does not fit this definition exactly, it falls in the general category of “pay-as-you-go” game or as I like to call them, “pay-to-win” games.
Mr. Padilla mentioned the collection aspect of the Pokemon games as a comparison to HDA, but in reality, these games only share a “collection of virtual characters aspect” and nothing else. In Pokemon, you have to actually hunt down the creature and weaken it to capture it. This invokes the whole “thrill of the hunt” aspect to the game. You can also breed them, train them, teach them attacks, etc. You cannot do any of this in HDA. You get random characters by buying packs with real world currency. While the developers may say that it’s random, I suspect it is more likely that you will get a great character if you pay for the higher-priced packs. This concept makes the game “rigged” in favor of those who pay more. You can’t really claim that the randomness is a fun part of the game because you know that if you spend enough money, you will get good people. Unlike the old baseball trading cards of yore, you could spend hundreds of dollars worth of packs, but there is no guarantee that you will get that Bo Jackson rookie card. That is the “thrill of the hunt.” HDA has removed this thrill by knowing that you will always get a rare character that will completely own if you splurge on a gold pack. Another way to think about this is: How much would you like the Pokemon games if you had only weak Pokemon available to you and had to purchase powerful ones? (Also, you don’t get to EV train them or choose their attacks.) I’m guessing a lot of people wouldn’t like those changes? Why? Pricing structures aside, it will take a lot of the fun out of the game.
Other parts of the game are lacking as well, such as a reason to keep doing what I’m doing over and over and over again, which some people refer to as “story.” There was none in HDA that I could discern… or maybe I didn’t play long enough to uncover one. I will give credit to the pretty graphics. It looks great on my iPhone 5 even though the loading times were a little on the annoying side.
At the end of the day, I feel like I am playing a really convoluted game of chess where I don’t really move the pieces, but just suggest to the A.I. my overall strategy. Similarly, I have all of the emotional attachment to these characters as my chess pieces. If one dies in battle, I just replace him/her/it with another until they die. I just have to pay for the extra pieces because the guy who brought the board over to my house said I could play against him for “free.” There is nothing compelling to move me forward to to make me feel any type of emotions except for boredom and a small, nagging voice in the back of my head telling me to “stay away” from this gaming snake oil salesman.
-M
Now this is a rant!!
This game sucks.
I had to install this game 3 times before it actually completed and let me play then it baby’s me through the battle process even after the 1st battle then u can’t even choose attacks or buffs to add. What’s the point of playing an rpg if u don’t control anything.