Dungeon crawlers have been a staple of the gaming genre for over a decade. There have been ample choices on the Android platform for this genre. Games are finally starting to fill this gap and one of the best choices is Heroes Call. Created by Defiant Development, Heroes Call is a beautiful top down dungeon crawler that is well worth your time.
Starting out you’re prompted with a screen to choose your character. Currently your choices are limited to the Blood Knight and the Plague Wizard. There is also a Combat Alchemist and a Shadow Assassin class labeled as ‘coming soon’. Intrigued by this mystical Plague Wizard it was time to dive into the game and see what it had to offer. Well…not exactly, after deciding to play the Plague Wizard a screen promptly stated that there was an insufficient number of gems and gave me the option to purchase. The decision had been made for me, Blood Knight it is.
Heroes call takes place in the magical town of Brineside. As expected there is something wrong and you must become a hero to save the good people from bad things. Jumping into the game you’re given about four sentences of back story and a brief tutorial on attacking. Simply tap on an enemy create combos and aside from that your hero will auto attack on his own. Moving around is just as easy, simply tap on the ground where you would like to go and your hero will proceed over there. After you’ve made your way through the short path of tunnels a guild dispatcher will hire you to become an adventurer.
Surprisingly Brineside isn’t a town at all, it’s more of a series of menus. Working as central hub these menus give you the option to use a blacksmith, tavern, check out the guild or the appraiser. The blacksmith is what you would expect a blacksmith to be, you can buy weapons there or sell the massive amounts of loot you pick up during each quest. You can sync up your facebook to share achievements and invite friends in the tavern. Something most people don’t do, if that’s your thing it’s right there. Checking out the guild will let you replay old missions for more loot and experience, you’re going to need to do this since the difficulty of enemies escalates pretty significantly early on. The appraiser is the person you want to speak with to identify items, it works slightly different than most dungeon crawlers. There is a slot you put the unidentified item in and it takes time to identify, the better the item, the longer the wait. At the beginning you only have one slot and you can buy another one for 1,000 gold. It doesn’t take long to amass 1,000 gold so it’s a worthy purchase. The final slot needs to be purchased with actual money through gems.
Now that we’re on topic of micro-transactions let’s talk about the ones in heroes call. You can purchase gems which can be used to buy significantly better weapons at the blacksmith, unlock other heroes to play as and buy identify scrolls that can completely bypass the need to have the appraiser look at the item. 320 of these gems cost around $10.00 and if used sparingly could last a while. Thankfully they’ve made every quest free so that you no longer have to purchase additional ones when you get into the late game. You can also find gems during each quest, but after playing for around two hours I amassed a grand total of two of them so don’t count on it.
Graphically this game puts the Tegra processor to work with great features such as; rag doll physics, dynamic lighting, and particle effects. Everything looks amazing on the Nexus 7 including the animations of your hero and the enemies. Another great thing is the sound effects. Amazing sound effects aren’t necessarily essential, but these ones do a decent job of contributing to the dungeon atmosphere.
Overall, Heroes call is a great game, this will provide many hours of dungeon crawler fun on the Android platform. Spending a few dollars on it could increase that time a bit more but, you should be able to get your fill without the use of in app purchases.
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