{"id":25302,"date":"2014-06-21T08:00:19","date_gmt":"2014-06-21T13:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/?p=25302"},"modified":"2014-06-24T16:34:47","modified_gmt":"2014-06-24T21:34:47","slug":"ios-review-glorious-8-bit-puzzle-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/25302-ios-review-glorious-8-bit-puzzle-action\/","title":{"rendered":"iOS Review: Glorious 8 Bit Puzzle Action!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Horde1\"<\/a>It\u2019s been a while friends, and for that I apologize. However, I\u2019m back with a whole new pile of games to play and we\u2019re gonna start it off with a bang. It\u2019s been made pretty clear on this blog that I\u2019m not a huge puzzle fan, but on occasion I find one that I fancy. This is one of those times. Horde of Heroes<\/a> is a neat combo of fantasy RPG with leveling and stats and a puzzle game with match three mechanics. Think Bejeweled with a buster sword<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The game starts you off with a character creation screen, and you get to pick from a handful of nearly unrecognizable clusters of 15-32 pixels to make your character look\u2026 like something. Some of the items it wasn\u2019t really clear what they were unless you read the name. Even with my love of pixel art and being a pixel artist myself I found that some items \u2026 probably should have been scrapped early on.<\/p>\n

\"HordeOfHeroes1\"
It was the only one with spikey hair. Which I feel obligated to use in RPGs.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The game offers four main different colors of puzzle pieces, red, green, purple, blue. Each one correlates to one of your stats, and affects the gameplay based on what color you choose to break. For example, if you were to connect three red pieces, this is for your physical damage attribute and does more damage to the creature your fighting based on your stats. The better your stat, the harder you hit\/ recover health\/ shield yourself\/ etc. I think its really neat that the world map for this looks like it was created by a bunch of guys playing D&D, casting magic missiles into the darkness and such, with its pixelated tabletop and dice strewn about.<\/p>\n

\"HordeOfHeroes2\"
Eels that drop ham? Yeah, that\u2019s gross. Would not eat. 0\/10.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One of the nice things about working with pixel graphics, is you can pack a lot into a small package since graphically there\u2019s not much to each \u201cthing\u201d be it an item or a monster. Horde of Heroes did just that. Offering over a million combinations of loot such as armor, weapons, items, etc. That level of customization is dwarfed only by the customization in my second MMORPG I\u2019m working on, where we have 64,000 styles of hair alone.<\/p>\n

Frankly I am quite happy with this game and it got quite a few hours of gameplay out of me, which is really good and pretty rare for a puzzle game to manage to do. While I certainly wasn\u2019t challenged that often I have to say some of the levels that give you a limited number of moves to accomplish something in fall into the Candy Crush trap<\/a>. Meaning random generation of pieces could make or break your ability to win a level. I would have rather seen these levels have static placement of pieces to help solidify strategy and teach me to look for certain things, or fail trying. Sadly all I got out of these levels was \u201clearn how to skip by spending your gemstones\u201d or be as frustrated as Jack Nicholson in The Shining<\/a>.<\/p>\n