Dragon Age 3 is still, what seems like ages away and I know I’ve got pretty bored with the endless play-throughs of Dragon Age 2. Electronic Arts have released what they feel could be the answer to our impatience Heroes of Dragon Age.
Heroes of Dragon Age is made up of two different elements. First there’s an auto-battling RPG, where you send your party against a variety of monsters and watch them as they duke it out to the death. Secondly, there is a collecting element where you can buy other party members, and combine or upgrade them.
You are given a basic party of fighters to begin with, two in the front rank and two in the rear (he he). The fighters in the front rank have a bonus to their health, to make them more effective as tanks. The fighters in the rear will get a bit of a boost to their damage. So in short, put your hardest warriors in the front and the big damage dealers at the back to maximise their effectiveness.
The game is divided into a number of story-lines taken from the Dragon Age series, such as the cursed werewolves etc. Each storyline has five battles that culminate in a boss battle. When you enter a battle, there is nothing more for you to do except watch and see how it turns out.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T6iLpvIgF4
When or indeed if you win your battle you are awarded a few xp, some gold and in some cases some blue gems which are the paid-for currency in Heroes of Dragon Age. The fighters who took part in the battle will also gain xp, and in some cases they’ll gain a level that increases their health, and damage making future fights that bit easier.
The fighters are divided into 4 categories, bronze, silver, gold and ultimate. These fighters within these categories vary greatly but all are represented within the Dragon Age games themselves. The bronze fighters are generally the sort of rank and file troops your party would be kicking seven shades of poopy out of, while gold and ultimate fighters are the named characters youd find in the Dragon Age series, such as Morrigan, or Alistair.
There are two ways you can get access to these characters, first you can win them in certain bonus battles or, and more likely you will buy them.
- Bronze packs can be bought for 350g
- Silver packs can be bought for 1350g
- Gold Packs can be bought for 37 blue gems
- Ultimate packs can be bought for $1.99
There you have it, a brief look at the ins and outs of Heroes of Dragon Age, but is it actually any good, and worth your time to download?
It’s a tricky one, despite it being yet another game in the Dragon Age franchise, crammed with familiar characters and themes it does have a few of negative points, one slightly irritating thing, one extremely annoying thing and one or two mildly vexing things.
The slightly irritating this is that each battle you fight in expends one point of energy, and you have a grand total of 6 energy. Yep, six energy, so six battles before you have to wait for your energy to recharge. The recharge rate is 1 point of energy every 7-8 minutes. If you work out the maths you get about 5-10 minutes of game time before you have to wait for your next point. In other words over half your playtime is waiting around for you to have the energy to do something. At least your energy is refilled when you gain a level.
The extremely annoying thing is the obscenely high number of crashes that Dragon Age puts you through, which wouldn’t be so much of a problem if the game was quicker to load. Maybe my meager iPhone 4s is just not powerful enough.
There are achievements in Heroes of Dragon Age, and the game centre decides to tell you about the ones you have achieved every time you load the game. Without fail, every time I log on I get informed that I have completed the tutorial or hoarded 3000 gold.
Game-wise, Heroes of Dragon Age is alright. It’s not awesome or terrible; it lies in that giant grey area in the middle labeled ‘Ok’. However the crashes, combined with the lengthy and numerous loading screens and stuttering graphically intense animations detract a lot from the ability to play the game, to the point where it takes a fair amount of willpower to play the game, for all 10 minutes at a time.
Unless you’re a die-hard Dragon Age fan, I’d probably leave Heroes of Dragon Age alone for the time being until a patch or two has sorted this things out. You can download Heroes of Dragon Age for Android from here and iOS from here.
N.B. I might have been a little too hasty. Dragon Age Legends seems to be a lot more stable now. It hasn’t crashed on me in ages, so ignore the crashing bit it was either me or they’ve fixed it.
