When Pocket Heroes was first announced back in 2005, it created a huge lot of fuzz. It’s 2007 now, and the game is finally available from its web site. But can it stack up?
Pocket Heroes ships with more than 20 maps, additional ones can be installed. At start-up, the game allows you to select a difficulty and assign players/races to colors:
Setting more than one color to human enables “hot seat mode” - this is a multiplayer mode that works by players physically passing around the PocketPC:
Pocket Heroes maps contain a variety of terrain types and buildings that look very well - the images below show a few samples:
Heroes-style games are centered around castles and heroes. Castles act as “bases” for heroes, where troops can be purchased if the appropriate buildings have been built:
Tapping a castle allows you to recruit units and build buildings:
Tapping a hero shows its properties, army and inventories - heroes are like “vehicles” for moving around the terrain:
Since Pocket Heroes is turn-based, each hero can move only a predefined distance per turn. Pocket Heroes shows the “range” of the hero when a path is created:
Heroes can interact with terrain objects - they can conquer mines, pick up artifacts and resources, and explore the terrain:
Last but not least, Heroes can also fight rogue creatures or other heroes(e.g. to take over enemy castles). The fights also happen in a turn-based style, each unit is given one order, which it executes immediately!
This review focussed on version of Pocket Heroes on a hp ipaq rx4240. The game works quite well on the ipaq(installed onto external media) - reviewing it was great fun. However, “resuming” the game after a dialog pops over it or after switching to another app is slightly unreliable…
Overall, this 19.95$ game definitely is worth it’s price in gold. While the game still has a few small quirks(resuming of game, tapping enemy units in combat), it is one of the best games I have ever seen on a mobile computer. If you like turn-based strategy games or were a longterm Heroes fan, get PocketHeroes by all means!