Time of Heroes Review

The iPad is probably the great console ever created to play turn-based strategies. Moving players around on tiles and scanning a complex battlefield always works intuitively on the iPad. While Time of Heroes isn’t my favorite turn-based strategy on iOS, it was fun and had fairly decent 3D graphics.

The game was challenging almost from the start. Once I got to the third level, I had to actually start thinking about the moves I made and the units I used to attack with. There were times when I lost my hero units in early levels because I didn’t protect them well enough.

The “hero” units remind me of playing Warcraft but in a turn-based strategy environment instead of a RTS one. The units level up, can learn new skills, and give buffs to surrounding non-hero units. The heroes are unique enough distinguish the game from just any other strategy game.

The game progresses incredibly slowly if the right options aren’t selected. All players should absolutely go into the options and turn “Show Battle” off, “Quick Movement” on, “Fast AI Move” On, and “Quick Attack” on. Show Battle shows an animated battle where the player gets to watch the two armies attack each other every time an attack is made on the board. It’s fun to watch a few times, but it wastes a ton of game time if it’s left on. Quick Movement and Fast AI Move will stop showing the movement animations every time a piece is moved and, instead, just teleport the piece to its final place. And Quick Attack allows players to “move” onto an enemy instead of tapping buttons to attack.

The music gets a bit repetitive during a game but it isn’t bad. I just wish there was more options for the game to cycle through instead of repeating the same song.

The graphics aren’t comparable to anything like Infinity Blade but they're fairly good. The animations for the battle are entertaining and, graphically, nice looking. Graphics for the top-down view of the battle field look good too but unit health over all of the pieces heads sort of overpowers the overall aesthetics of the game. If the health was smaller and was a bit see-through (so it doesn’t cover the pieces as much), I think the game would look a bit better.

Time of Heroes is well worth $2.99. I would pay the same amount of money for this game if it was scaled down to 2D because the gameplay alone is worth that price. The game is universal and will play on both the iPhone and iPad.

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