The Myth of Hero Legends

If anyone has played and enjoyed Bimboosoft's Battle of Tiles on the PC, there is now a game on the iPhone/iPod that plays quite similar to it.

It's called The Myth of Hero Legends and its about a party of heroes, who you position and then slide along, and fight oncoming enemies. The party has mages, healers, fighters and archers/spear throwers, and you manage their physical positioning and their abilities fire off as they commence an attack. You earn experience and gold as you progress through the waves, and you can purchase/bribe enemy types to join your band to help against the onslaught. It has a chinese flavour to it, and the party arrangement isn't as tight as BOT, but its fluidity and smaller scale suits the iPhone better I think.

You tap your adventurer icon to select them or deselect them from the party, then to advance you swipe the screen in a given direction and the selected units move forward in that direction. As you do, the enemy move towards you. So you basically set up a movement and protection formation and advance, and see how the combat turns out. Its essentially turn based. If you healer is near a unit that takes damage he will heal it. If your ranged troops spot an enemy in their range they will fire. Similar you use the fighter as a shield for your weaker support troops. You tap and hold over the units or the enemy to see their stats. Although I don't think there is any equipment management or whatever, but your troops do level up as they do damage to the enemy. So it behooves you to keep all your troops rotated through a position where they can attack or kick off their specials, because thats how they level up I think. You can purchase incoming enemy and add them to your party if you can get them back fast enough. So you can take on their abilities and level them up.

Its right up my street, I can see me putting some time into it, because I was utterly charmed by BoT, and this is a smaller more manageable scale. With nicer graphics. I think its about £1.79 on iTunes at the moment.

Worth the effort if you like turn based party RPG-lite strategy.

Elements

Elements is a web based fantasy card battler. It has a rather simpler more casual mechanic than Magic the Gathering, but it is obviously inspired by that game.



It relies on a constructed deck to maximise your advantages on the card draws, and the synergy between certain card combinations. Rather than "mana" you have elemental Pillar cards that deliver a constant flow of currency to summon other cards, whether they be offensive creatures, or support cards such as spells, shields or weapons.

Each player has a guarenteed energy slot for their Elemental school (of which there are 12). The player also has an offensive weapon slot, for bonus attacks and a defensive slot for a shield or reflector of some sort. In addition to this, your permanent cards, such as pillars and artifacts or effects cards stack up at the back. Your creature cards are laid up front, where they exert an attack at the end of each turn.

Like in Magic the Gathering, certain Creatures have special abilities which can be activated before you initiate the attack by ending the turn. Some spell cards attack or destroy creature cards, some target the permanent support cards, or even the players life points themselves.

Theres no blocking as such, but each creature has an offensive value, and a hit point value that can be whittled down by offensive spells, until the creature dies.

A win in the game can reward you with gold coins (which you can use to buy more cards), rank points (to demonstrate how good you are, conversely losing a game can forfeit some of those points) and loot attempts (by spinning a slot machine wheel) to gain you some random free cards.

There is a deck builder and a bazaar where you can purchase extra cards, although I've not investigated the player trading mechanism at this time.

The game can be played against the AI at different levels, or you can take it online against other players (which costs gold coins to form a challenge), if they are of a similar skill rank.

The game presents itself well, and delivers a very easy to pick up casual card battler. It also has a quest based system, whereby you complete certain tasks, and you gain rewards. These quests start off as quite easy, such as buying a card, or selling a card, and become harder as the rewards become better, such as gaining a certain rank score.

Since the game is free to play, I can thoroughly recommend the game to anyone interested in a quick blast of collectible card gaming with the ability to change your elemental nature, customise your deck, play against other friends, level up your rank and link your Elements account into Facebook.

Its simple and elegant enough for everyone to play, yet has some complexity to keep card battling gamers amused for a while.

For more information check out the Elements Wiki.