Slay Ghouls, Ghosts, and More in the Classic-Style RPG Hero’s Way for iPad

By Juli | September 18, 2011 | No comment yet

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Hero’s Way is a classic side-scrolling RPG created by Lakoo, the same company that brought you the popular iDevice MMO Empire’s Way.

In Hero’s Way, play as a witch, a warrior, or a rogue and fight your way through a seemingly endless string of monsters and bosses to level up. On your journey, you will collect a wide variety of armor, weapons, and loot to aid your hero.

When starting the game, after a short tutorial, players are prompted to choose classes for their three heroes. Witch, warrior, and rogue are available, and you can choose one of each, or play with three witches if you so desire.

From there the game shifts immediately to the action. Your heroes will continually walk forward into enemies and fight them automatically, which is actually rather boring. While you can move them around to flank enemies and tap a button to cause them to run, merely watching all of the action tends to get tedious after just a few minutes. Additionally, monsters tend to swarm, making every fight similar.

Luckily monsters drop plenty of coins and the occasional treasure chest filled with items, and item, armor, and weapon upgrades are the saving grace of this game. It’s not entertaining to watch your heroes battle on their own, but it is fun to level up and outfit them in shiny new armor.

As in most RPGs, as your heroes level, stat upgrades will be available. There are three in this game: strength, intelligence, and agility, and each hero relies on a different stat to do damage.

I may not have greatly enjoyed regular combat, but I did find that collecting items to be entirely addictive. Boss fights also required slightly more interaction, as heroes had a tendency to die often. Reviving after death is instant, but it requires 100 coins. Boss fights are expensive, and I was never sure if I was going to win, making encounters with bosses fairly interesting.

After the two areas, I ran out of coins to purchase armor upgrades, and the acquisition of new coins was rather slow. This is to be expected, of course, since this is a free game. The company wants you to invest in the purchase of coins in the app. Unfortunately, without a coin purchase, gameplay grinds to a halt because weapon and armor upgrades necessary to fight increasingly difficult enemies become unobtainable.

Of course, you can fight lower level areas more than once, but that just adds more tedium to a game that’s already repetitive and slow. Personally, I would much rather pay for a great game upfront than to be forced into the continual purchase of coins.

Despite its shortcomings, this is a game that can be fun, especially for RPG lovers. I’d recommend downloading it and checking it out, since it is initially free.

What I liked: The wide variety of armor and weapons available, plus the graphics, were really the best part of this game for me.

What I didn’t like: Progression is very difficult and tedious without the purchase of coins within the game. I’d wager to say that it’s not worth playing if you don’t plan on purchasing coins.

To buy or not to buy: Well, since it’s free, it’s worth checking out.