NOT A Review: Heroes of Dragon Age [Android]

–

Heroes of Dragon Age is a Free-To-Play strategic, CCG-inspired 3D combat game from EA Swiss Sarl.

Here the goal is to build the perfect squad, using a combination of tabletop-like figurines based on characters from across the beloved Dragon Age universe, including rare dragons, giant golems, and other devastating creatures – each with unique abilities, stats, and factions.  Once gathered you can then send your squad out to face epic quests and boss battles, giving you the chance to relive places, times, and storylines straight from the franchise.  And of course, there is also the online leaderboard, where you can fight for eternal glory by facing your squad off against other random players’.

The premise has a lot of promise, however despite the slight strategic elements present, the gameplay is simplistic to the point of being non-existent, and fails to deliver.  It is not helped by the limitations placed upon the game by the Free-To-Play model either – unfortunately at the end of the day, it is almost impossible to advance in the game without paying for premium content, making this a strictly Pay-To-Win title.

– 

HDA +

• Impressive graphics and character designs.
• Random drawing of characters as ingame rewards.  Supposedly all of the characters have a chance of being drawn – but non-paid drawings have extremely lower chances of winning you the higher grade and the more useful characters.  This strangely gives the game an almost addictive quality, since you are constantly wanting to reach that next “just one more” reward drawing.

HDA –

• Restrictions and the Free-To-Play gameplay designs makes this game almost unplayable without paying.
• Difficulty of the main story quests makes it impossible to proceed in the game without the more powerful higher grade characters – and unfortunately the higher grade characters are next to impossible to obtain without paying.
• The same problem exists for the leaderboard side of the game, where you are faced off against players with much higher grade characters, making it impossible to compete without higher grade characters of your own.
• Elements like character factions and abilities add supposed depth to the gameplay.  However any depth proves to be artificial, since all strategy are overpowered and rendered inconsequential by the grade of your characters.

–