Hero Wars: Alliance

I do enjoy playing this game! I love collecting the heroes and the many different ways you can level them up! Sometimes the battle system seems a bit unbalanced, especially in the tower battles! They should get progressively harder as you advance up the floors of the tower, but instead they’re just completely random! I might battle a full team of level 50, purple rank heroes on floor 1, and then a team of level 47, blue rank heroes on floor 2! Seems a little backwards! I also think that instead of skipping “floors” based on the number of wins you have, you should be able to skip “battles” based on the number of wins you have! For example... winning 2 battles in the tower should get me to floor 5; skipping the battles on floors 1 and 3, and claiming the prizes on floors 2 and 4! Instead of winning 2 battles only getting me to floor 3! I’ve also noticed that some of the battles in the special events have been severely unbalanced as well! But besides all of that! This is a very enjoyable game! I’ve always enjoyed these grindy kind of games! It makes the leveling up worth the work! 😄

Pros: the game is lots of fun- I love it. The Team does a great job of giving out small free rewards via facebook and issuing new daily and weekly events. Guild wars are fun, cross server wars are fun and in game challenges keep me busy. Overall, the in game experience will keep you busy and entertained. Cons: this is definitely a pay to play game. You literally cannot “get good, get strong” or make any real progress without a credit card. The energy used in game to participate in campaign challenges is extremely small, runs out extremely fast and takes an enormous amount of time to recover. I understand the Team needs to make some kind of profit to pay its developers and staff to keep the game fun, running and for it to grow further, but we all wish they would stop being so cheap and greedy and give us more energy as well as decent rewards for completed challenges. One example is opening a “rare or epic” chest is supposed to be RARE OR EPIC. 99.9% of the time, the reward is 4K gold or 7k gold. Which to an unfamiliar person seems like a lot! It is not- at all. We, as HWM gamers go through millions- no BS- millions of gold daily to “slightly” progress. What am I supposed to do with 4/7k gold that came from a rare/epic chest? Again, this is a pay to play game hands down. And I just wish they would adjust the numbers, prizes and rewards for the people who don’t want to go into credit card debt or the people who aren’t old enough to pay in the first place.

I have been trying to find a fun game that doesn’t consume your time and money. The game does offer instant completion features, however you will have to purchase a pack to get unlimited raid tickets to do so or earn them each day in game. I have paid $1.99 to get these unlocked and that is all. Otherwise the progression is reasonable. The graphics are pretty and funny. The characters are very cartoonishly designed but still nice. I do recommend giving it a try to at least level 50 before you decide. I think the $1.99 was at least worth it to speed up grinding that would otherwise take several minutes. The basics are to gather heroes and later on titans to farm items and resources to level up further and summon more playable characters. Team synergy is very important especially in arena areas where it is on auto. I have 20+ heroes and while I do primarily use the base team I received when first starting the game, I also try to split resources to make well balanced alternates for further progression. One thing I do like about this game is the fact it shows you who needs something, where to get it, and takes you there with one click. Overall I think the worst thing I have found is the difficulty level increases abruptly, and it took me several days to get moving again due to the energy and gold limitations from trying to play as free as possible.

My biggest gripe with this game is that the advertising that drew me in to downloading the app was completely misleading. I was under the impression that there would be puzzle-solving mini-games (as their social media ads portray), but there are none. Regardless, the game is pretty fun but has the potential to become expensive if you have no patience with leveling up and progressing slowly. Almost everything in the game can be bought with or traded with Emeralds, which translates to real-world dollars eventually. Of course you CAN earn “free” Emeralds by achieving certain tasks while playing, but it’s very easy to blow them all in one go doing basic functions in the game. They like to advertise “deals” and “specials” for buying emeralds, but these are hardly ever worth it and I’m almost ashamed to say that I have spent too much money (ANY amount is too much, really) on this game. The developers really should tweak the way characters level up to make it easier and keep players engaged. Also, what happened to the story? There was a storyline about a kingdom in peril with the first few levels but now it’s just grinding through themed areas. BORING!

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Don’t let the easy on-boarding fool you; this game is 100% pay-to-win, especially once you start getting into the guild/arena stuff. To the devs credit, they have created a lot of different game mechanics, but the underlying game design is centered on making you believe that you are getting a “deal” when you spend $15 on a skin that “normally” costs $75 or when you pay 5000 emeralds (their currency, 5k is about $30 irl) to upgrade a character rather than wait. Skins are almost required in the late game as they give your character an added stat bonus. The more skins a character has, the more stat bonuses. What tipped the scale for me was their recent event where, if you completed a bunch of quests in a 3-day span, you could get cool prizes. In the past, a seasoned, diligent player could complete enough quests to get some or all of the top rewards. In this case, one of the top rewards was a skin for my favorite character as well as my top DPS character. However, the only way to complete the quest was to spend 55,000 emeralds, which roughly equates to spending $200 irl. If you want to spend hundreds of dollars on a small high, then this game is for you. Otherwise, you’d be better off spending your money elsewhere.