Hero Defense Haunted Island Review

Hero Defense

What better way to get an early start on the Halloween season than with a game that is all about vampires, skeletons, and things that go bump in the night. In Hero Defense Haunted Island you must defeat Count Necrosis. He is the world’s most powerful vampire. You must bring together a team of heroes that can take him down. Count Necrosis is bent on unleashing an army of the undead to help him gain world domination. Each member of your team has a different ability to help combat the various creatures of the Count’s army. To make things worse Count Necrosis is actually Jack’s father.

Hero Defense is basically a tower defense game without the towers. You can move your heroes anywhere on the map that you want. Placement of your heroes in key in order to defeat the map. When you first start out you only have Jack and Barrow. Once you place your heroes they automatically start fighting the bad guys on their own. There is no need to figure out what moves they should do. Your only job is to figure out where to place them on the map. You the rest of the heroes as you progress in the game. Each one has different abilities, and weapons. The skill points in this game are directed towards upgrading your hero’s abilities rather than magic attacks like in other skill based games. Runes are also used to give your hero a boost. Each one is used to give your hero a different ability such as increased speed or attack damage.

As I stated before each hero is effective against different enemies. Barrow the blue hero is effective against blue skeletons, Jack against red vampires, Sam against zombies, Jane against igors, and Wylde against werewolves. Strategy is key in this game. You can’t just place your heroes wherever and hope for the best. You will actually find yourself moving your heroes around a lot during the game. Each map has its own gate that the heroes have to guard.  Only 5 enemies are allowed to pass through each gate in each map in total. You can not pass a map if your gate reaches 0. Even though the gate says 5 in reality its really 4. Where you place your hero is where they will stay. If the hero is out of reach of the bad guys then they will pass through the gate.

hero-defense

You have to survive every round in each map to move onto the next one. In one map there are 8 rounds of enemy assault. You have to survive all 8 of them. Even if you are short of one and just pass 7 you lose. Leaving you to redo the entire map all over again. Believe me it gets annoying have to redo a map over and over again from scratch. It would have been easier to save your progress and only have to redo the round you lost. Completing the story is important if you want to unlock the entire town. Count Necrosis completely burned down the town. It is up to you to rebuild it. You can upgrade buildings and each one has its own purpose. Unlocking the armory allows you to upgrade heroes weapons. Unlocking the academy allows you to upgrade skills for heroes.

There is ranked PVP, co-op mode and single-player mode. You don’t need to be online to play the game. Each map has its own difficulty settings but you have to beat that map in order to unlock it. Campaign is the easiest setting.  Challenges are available in each map with rewards. Campaign claims to be the easy difficulty setting but in reality its not. Compared to the other difficulty settings Campaign is easy. But it still holds its own challenges that are anything but easy. Unless you are very skilled at tower defense games and have a lot of patience I would not advice trying the harder difficulty settings.

Hero Defense

The game does a great job of explaining the mechanics of the game. You aren’t left on your own to figure out what’s what. The menus are very easy to navigate through. As you play through each map the game definitely gives off the vibe that the entire island is haunted. You can feel the whole spooky Halloween vibe throughout the entire game. Playing it I felt like I was taken back to the old black and white monster movies. If I could use one word to describe the game it would be macabre but Hero Defense does a great job of not going overboard. You won’t see any gore or excessive amounts of violence. It’s a monster game that anyone at any age can get into.

The graphics have a cartoony look to them similar to what you might see in Clash of Clans but with its own originality to them. Each character has their own color, and original look that sets them apart. Each map is detailed, dark, gives off a spooky vibe that fits into the theme of the game. Everything from the monsters to the town has their own unique look yet fit in with the haunted island feel. Despite what some gamers may say graphics definitely matter. Great graphics can greatly enhance the user experience. Another feature some PC games tend to ignore completely is sound. Luckily Hero Defense does not. The music in this game has a nostalgic Halloween feel. I was also surprised to hear the characters actually talking.

The controls are great if you have a normal mouse. If you are using a mouse pad on a laptop or tablet the controls are difficult. The mouse is really the only controls you need. Hotkeys are available to summon your characters but that is optional. It is your basic point-and-click game. To move your characters on the map you just click and drag them. To move the camera around you use the arrow keys.It can take more than one try to complete some of the maps. Once you have you may not want to go back and replay that map. Hero Defense Haunted Island has great macabre style graphics, interesting story, simple controls, and fun yet addictive gameplay.

Rating 8

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary PC code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.

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