Kabam’s presence on the App Store is marked by consistently releasing social free-to-play games with gorgeous graphics. They are probably best known for the Fast & Furious 6 game and the city builder, Kingdoms of Camelot. Their latest release is Heroes of Camelot. In true Kabam fashion, it is a social free-to-play game with spectacular artwork. It’s a return to Camelot, but this time it’s in the form of an RPG card battle game.

Evil is consuming Camelot’s land and people. In response, King Arthur has issued a call to arms, requesting that all Knights and allied Druids seek out the Holy Grail. The legendary goblet is apparently the last hope to ever bring peace back to the kingdom. At the beginning, you’ll get to choose if your first card is a Knight or Druid. After that, all players will encounter and recruit all kinds of heroes from the various factions.

I want to be upfront about what this game is in a way Kabam isn’t in the iTunes Description: Heroes of Camelot looks like a card game, but it really doesn’t play like one. The deckbuilding strategy is pretty thin and you will literally do nothing during actual battles. The game has a rich collection of cards that vary along all the important metrics: faction, rarity, health, strength, playstyle, etc. Despite that, the playing of the game is all in how you build your party, because in battle, they’re going to be making all of the decisions.

The main course of the game is pursuing quests in an effort to reach the Holy Grail. Questing amounts to tapping the next city on your map and then mashing the “Explore” button until you get there. By the time you are travelling to the second city on your quest, you’ll need to explore about 70 times.

Questing isn’t quite that threadbare, but as a player, that’s about your only contribution to the team. Each city is divided into six areas you must explore through. Each area is home to one card you can randomly find there every time you tap explore. The luck is a major factor, as I came out of some areas with 3 or 4 copies of the same card and other areas without finding one of the local cards. Exploring costs 3 Stamina Points (something you recover over time), but you’ll be rewarded with Gold and Experience for each exploration. You can also be rewarded with a copy of the area’s card, various consumable items, or some quest dialogue. The dialogue is passable, but ultimately shallow — if you skip all of it you won’t missing out on anything important. Dialogue often leads to rewards or battle, so there’s that to look forward to. Once you make it through all of a quest’s areas, you must defeat the quest’s boss before moving on to the next one.

Alright, onto battle. Your party consists of up to three teams (you should unlock the second and third team within your first hour of the game). A team is made up of 4 cards that attack and take damage as if they were a single unit. Each card has its own health, attack power, and special abilities to contribute to its team. For each turn a team has in battle, one of its cards will trigger a special ability and then the team will attack as a group. Whichever player is the first to defeat all three of their opponent’s teams is the victor. As I said before, cards do all of the attacking on their own. You can sit and watch the match… or you can just press the Skip button to jump straight to the Victory or Defeat banner. I wish I were joking, but no — the winner of the battle is decided before it even begins.

Each card also has a mana cost. Every time you enter battle, you must spend the total mana cost of your whole party. Your mana automatically recovers over time and it will also be fully refilled every time you level up. At the beginning of the game, you can plow through battle after battle because you’ll be leveling up before you run out of mana. Bosses are the biggest problem for your mana. When you fight a boss, you’re really only going up against one big bad dude instead of a whole party of enemy cards. That said, bosses are tough and its likely they’ll knock your party out pretty regularly. Bosses keep their damage between battles though, so you can literally just keep battling them over and over until your party prevails. Losing a battle carries no penalty except that you must pay the party’s mana cost again to start a new battle. So, unless you’ve stocked up on Mana Potions or have the cash to buy more, a tough boss could drain you of your mana before you wipe him out.

There are several ways to get more cards. The two main ways you’ll get cards are by finding them randomly in quest areas and by spending Summoning Stones to summon them. You can always return to quest areas you have already been in and Explore as many times as you need to randomly find more copies of that area’s card. A card’s rarity is indicated by the number of stars on the front of the card, ranging from 1 to 5. Cards that you summon with Summoning Stones can only be in the rarity range of 1 to 3. You can also summon cards with the game’s premium currency, gems. Doing so will summon cards in the rarity range of 3 to 5. The only way to get gems is through in-app purchase. There are a few other ways to get cards, so players who don’t buy gems will still be able to get their hands on some 4- and 5-star cards. The alternate methods reward cards very slowly though, so generally players who don’t spend money on the game will have a very limited number of rare cards.

Like most free-to-play collectible card games, you can power up your cards by combining them. For some gold, you can Enhance any card by having it absorb other cards. Doing so sacrifices the absorbed cards but causes the Enhanced card to level up and gain some health and attack power. You can alternately Evolve cards (also at the price of some gold) by combining multiple copies of the same card. This causes the card to “rank up”. It will keep its same name and rarity, but it will get better stats and a new piece of artwork. The evolved artwork always looks like a more powerful version of the same character. Some cards can be evolved many times, so I found it impressive just how much artwork went into the game. For the record, you’ll find gold throughout the Quest mode and can also sell spare cards for gold.

Once you complete the second quest, you gain access to the Arena. The Arena consists of weeklong challenges where players can battle an endless stream of decks from NPCs and other players. Of course, each battle is going to cost you an Arena Ticket which you can find randomly while questing or buy with gems (the cost comes out to around a dollar every three battles). Players earn Might for defeating enemy decks. At the end of the week, the players who earned the most Might will receive prizes. All players can access up to 6 different reward packs by hitting certain Might milestones. That said, the requirement to have Arena Tickets will make it very hard for non-paying players to do well in the Arena.

Before I blow this thing to smithereens, I just want to reiterate once more that Kabam does an awesome job with their artwork. Every card, background, and UI element looks great. The card art in particular is simply gorgeous. You can zoom in any card in the game, which causes it to download a bigger version of the artwork that takes up your full screen. I think it’s an awesome feature that allows players to really appreciate the excellent illustrations even if they’re on a device that’s barely bigger than a playing card.

The Bottom Line:

So I’m looking at the whole package and I see incredible artwork struggling to hold up weak gameplay, a trite story, and unremarkable music. The artwork is so powerful that it really didn’t need much backup to push Heroes of Camelot solidly into “good game” territory, but that just didn’t happen. This game is not worth your time. Sure, it barely hits that compulsion to collect more cards, but doing so is going to be a serious drain on your time or money. This isn’t the kind of random card collecting where it’s hard to find a single rare card in the mountains of commons you’ve acquired. On the contrary, you might spend 30 minutes just to find two or three copies of the most common cards in the game. The drop rates are just not friendly and hitting “Explore” repeatedly is just not fun. I don’t know if this person exists, but the kind of person I see enjoying this game is somebody who loves managing their card collection and building a strategically synergistic deck but hates actually playing strategic card games. I guess if that’s you, this might be worth a shot, but even if it is you, good luck enjoying your card collection while it gets new additions at such a slow rate.

iTunes App Store Link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/heroes-of-camelot/id570964996?mt=8

Google Play for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kabam.newcnhoc