Heroes of Dragon Age is a weird game. It’s loaded with fan service in the form of characters and events pulled directly from the Dragon Age games and novels. Then, you spend some time with it and discover it plays just like all the other free-to-play collectible card games on the market (given, Heroes uses 3D models instead of cards). Sure, fans of the series will eat up the lore and be thrilled to use their favorite characters — but can that possibly hold up a liberal application of super-casual, free-to-play game mechanics? Dragon Age is a hardcore RPG series, after all.
Heroes of Dragon Age lets you relive ten major historical events from the Dragon Age universe. You do this through fast-paced five-on-five battles. The composition of your squad is yours to determine, you’ll just have to collect the heroes and beasts you want to send into battle. Because you have full control of your squad members, the battles you relive are entirely hypothetical. That is, modern heroes didn’t actually fight in the First Blight and demons probably didn’t fight alongside Grey Wardens and bears to eliminate darkspawn.
You’re responsible for your party’s composition and formation, but once a battle begins, combat runs on autopilot. Even the longest of fights are over in less than a minute. The historical events are broken down into five battles each, leading to a current campaign length of 50 battles. The single-player experience is stretched out by your Energy (which replenishes over time), steep difficulty curve, and the ability to replay missions for extra XP and gems.
Once you run out of Energy to play campaign quests, you can spend your Stamina to enter PvP battles. Because combat doesn’t actually require any decisions on the player’s part, both players do not need to be online to play each other. Instead, the game will just pit your party against a random player’s. Winning and losing affects your Trophy count, but these are really just used to ensure you are matched with players around your own power level. If you win, you’ll also get some gold and XP. If you don’t, you’ll at least get a small fraction of the XP.
It’s kind of cool that the game uses two separate energy bars — Energy for the campaign and Stamina for the PvP. It’s a good way to ensure both sides of the game get played even if one is much more rewarding than the other. The fact that you get gold and XP in PvP battles is important too, so that there’s a reason to play even if you don’t care about rankings and leaderboards. That said, each bar only lets you play six matches before it’s empty and refilling even one unit of the Energy or Stamina bar takes over 15 minutes.
The game features just about everything you’d expect from a free-to-play collectible card game. New heroes are acquired through summoning. When you summon, you choose which of three different summoning tiers to pay for and you get a random hero from that tier. Essentially, more expensive tiers increase your chances of finding rarer heroes. There are five rarities: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, and Legendary. Even the most expensive summoning tier (which requires gems, not gold) only guarantees a Rare. It increases your chances of finding an Epic or Legendary, but that’s still left up to chance. You can have one of your heroes consume your unwanted ones to gain XP and increase its chance of dealing double damage. If you happen to get two identical heroes, you can combine them to get a better version of that same hero. There are over 100 heroes in the game and each has four different versions, leading to an impressive 400+ available heroes. Then again, luck is the only way to get new heroes, so the presence of over 100 heroes means that it is hard to find your favorite characters and hard to find the duplicates needed to combine a hero into its next form.
The large pool of available heroes is even more impressive when you consider that the heroes are fully 3D, animated, and have good voices and sound effects. Here’s really where Heroes of Dragon Age shines. While the gameplay is shallow and repetitive, the graphics and audio are better than any other free-to-play CCG on mobile. Instead of just animated slashes and sparks adorning the screen, you’ll actually see soldiers swing swords, archer’s nock and release arrows, and dragon’s bite.
The game’s limited strategy comes in with how you compose your party. You have slots for four normal-sized heroes and one large hero (creatures like giant spiders, possessed trees, and dragons). The two heroes on your frontline get a bonus to their health, as they will tank hits for the back row until they fall in battle. The heroes on your backline have more time to plan their attacks so they have a higher chance of dealing double damage. The large heroes are generally tanky and very strong, but are also slow in combat and slow to level up.
All heroes can level up from the XP they earn in battle. Doing so increases their Health and Power. Leveling up your heroes is certainly important to success, but rarity is a much more reliable indication of a hero’s power. The color of the base that a hero stands on indicates their rarity, such as bronze for Commons, gold for Rares, and green for Legendaries. The difference from one rarity to the next is significant — most level 1 Uncommons have better stats than level 10 Commons. Rarer heroes are so much better that you’ll be saving up your gold and gems for the higher summoning tiers, which also means you’ll be bringing in new heroes at a slower rate. That’s not a very fun grind, but once you’ve got some powerful heroes to work with, you can frivolously drop gold on common heroes to be consumed by your rare ones (Consumption is the only way to permanently increase a hero’s double-damage chance).
There’s a little bit more that goes into determining who goes where in your party, but it’s pretty simple. Some heroes have special abilities such as stunning its targets or hitting all creatures in the same column. Some of these abilities are powerful enough to make up for a hero with lower stats. Also, whenever you summon a new hero, you have a chance of receiving a rune as well. Runes are consumable items that grant boosts to your whole party for a limited time. These boosts range from improving stats to resisting status effects and even minor boosts can make a huge difference in your party’s success.
I really can’t recommend Heroes of Dragon Age. It’s a really pretty package, but the gameplay falls really flat. It definitely generates a fun compulsion to collect, level up, and upgrade your heroes, but you have to wade through a lot of repetitive combat to afford all that summoning. It’s really weird that EA drew such heavy inspiration from casual, free-to-play games for a game in a hardcore RPG series. Fans of the series may be drawn to the content and lore, but most will wind up sorely disappointed by the gameplay. Players can definitely pay their way to victory, dropping real money on bundles of gems that let them afford a bunch of heroes from the highest summoning tier. Like any RPG, your party’s power is representative of how much time you have spent playing the game, but it’s unfortunately also heavily tied to the luck of the draw when summoning new heroes as well as how much money you’re able to drop on gems. Only the most diehard Dragon Age fans should feel compelled to play this game. You won’t be missing out on anything besides boring gameplay — every bit of lore in Heroes of Dragon Age is pulled directly from the existing games and novels.
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