With most of the major game companies are still in the festive holiday period, I have decided to showcase an indie mobile game from China as the first article of 2020. Heroes X Academy is an indie mobile strategy RPG which launched around a year ago, but recently caught my eyes when the Japanese and Korean versions were announced. A major feature of Heroes X Academy is that all characters (15 thus far) can be unlocked in-game, with no gacha for characters at all. Players can also plan tactically to take down bosses’ individual body parts, which in turn disable certain abilities! A summary of details can be seen below.
Key features based on personal gameplay:
● No character gacha: New characters (other than the starting few) can be obtained by completing story campaigns or getting 1 of his or her specialized weapons. As such, the main gacha for the game is equipment gacha (though can still be obtained in-game).
● Real tactical gameplay: It is almost similar to playing chess, with each character and enemy getting a turn each round. Some character abilities are activated by positioning, and some bosses can be attacked sequentially by body parts, somewhat like Monster Hunter!
● Deep equipment system: Other than equipment specialized for specific characters, there are many random and set equipment as well. Specialized equipment will bring their characters more power, while set equipment will sometimes provide new abilities, such as the auto-summoning of healer bots seen in the starting part of the video above. Awesome!
These are some of the observations which I made during my test run of Heroes X Academy, and it is no doubt a refreshing experience without having worrying to collect new character shards to increase their grades. As mentioned, Heroes X Academy is now being prepared for Japan and South Korea, and hopefully a publisher will bring it to western markets too!
