14 DAY TRIAL // Heroes & Legends: Conquerors of Kolhar is an upcoming game from Phoenix Online Studios, that aims to blend story and combat in a classic rendition of the genre.
The premise is pretty simple, you are put in control of three warriors, sent to investigate some suspicious remote dealings at the edge of a fantasy kingdom, and the game has an intense focus on combat.
That kind of adventure might sound like something out of an old Final Fantasy game, especially given its turn-based combat system, but Heroes & Legends: Conquerors of Kolhar is pretty far from that.
Instead of the free-roaming style employed in traditional role-playing games, you are treated to a map of the kingdom, and you simply select whether to further advance the story or to revisit one of the older chapters, to grind some mobs for better loot and additional levels, much like in a tablet game.
The story is delivered via stationary portraits and text, and the entire design of the game is conducive to the fact that the game was designed for touch-based controls and small screens.
It's not however bad, it just gives it an overall lightweight feeling. That however can also mean that you can always jump in whenever you have 15 minutes to kill, do some battling and advance the story, without needing to commit larger periods of time to the game.
You control a mage, a fighter and a paladin that play pretty much the way you would expect, and you can unlock more characters as you progress through the campaign.
When selecting a new destination on the overworld map, you are taken to the combat screen, divided into a 3v3 grid, with your heroes on the left hand side and the enemies on the right. Positioning is pretty important in the game, and you can always use your hardiest heroes to take the brunt of the assault and have your weaker ones fight the more feeble opponents.
This positioning bit becomes increasingly important as you level up, because you can choose to spend points to increase the physical and magical resistances of characters in a specialized manner, and then swap their positions according to the enemies that your are facing.
When leveling up, you can also spend points to improve the general quality of the loot that you get from monsters, in order to access better drops, and you can also evolve your characters' offensive abilities.
The weird part about combat is that instead of planning everything in a turn-based system, having characters act their turns in order, the game chooses to have everything happen automatically, on a time-based system that uses progress bars that fill up faster or slower, depending on the attack.
In addition to the auto-attacks, you can also select up to three abilities from each of your characters, which share a similar mechanic, based on pretty long cooldowns. As you level up, you will gain access to more abilities, so you can swap out the beginning ones for more useful ones or for some that better complement your chosen play style.
When you get better equipment, you swap them from the loot bar on the left for the pieces you already have, and in case you don't get lucky, there is also a crafting system that allows you to break stuff up into base components and create new, more powerful items.
During my time with the game so far, the thing that has miffed me the most is the fact that the game seems to be more in line with free-to-play mobile titles than with a proper PC role-playing game, and the fact that your crew auto-attacks makes you feel less involved in what's going on, just waiting for cooldowns and such.
It doesn't feel bad, but it doesn't feel like it's particularly good either, the sort of thing you kill some time with while waiting for something meatier to come out, in case you like fantasy RPGs.
In any case, I'll come back with a proper review of Heroes & Legends: Conquerors of Kolhar on August 21, 2014, when the game launches.
