You’ve got to hand it to Capybara: they released two of the best “smaller” videogames of 2009 within a few months of each other, and both happen to belong to a genre that I for one had been totally through with. You know a game type has officially reached saturation when Kotex makes their own clone, but Capybara proves that match-3 still has some life left in it. Critter Crunch combined the descending action of Space Invaders with a novel "food chain" matching mechanic to great effect. Clash of Heroes, on the other hand, tries its hand at providing an alternative to the Puzzle Quest-style match-3 RPG. This is a game created for everyone who, like me, devoured Gyromancer and Galactrix last year but were left feeling cold.
Clash of Heroes is a DS title, so you wouldn’t expect it to match Critter Crunch’s pristine HD visuals. But you also wouldn’t expect this game’s crude sprite art to satisfy as much as it does. It would be interesting to see how much money was spent on producing these two games, because it seems entirely possible that Critter Crunch (which costs roughly one-forth the price of CoH at retail) was the more expensive of the two projects. I wouldn’t say the visuals here are charming; it’s basically a bunch of low-pixel soldiers and demons who can only face one direction, even while walking. Graphics hounds will be somewhat non-plussed during the opening scenes, but once they begin strategizing they'll quickly cease to really care how the game looks at all.
The game is divided up into independent vignettes following the tribulations of one of five young warriors whose parents have been slaughtered by a demonic horde; therefore, there are five types of armies: elven, knight, undead, demon, and mage (think Aladdin’s Jafar, not Gandalf). Each arc follows the same basic pattern: slowly build up your army and experience level, make your way through a short quest supplemented by bounty hunting missions and pure puzzles on the side, and wrap things up with an incredibly well-designed boss fight. Just when you’re sick of using the same units and scanning the rote dialogue of one spiky-haired anime-type, the sequence ends.
The complexity of the combat slowly grows on you as you move along. You control the bottom screen, while the enemy army occupies the top. Each army type has three basic units (which roughly break down into light, medium, and heavy). At the beginning of the game, most basic units are entirely interchangeable; however, there will be some battles where it’s preferable to load out nothing but quick units. Some basic troops have special abilities, such as the undead skeleton whose remains form walls after it’s killed. The general rule is that the specificity of units becomes more important as the game progresses. By the time you’re controlling a mage army in the final section, this tendency begins to flirt with the absurd: one core unit that is basically useless, one has a slight horizontal attack, and one that only harms enemy troops.
The player has three moves per turn (two moves in the opening turn), and most decisions come down to, “Do I link these three vertically to form an attack column, or do I match three horizontally to form a wall?” You can only match units that are both the same color and the same class. Cascading is also involved here, but you’re not going to rack up the kind of massive combos you can in Bejeweled. If you do manage to match three through a cascade, you’re granted an extra move. Advanced techniques include “linking” and “fusing.” You gain bonus to attack by linking if two activated columns of attackers are the same color and set to attack during the same round. Placing two activated columns of the same type on top of each other causes them to fuse, which basically just speeds the action up and frees space on your board. Later battles require an understanding of these techniques, but early on you'll simply gain their bonuses by happy accident.
Each army also has two to three “elite” and “champion” units, some of which you’ll only encounter if you’re following side quests (or just exploring off the beaten path). Elites take up two spaces vertically, and they require two units of the same color and type placed behind them in order to activate. Champions are much stronger, many of them able to end the match with a single attack, but they require four identical units to activate and a hefty amount of waiting time after that. Most of your tactical thinking during the game will be devoted to maneuvering these bulky units around without getting them killed---unlike your basic units, you have to pay to replace each elite or champion that dies while on your side of the screen. They’re also the keys to your victory, as each has a unique use that some battles require you to understand.
The difficulty of the game comes from the fact that units have to “charge” after being activated. If a unit takes three rounds to charge before attacking, it will activate at roughly one third its total health. This makes it temporarily vulnerable to attacks from the enemy, but it’s still preferable to allowing an enemy to plow through a group of “latent” units. Even a champion, if attacked before being matched, will die in a single hit regardless of the attacking unit’s strength. That said, larger latent units do seem to soak up significantly more damage as they die. It’s all a matter of calculated loss, especially toward the end of the game.
Each story segment hero has two unique abilities: a magical attack and a wall ability. Every time the player receives damage or deals a direct attack to the enemy commander, a bit of magical power builds up. When the magic meter is full, they can unleash the hero’s attack. These vary in usefulness, from a magic arrow used to snipe the enemy commander, to a barrage of lighting bolts than can decimate enemy troops, to the conversion of all walls into fireballs (it sounds pathetic, and it is, but I actually won a battle with it once). The wall abilities are all passive, and you won’t even notice most of them. Elven walls regenerate themselves, while mages have an expedited route to tier-two wall units.
Clash of Heroes isn’t particularly trying for the first half. You’ll be engaged simply because matching three is addictive when coupled to a customizable army. Halfway through the undead campaign, though, the game will start to force you to think. A lot of Puzzle Quest-type games keep their battle segments and their pure puzzles separate. Those pure puzzles are included here, in special encounters where you’ve got to clear the enemy army within a single round through clever manipulation of tiles. What this game does exceedingly well, though, is including more pure puzzle elements into boss fights and bounty hunting missions. Of course, along with bosses that can only be bested in one specific way requiring mastery of special units comes a bit of frustration.
This significant difficulty spike has actually become a signature of Capybara’s games (if two games makes a pattern, which is arguable I suppose): Critter Crunch was given a patch to make it more manageable toward the end. Many of the boss encounters require a combination of quick learning and luck; sometimes you’re just dealt a bad hand and can’t possibly win. What makes some endgame sequences difficult isn’t so much that they’re are “impossible” per se, but that you’re not allowed to save in between them. Some people are used to simply letting their DS remain on at all times, but I, for one, enjoy the security of being able to save and turn the damn thing off when I want to.
Playthrough: Completed over the course of roughly 20 hours, every puzzle and side mission completed. No multiplayer attempted.
Disclosure: Provided for review by Capybara.
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