Meh. P2W, cluttered UI, slooow dl of data. – Alliance: Heroes of the Spire Review

Kid’s cartoon graphics are pretty cool though the dialogue is cheesy. The character variety is nice. The animations are decent, very cartoonish. Seems like they’re trying for the 10-13 age group. But they’re well done. The game play is simple enough. It’s the same as any other summoner game. The UI is cluttered. They try to present everything on screen (like special events, quest, sale bundles, whatever and it’s horrible. It seems that when they ordered their game template, they chose every add-on they could. They tried to pack as much into the game as possible so it would seem like it’s worth spending money on it. And they pretty much give it to you all in the first few levels. However, it makes the game unwieldy for beginners. There’s too much stuff going on and all the ads for the events beginners can’t even take part in ruins the interface. I have a 9.7” screen and the actual game area might use half of it. The rest is miscellaneous info, most of which is unnecessarily displayed (like events and sale bundles). Speaking of sale bundles, in a previous reply to another review the company said that the IAPs don’t do much and free players have the same benefits. That’s a bold lie. This thinly-veiled cash-grab is a P2W game, just like most games of this style. It seems they cut back the sale pop-ups because of some past reviews, but it’s still annoying. Loading screens for days. If you just play without downloading the data pack, you get loading circles every few minutes. I tried to download the data pack (200MB or so) and 10 minutes into the download over WiFi, it was not even a quarter finished. Maybe I just picked bad times, but I tried multiple times during the day and in the middle of the night. Ridiculously slow every time. The character gear equipping is strange. I got a complete set of some epic armour, but it won’t equip all of them to one character. And there is no unequip. Who does that? Pay in-game money to swap equipment? Whose dumb idea was that? The gold dropped in the game is barely even enough to keep the characters up to par. If you don’t want to pay when equipping new gear, the old equipment gets destroyed. That’s dumb. If you change your clothes IRL, do you get charged to keep your old clothes? No. Do your old clothes automatically get destroyed? No. Why should it here? Oh yeah..because it’s a cash grab of a game. Gotta find every way to get people to spend money. I’ve played a lot of similar games and this one of the few I’m having a hard time sticking with. I’m definitely not giving them any money.
Review by ohmyiv on Alliance: Heroes of the Spire.