Heroic Dungeon

Review

Match 3 is one of my favourite types of games as it is really simple to play and the difficulty increases as you progress through the game. I enjoy playing mine sweeper games too. So what would you get if you joined both of these genres together and created a hybrid with a bit of a twist?  In this case, you’d be playing Heroic Dungeon.

Heroic Dungeons has 7 dungeons to beat. As you land on the main menu, you’ll see a cute character on your left with coins just underneath it, and a booster button on the right hand side of your screen. By clicking on the character, you’ll be able to purchase upgrades for your hero (if you have coins, of course). Most of the upgrades are either for your strength (represented by a sword) and health (represented by a heart).  If you’ve been playing for a while and have accumulated enough coins, you can buy booster health or strength packs before entering your next dungeon.   

The gameplay has two phases. Firstly, there’s the dungeon, which is represented by a square of 25 tiles. You must find the dungeon key in order to move to the next floor by clicking on each tile. To give you an idea, the 7 dungeons have 25 floors to clear. As you start clicking on tiles, some will reveal a heart or a sword which will be added to your health and strength. Others might have a coin or chest. Click on the chest and you will receive either additional coins, a crystal, a heart or a sword, which go towards either your health or strength. Other tiles might hold nothing, while yet others may contain monsters to eliminate. Tiles that are next to monsters can’t be accessed until the monster has been killed.

That leads us to the second phase, the battles.  A new square with 64 monster heads of different colours will appear and you have to join as many of the matching heads as possible in order to fill in your hero gauge, which is located underneath your character. Most of the time, you have two turns with which to fill the gauge to its maximum capacity.  Occasionally you’ll have three turns, but that will depend on the enemy you’re fighting. If you manage to join a minimum of five heads, you’ll receive a power play which will appear on the last head you joined. All you have to do to activate it is to make sure it is part of your next series of matching heads. Now all enemies have health and strength, too. As an example, if your enemy health is 30, you must have a minimum of 30 strength points to kill him on your first go. If you don’t, he will strike back and damage your health with whatever strength points he has. You do have the ability to purchase additional points before your strike, but it will cost you coins each time you want to do so. The good news is that you’ll receive a coin each time you eliminate a foe. If you manage to unveil all the 25 tiles, you will receive a bonus at the end of each floor.  As you go deeper into the dungeon, your enemy will have more health and strength points and the match 3 grid will be slightly more difficult too.  In the event of your hero’s death, you can use a crystal to revive him.

The graphics are cute and the soundtrack is ok. I haven’t encountered any issues with the game; it runs very well. It is very repetitive, however, and needs more content in my opinion.