11 people found this review helpful
Not Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 1.4 hrs on record
Posted: 2 May, 2016 @ 5:02pm

Sadly I can't recommend this amongst the other fantasy RPGs available on PC, turn based or not.

It is very obviously a port of a mobile game, and suffers for it at every turn. The interface is horrible, both in aesthetic and usability. Simply levelling up your attributes presents you with a scrollable list of massive text - something that could easily be on one screen. It's full of this kind of thing. The entire levelling process could be on one screen, but it's split into three for touch screens.

Animation is basic to say the least, and the art style looks amatuerish as harsh as that sounds. Environments are blurry when zoomed in.

Barely any usability options that are expected of a PC game, including custom hotkeys that don't seem to support Shift key modifiers. No gamepad support.

You are limited to four premade characters with what looked like a small amount of talents (not sure if more unlock later).

There is a massive lack of feedback for the player. You've no idea if your characters are buffed for example without diving into their character status (which of course takes up the whole screen), and even then it won't list what buffs are on them -- just the affects of the buffs. Maybe I am wrong about this -- I hope I just missed it. There is no combat log, so you're just left to guess what is going on unless you want to inspect and memorise each enemy's stats and yours and do the math in your head. There is not even a basic % hit chance indicator when mousing over things. Abilities that have a ranged component give no indication of that range that I could see, leaving you to constantly count tiles. This lack of feedback and polish is everywhere.

It might be good as a mobile game, but there is just nothing compelling about it in the PC space. Combine that with the poor usability and you get a dud IMO.

Their follow up game, Templar Battleforce, is FAR better. Some of the usability concerns remain, but it's generally much slicker and has a much more unique theme and structure which carried it through for me. The theme in Heroes of Steel seems as generic as it gets.

Note - I only played 90 minutes or so, just couldn't stand the shortfalls any longer to play more. I hope the devs focus on PC sensibilities a lot more for their next PC release.
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1 Comments
Trese Brothers  [developer] 3 May, 2016 @ 6:40am 
Thanks for the feedback. We are always working to improve.

Each character has from 10-11 potential Talents to unlock, only starting with a couple. As soon as you start leveling up, you can unlock these Talents. Each can all be leveled up to power 10, so there is a great deal of build-configuration available.

If you look in the bottom right corner of the screen, you can see a floating list of all the icons of the Buffs that the selected character currently has on. If you click on any of these icons, it brings up the full list of Buffs + Weapon / Armor / Gear effects. This list also will display Buffs that are about to expires, giving warning in their last 3 turns via the icons.