Game Reviews

BattleHand - A solid and gorgeous fantasy blend of CCG and RPG

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BattleHand - A solid and gorgeous fantasy blend of CCG and RPG
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| BattleHand
What's BattleHand then?

It's a brand new mobile game by a few former Fable developers that blends elements of CCGs and RPGs.

How does that work?

Well, you gather a party from a selection of fantasy hero clichés and then equip each of them with a deck of eight cards. Each card represents a weapon, item, or spell you can use in battle.

Then you fight your way through the campaign mode, take on other players in PvP, or test out your hand in dungeons and challenges.

There's plenty to do then

That's right, but you can't do all of it at the beginning. As you grow in fame you'll level up and steadily unlock more features.

This is probably for the best as you'll want to spend most of your time in the campaign while you're getting to grips with building a deck.

Oh, is it hard?

Not at first but the difficulty does ramp up fairly quickly. At that point you'll need to start thinking about levelling up your characters and cards, and evolving the latter.

The issue with this is that you just don't earn enough gold or booster cards to keep your characters and cards at a high enough level to tackle the content. This becomes more difficult as you unlock more characters.

Is that fair?

Not really, but, as it's a free to play game, this is how you're encouraged to spend money. You can purchase gold, card packs, and gems as an IAP and this starts to become essential the further you get in the game.

Couldn't you just spend all your gold and booster packs on your favourite characters and ignore the rest?

It's a good idea until you start delving into elemental weaknesses. Each character is aligned to an element which is strong against a corresponding element and weak against another.

It's a decent system when it works but you'll need to keep all of your characters and cards around the same level to ensure you can bring the right ones into a scrap with you.

This isn't sounding positive

That depends. As an RPG and a CCG it's excellent until you hit the F2P roadblock. At that point you'll either persevere, spend money, or give up completely.

If you do persevere, there's a deep, fun, gorgeous and incredibly well-animated mobile game here.

BattleHand - A solid and gorgeous fantasy blend of CCG and RPG

BattleHand is a gorgeous and finely-tuned blend of CCG and RPG which is somewhat spoiled by poor free to play implementation
Score
Chris James
Chris James
A footy game fanatic and experienced editor of numerous computing and game titles, lively Chris is up for anything - including running Steel Media! (Madman!)