Heroes & Legends: Conquerors of Kolhar

What is the core concept of the average RPG but a grind for experience spread out over hundreds of battles, in the name of grabbing higher-level stuff for even more battles?

Well that's kind of what Heroes & Legends: Conquerors of Kolhar is, only it all happens rapid-fire.

The resulting fast-forward RPG is bizarre and a little awkward, but it's also fairly easy to get wrapped up in.

Heroes & Legends is essentially a series of fights against numerous enemies using a band of three heroes (selected from a total of five once you've unlocked two additional characters).

What's interesting is that everything happens automatically and in real time. So you can't pause the action to figure out your next move - you have to assess the situation quickly and react.

How can you react when the action is automatic? By shuffling your characters around, and by triggering their special abilities.

That's the entirety of the gameplay, and it feels almost like a super-fast puzzle when you're in the thick of it.

Each of your three heroes will take damage and attack on its own, but it's up to you to make sure the right hero is squaring off against the right enemy. You need to know when to freeze your opponents instead of healing your entire party too.

On top of all that you'll also want to keep an eye on the left side of the screen for loot drops, which involves a very limited amount of space and a fair bit of shuffling.

Once you get all that gear back to camp, you can break it down into raw materials for armor upgrades or forging new equipment.

As interesting as Heroes & Legends can be, it's still rather clumsy. The text is way too small on an iPhone screen, it's hard to distinguish what the different stat symbols are when leveling-up your characters, and you can't actually equip new gear from the map - you have to start a string of battles and swap it out during combat.

Heroes & Legends: Conquerors of Kolhar does manage to get by despite its awkwardness, though.

It takes some getting used to, but when viewed as a manic sort of RPG puzzle it can actually be fairly entertaining.