Heroes of Puzzle Adventure is a great puzzle RPG marred by you having to pay (review)

It’s hard for an indie game to stand out in a mobile market saturated with clones and remakes, so one way for a game studio to set itself apart is to go where no other indie dev has gone before. Like Boomzap Entertainment’s board-based RPG Super Awesome Quest,  9fury game studio’s Heroes of Puzzle Adventure lends the traditional match-3 puzzle an RPG twist.

The puzzle aspect of Heroes is how you do battle and progress across levels. Matching sword tiles up lets you deal damage, while matching shields earns you a temporary reprieve from damage. There are a total of four different tiles on the board: damage, shield, magic, and potion tiles. Of course, each enemy you fight also varies a little, though all of their attacks are governed by turns; some enemies take just one turn to deal damage, while others hit harder but take three turns.

Your ability to take and dish out hits can be altered by the items you equip on your character. Your character’s armor changes depending on what you equip, and that’s a nice touch. You can also forge items at the Blacksmith, though I haven’t yet encountered any forging supplies dropping from adventures.

Each level in the game has multiple enemies, and each enemy gets progressively tougher to beat. At the end of each level, you’re awarded with the gold and experience points you earned in the course of battle. There’s usually also an item drop.

This is about the extent of the RPG part of the game; I don’t even remember there being an actual story giving context to Heroes. I’ve noticed that many Vietnamese games (that are in English) don’t have strong storylines, though, perhaps due to the language barrier.

While Heroes of Puzzle Adventure doesn’t have the best visuals – they are pretty amateur, to be honest – I do like the gameplay. The background music isn’t the best match for the visuals, but the sound effects are solid, and the whole puzzle-battle thing is great fun.

What the game really stumbles at, however, is monetization. There seems to be no way to acquire better – and necessary – item upgrades to progress beyond a certain point unless you fork out the gems to buy higher-leveled chests. The gems can only be purchased with real money, and the chests they buy are basically a gachapon feature in disguise. Each type of chest has a set of items it could potentially drop, and each time you open a chest, you receive just one of these items.

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Heroes of Puzzle Adventure is definitely a good attempt at a puzzle RPG, but it needs two things before it can become the hit it potentially could be: a monetization strategy that doesn’t enforce a paywall and better visuals.

6.5/10.

Heroes of Puzzle Adventure is available for iOS and Android.