Looking at Palm Heroes I would swear this is a direct port from another platform. Why do I say that? Well it just looks like it. After doing a little research I found out that it’s a Windows mobile game and I think the iPhone version must have been secondary.

When you zoom in the entire game becomes horribly pixelated back to the days of 8-bit gaming. However, when zoomed out the game looks nice. The only problem is that everything is so small you can barely see it. So you’re forced to play in the chunky pixelated screen much of the time. What a waste of graphics power in the iPhone.

That’s not to say that the game isn’t interesting. I have been playing hour upon hour of it. But that’s only made me realize all of the flaws that much more. The basic mechanics of the game are simple enough. You start out with a hero and work to raise armies enough to overcome your enemies. But that’s all there really is to the game even thought they offer you a couple dozen levels to do it on. The game calls itself an RPG but it is really a TBS (turn-based strategy) as there is very little interaction that would be considered role-playing. You hardly have any control over how your heroes develop and in general it lacks all the aspects of what separate an RPG from other types of games.

The sounds in the game are bland. In fact, there are no battle sounds even. The game goes strangely quiet when you enter a battle (which is also turn-based) and the fight plays out before you. The characters have little to no animations and they’re generally so small as to not be able to be appreciated anyway. The environmental sounds are redundant and often standing near a building may very well drive you mad from the redundancy of the sounds coming from it. Especially the stables and the forges.

But flaws and one-dimensional gameplay aside, it’s not a bad little TBS. If offers a variety of items that you can pick up along the way which help strengthen your hero and armies, you do get to choose a skill to train when your hero levels up (from a pre-set selection) though it does only offer you two that you can choose from each time you do so.

There is a vast array of monsters and units that you can pick up including peasants, pikemen, cavalry, mages, priests, orcs, ogres, trolls, and on and on. So they did put a great deal of time into the game it seems, they just didn’t put it into all of the right places.

Even when zoomed into the screen the places you need to tap in order to move are tiny. You will often find your self tapping about the screen trying to find the exact location. This will generally result in your accidentally moving to a place you were not wanting to move.

Overall the frustration level is low and so are the graphics. It’s not a bad game, it’s just not great. It could really be so much more than it presently is on the iPhone and for that reason I might suggest you wait, find some other game or only check out a free version of it.

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