A Free Mobile Port That Starts Well But Ends Grindy
Some genres mash-up neatly. RPGs and shooters have been combining well for a couple of decades now. And then you have the newest free-to-play title on the Xbox Store, Cup Heroes. If there was a trophy for Most Inelegant Mash-up of the Year, it would have one hand on the cup.
Cup Heroes is one-half auto-battler and one half, erm, Peggle. There are other influences in there too, namely beer pong, but auto-battlers and pachinko/Peggle are the big ones. And they blend together like cheese and cement.
A Game Of Two Halves
Each ‘run’ in Cup Heroes starts with the auto-battler half. Your chosen adventurer faces off against some goons. But instead of choosing actions, the combat is automated, as you would expect from auto-battlers like Raid: Shadow Legends and other mobile titles. The damage you deal and take is initially based on the gear you equipped before the run. If you’re sufficiently prepped, then the first battle should go your way.
Now for the second half of Cup Heroes. After a battle finishes, you’re whisked to a game of pachinko. You pour out ping-pong balls from your cup, and those balls pass through x2, x3 etc gates which multiply those balls. Chain together several gates and the screen can fill up with balls, taking an age to process, allowing you to pop down the shops for a bit. You have full control of your cup, so it’s down to you which gates you prioritise (hot tip, you can move the cup post-pouring, allowing you to spread the balls, as it were).
There is almost no thematic connection between the auto-battling and the Peggle stuff, which left us a little baffled. There’s barely any game connection either, other than the balls you collect in auto-battling being used in the pachinko, and the balls from the pachinko being used as a currency in the end-of-wave shops. We just expected it to be a little more artful, a little more intertwined (bonus health and damage increases in the pachinko, for example). They’re like two mobile games cellotaped together, which is not wholly damaging to the enjoyment, just notably odd.
Balls Balls Balls
A shop pops up between waves, at least invigorating the auto-battler side of the game. Hades-like, you’re given a choice of three benefits and can only purchase one with your newly earned ping pong balls. They have varying rarity and are a decently differentiated bunch, including extra damage, health, shields, ricocheting bullets and extra attacks. You’ll want to balance survival with DPS if you want to overcome the minibosses and bosses on each run.
Our first four or so hours with Cup Heroes were decently enjoyable. The pachinko half of the game is mindless but gratifying. The best path through the gates is often abundantly obvious, even when gates move speedily or question marks indicate a ‘mystery’ gate. Getting your balls through the gates isn’t overly challenging either: once you know the angle that they pour from the cup, and you’re patient enough to wait for gates to align, then you can maximise your output. From there, it’s an avalanche of ping pong balls and currency for the next shop, which had us, at least, rubbing our hands with greedy glee.
The shops, too, are good fun. Strategies start emerging. We liked to increase our earning potential in the opening rounds, before choosing benefits that made us better at clearing swarms of enemies: ricochets, multi-shots, that sort of thing. Then we prepped for the bosses with damage boosts and shields, knowing that the upcoming battle would be focused on attrition. We occasionally dipped into our gems (the soft currency of Cup Heroes) to buy all of the upgrades in a single shop, or to revive ourselves once if the run was looking particularly optimistic.
The progression stuff was also looking positive. The game’s soft currency was meted out generously, which surprised us. Loot could be gained in increasing rarity, a free battlepass gave us something to aim for and we soon gained our second character with a whole new deck of upgrades, when there were clearly dozens to unlock. Our future Cup Heroes career stretched out in front of us, and it looked wonderful.
Alas, It Didn’t Last
Until it rather sharply stopped being wonderful, around the fourth hour of Cup Heroes and roughly level 15+. It’s here that the mobile origins of the game started to surface.
The grind is the biggest culprit. There’s a sharp spike in the difficulty and health of the enemies, and it leaves you with a choice. You can keep bumping against that spike, playing the same levels over and over until loot or level-ups make you strong enough to pass. Or you can dip into your soft currency reserves to buy loot chests, revives or additional upgrades. While Cup Heroes is generous in the number of gems it supplies you with, the gems begin to wither away when you’re not completing levels.
Which comes to culprit #2, which is the pacing and variety, or lack of it. New stuff arrives at a glacial pace. We’re at hour ten and have still only unlocked the third character. We presume that the full roster will take hundreds and hundreds of hours to unlock, assuming of course that we neglect to buy them with our real, hard-earned cash (in this economy?). As the game goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that the loot is narrow and there’s very little to earn, so you’re mostly waiting for a slow trickle of them to ‘merge’ so that you can increase their rarity.
The poor pacing and lack of variety spreads into the game. The enemies may get makeovers that are appropriate to the level (wild west hats, vampires) but they all do the same thing. The pachinko gates gain trampolines, get faster and even move off screen, but there are (at least at ten hours in) precious few interesting ingredients. We expected portals, multi-screens, maybe flippers in an homage to pinball. There are plenty of Peggle games and DLC to steal ideas from, but Cup Heroes mostly doesn’t bother. Only the shop updates with each character, and even then the familiarity creeps in quickly.
And so onto culprit #3. For reasons we can’t figure, we kept hitting the same bugs at level 15 onwards. At the run-end screen, Cup Heroes would hang, and we would have to forcibly restart it to progress. This happened just over 50% of the time, and progress would only occasionally be saved. The gears got ground and eventually we lost all enthusiasm for playing. All that goodwill had gone.
A Free Grind
Bugs, poor pacing and free-to-play grind. It’s not a great future for anyone who begins to play Cup Heroes. Which is something of a shame, as the opening of the game can be a whirlwind romance for fans of auto-battlers and pachinko. But, since Cup Heroes is free, we have a proposition: play it for four hours, net yourself a few achievements, enjoy the awkward blend of genres, and then nope out of there. The cup just isn’t worth chasing after four hours.
Important links
Download from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/cup-heroes/9ncd341chc8g
