A PvZ-Clone That Might Be Worth A Pop(Cap)
Plants vs Zombies: Replanted has been slowly moving up my wishlist. Having played Heroes Battle Awakening, it has gone back down again. That’s because my nostalgia itch has been scratched. The two games are aiming to do the same thing, so I needn’t play both.
I wasn’t aware that I was getting a riff on Plants vs Zombies when I came to Heroes Battle Awakening. Perhaps sensibly, Eastasiasoft haven’t put any mention of PvZ in their press materials.
An Overdose Of Nostalgia
It didn’t take long to realise what it was going for. Level 1-1 hands you a knight who fires arrows in a pew-pew cadence, a direct replacement for the pea-shooter. In level 2-2, it gives you a siege-engine looking thing that generates currency passively, a la the sunflower. And after that, there’s the hardier minotaur, who acts like the wall-nut, but with a handy habit of attacking back.
So, it’s not only the units from PvZ, but the order in which they get introduced to the player. The opening game experience for Plants vs Zombies is my favourite from any game, full stop, such is the smoothness that it introduces new concepts. You can tell it was near-perfect because Heroes Battle Awakening copies it almost verbatim.
Initially, the enemies are familiar too. There are the slow ones, the hardy ones and the fast ones. There are the walking pea-shooters who need dealing with quickly, before they erode your defences. It meant my muscle memory kicked in: slap down as many currency-generators as humanly possible, then take out the initial attackers with my pea-shooters (sorry, knights). Build up a bank of 5×2 siege engines as soon as possible, so that I can buy pretty much anything I need when the swarms start coming.
This is the point that we start detaching from the PvZ comparisons because, credit to Heroes Battle Awakening, it does diverge after the first ten levels or so.
Easy Pea-sy
The first difference is the difficulty curve. Heroes Battle Awakening gets difficult, fast. It only took five or so levels until we died, which surprised us a wee bit. It’s clear that Heroes Battle Awakening has a different manner of challenging the player. It’s focused on rushing the player in the initial moments, and seeing if the player can handle it. It’s also fine with over-populating individual lanes. There were quite a few instances where I’d slam the Retry button because I’d learned that one lane was full of enemies, and I needed to adapt (putting my siege engines in the other lanes, most often).
That difficulty curve is an oddball, because it’s entirely opposite in the endgame. Heroes Battle Awakening is a whole lot easier as the game goes on. That’s because the same pattern of play will succeed no matter the level (build up those siege engines early!) and each enemy has a very specific counter-measure. Floaty ghosts can be killed by the minotaurs, which is handy as minotaurs are cheap. The bulky enemies can be killed by pea-shooting knights if you give them half a screen. Barbarians, skeletons and zombie archers all fall to a single poison mushroom, and the huge axe-spinning knights need to be bombed as soon as they appear. Preferably before they toss an axe.
There you go, a handy strategy guide. Those are the tools you need in the early moments of a level, as it’s all about getting enough of a siege-engine foothold to generate oodles of cash and then buy the big guns: namely the lane-obliterating golems, and the bomb-chucking wizards. Nothing else matters: get to these bad boys and you’ve won.
It’s Heroes Battle Awakening’s biggest flaw. It can’t find enough ways to challenge the player once they know what’s what. The same formula works every level, and that gets boring. I was surprised that it didn’t do the obvious: limiting which units you could bring to each level. If we were forced to find other ways to win, matters would have gotten interesting. But Heroes Battle Awakening lets you keep all of your heroes at all times.
It Begins To Find Its Own Lane
What Heroes Battle Awakening gets right is some cool deviations from the PvZ formula. There’s less emphasis on heroes (the plants of Heroes Battle Awakening) and slightly more on spells. Poison mushrooms, ice potions and bombs are all absolutely essential. I’m not sure you can complete the game without the mushrooms or bombs in particular (now that would have made for a better theming to the achievements). They are fundamental.
There are some unusual heroes and enemies, too. The dark-knight that bounces an axe across all lanes is a particular un-delight, and there’s no feeling worse than having a lack of cash when he appears. Without a bomb, he will rip holes in your defences. On the hero side, there’s a riff on the three-bullet peashooters which only fires diagonally (making it utterly useless and never used), as well as the bomb-throwing witch who is your answer to the dark knight. She will luzz bombs everywhere regardless of lane.
I’m going to bring Plants vs Zombies back for the conclusions, as it’s impossible to give opinions without comparing the two. Heroes Battle Awakening is undeniably Plants vs Zombies. It just is: it borrows all of the mechanics and many of the troops. Strategies that worked for Popcap’s game will work well here.
The developers must have hated that Plants vs Zombies: Replanted came out so recently. There have been no decent games in the genre for quite some time, then, like buses, there are two in a few months.
A Competent but Clipart-y Contender
But Eastasiasoft and Josep Monzonis Hernandez don’t have the finances of EA, so things are lost. The presentation is less charming, more Clipart-y. The levels aren’t quite as clever, and tend to chuck out stampeding enemies to see if you can manage the numbers. And it doesn’t quite have that balance, where every enemy is a threat and every tool is a viable counter-measure. There are tools that are outright rubbish, and others that are overpowered. The same goes for the enemies.
It leaves Heroes Battle Awakening in a tough spot. It’s a competent but diminished take on Plants vs Zombies. Perhaps that price will help. If you’ve still got the taste for brains, then these are – at the very least – extremely good value.
Important Links
Plants vs Zombies Fans Might Want To Check Out Heroes Battle Awakening On PC & Console – https://www.thexboxhub.com/plants-vs-zombies-fans-might-want-to-check-out-heroes-battle-awakening-on-pc-console/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/heroes-battle-awakening/9NGFSK13WHWX/0010
