In the day and age of multi-million dollar game productions and off-the-wall technology, sometimes it’s the best to still make a game that’s simple. Call for Heroes: Pompolic Wars is an upcoming action/RPG from developer Quotix Software and the game is definitely shaping up to a clean and easy game. For the cool price of $19.99, you can get your dose of slashing mayhem. I got some hands-on time with the game so here are my impressions.
The main objective is to collect dark souls. According to the story, a dark prince named Pompolic arisen from the dead and is attempting to possess the people and turn them into his dark army. His power is from dark souls, so naturally if you yoink these souls from under his nose, his power will dissipate. Seems like a rather simple story, but that’s the name of the game here.
The game features two playable characters, the Warrior and the Amazon (simple enough, right?). Each character has a choice of various special abilities and they’re broken up into different branches pertaining to each character. For the warrior they’re might based, defense based, and ice based, while for the Amazon they’re regeneration based, fire based, and invisibility based. In order to use these abilities you need to collect different icons that are strewed around the level. The preview only allowed me to choose a single special ability so for the warrior, I chose resist damage, which increases your armor by 50% for 20 seconds. In order to use that ability, I had to find icons of defense.
Other special abilities for the warrior include Ring of Death (damages enemies around you for 20 seconds), Riposte Shield (increases your armor and returns damage to enemies), and Explosion of Cold (a trap that’ll explode when enemies come near). As for some Amazon special abilities, there’s the weirdly named Regenerate Ovums (spawns three charges that’ll attack nearby enemies and give you health), Dragon’s Breath (launch big fireballs), and Ghost (increased health and mana regeneration for the sake of combat).
Continuing the ease and simplicity, the level I played through was like your usual dungeon, complete with underground rivers and bridges. The full game will contain over 15 different environments ranging from grass plains to dungeons. The game’s engine is pretty average, but like I said before, this game won’t be touting the latest technology. From plain sight, the rivers had relatively decent water reflections and the lighting and shadow rendering was pretty good.
Since I was in a dungeon, the monsters I fought were your typical dungeon fare. These included spiders, skeletons, and some form of flying monster heads called Phobos. After a few swats from my club (later upgraded to an axe), they were dead meat. One thing I didn’t like was I couldn’t attack while jumping, which made trying to attack Phobos a pain. Thankfully, you can easily dodge their attacks so after some patience, they’d get closer to the ground. Speaking of dodging, your walking forward speed is painfully slower than strafing left and right, and even walking backwards. So this meant that while I can strafe left and right like Superman, trying to walk forward took an eternity. Hopefully Quotix can tweak that a little bit.
During my brief play session, you could only restore health by collecting potions strewn around the level. While this gameplay tactic is pretty old and used in many older games, it still hasn’t lost its touch. Different sized health potions restore different amounts of health; there are also mana potions. Other items include coins (collect enough and you’ll go invincible for a period of time), the different icons I talked about before, respawn tokens (self-explanatory) and monsters’ souls (collect these from dead foes and if you collect enough, you’ll unlock your character’s most powerful ability for a period of time).
All and all, playing Call of Heroes was a pretty decent gaming experience. It’s a relatively easy hack n’ slash RPG and everything is pretty simple to comprehend. Considering the price tag of $19.99, the game will also be decently priced for eager players. In addition to coming to PC, Call of Heroes will also head to the Nintendo Wii. Hopefully the game will utilize the Wiimote for the different melee attacks and so forth, but we’ll see if that works out in the end.
