With the continuing arrival of cross platform games, in an effort to maximise revenue, another has found its way to the PC.

Hero Academy is a new game from Robot Entertainment which allows player to challenge their friends or strangers across a range of platforms.

Played as a board game on a 9 x 5 board, the object of the game is to destroy either all of your opponent’s pieces or their crystals. To do this you have a limited amount of people, who fall into four categories, warriors, healers, archers, wizards plus one special character.

The game is turn based with each turn consisting of five moves, which allow you to advance your pieces, attack if in range or use one of your available power ups to either enhance individual units, or send a devastation attack against a number of your opponents.

Each piece has certain qualities, like the amount of their life point and any defence and attacking advantages. The wizards and Archers are strong with ranged weapons, but not so great in melee, whereas the warriors move slowly, but pack a hefty whack.

Visually, the game is very bright and cartoony, like many which are designed for the relatively small screens of phones etc.

The main focus of the game is to play it across the web, so apart from a few tutorials and a couple of practice scenarios, there is no single person game and that becomes a real problem.

I played a number of games online against real people, half of which appeared to be potty mouthed youths or the completely silent. There is the ability to chat via a typed message. Now my feelings are not so easily harmed, but it would give me pause before buying this for anyone younger than a teenager.

By far the biggest problem was the interminable wait between your moves, about thirty second for me as I’m impetuous and the unbalanced four to five minute wait before your next move. I did try asking the other players if this was also their experience, but as I said earlier, the replies were not particularly useful, unless I was really looking to know just how much I sucked at the game.

My last game I gave up after an hour, by which we were about half way through, in which time I had also made a sandwich, a cup of tea, run a bath, all the time coming back to the game to see if it was finally my turn, before I died of old age.

On its own, it’s a brightly coloured tactics type game that would have been a lot of fun to play against an AI for ten to fifteen minutes, but the online experience is just a massive turn off, both from the type of players it seems to attract and the fact that you spend more time not playing the game but waiting.

5

Charles Packer