Castle Conqueror – Heroes

Genre: Turn-Based Strategy

Players: 1

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Review:

Castle Conqueror – Heroes is a Turn-Based Strategy game first released on the Nintendo DSi via the DSiWare service in 2011, and also released on the Nintendo 3DS eShop. While this game technically bears the name of the Castle Conqueror series, it doesn’t really have anything to do with the other games in the franchise apart from the fact that this is also a Strategy game. Heck, it doesn’t even have actual castles in it, what with its futuristic sci-fi setting.

In terms of presentation, this game is rough, featuring extremely simple pixel art visuals with poor animation, a chiptune soundtrack that isn’t very good, and a story and localization that are outright terrible. I’m sure I’d be groaning at all of the terrible cliches if the story were even remotely intelligible.

At the very least, the gameplay here has some solid potential, starting with gameplay somewhat like the Advance Wars games, but adding a few of its own ideas into the mix as well. Most notably, this game’s clever mechanics are supply lines and sieges. Supply lines are displayed on the map, and any character standing on one connected to one of their bases will receive some healing each turn. A siege, on the other hand, is something players can select in place of attack when more than one of your units is surrounding an enemy, allowing every one of them to join in on the attack and giving you the potential to have multiple units attack multiple times (albeit with each of them sustaining damage from counter-attacks).

While the gameplay here has a lot of potential, there are some major issues that limit that potential. Firstly, the controls here are stiff, and just moving the cursor feels like it takes more work than it should. Also, the game has a steep difficulty spike early on that makes it daunting to new players. This is exacerbated by the game doing a really poor job of explaining its mechanics to the player. What’s more, the game’s menus don’t properly explain what things are either, and in fumbling to look for something simple like an item description, I found myself inadvertently starting the next battle before I was ready.

The end result is that while Castle Conqueror – Heroes certainly has the potential to be a solid Turn-Based Strategy game, it’s too shoddy and unpolished to live up to that potential. The terrible presentation and steep learning curve make it difficult to get into, and the game is constantly frustrating you in other ways. There are some really good ideas buried underneath all of this game’s issues, but most players will not have the patience to get that far.

tl;dr – Castle Conqueror – Heroes is a Turn-Based Strategy game that’s a bit like Advance Wars, and it has some fun and interesting gameplay mechanics like a Supply Line mechanic. Unfortunately, the presentation is terrible, the localization is laughably bad, the game feels shoddy, and the menus are poorly-constructed, making this a game with a lot of good potential, but one that’s too full of frustration for me to recommend.

Grade: C

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