I was a Digimon kid while growing up. I watched the first four seasons, watched the movie in an empty screening, and played Digimon World, Digimon World 2003, Digimon Rumble Arena 1 and 2, and the strangely fun Digimon Digital Card Battle. However, as of recent, the series has died down for me until Digimon Heroes came up on the Google Play Store. For those nostalgic for the series, it is a fun ride as it is a match 3 card game that has you collect the digimon you remember from the past, but due to it lacking in depth, it won’t be as memorable as the games I’ve mentioned previously.
The main goal of the game is to get through waves of enemy digimon in stages. In the beginning, you are given five digimon to start off with and through battling you can get new digimon by defeating the waves and obtaining eggs. These eggs hatch new digimon for your party. However, if they’re duplicates, you can fuse them with your current digimon party to make them stronger. You can also digivolve your digimon through using pre-requisite levelled digimon and a certain amount of evolution capacitors. It’s difficult to get enough resources for digivolving without spending money, though.
However, Digimon Heroes is extremely fair with its monetary model overall. You can get a lot of resources through just playing the game. If you add people you have gained the help of during battle, you can get friend points, which allow you to get a new digimon. The game is also generous with the chips you need to upgrade your digimon. I’m always unlocking new digimon to use for my party, and that’s fantastic. Plus, I haven’t had any stoppages with timers with the first few hours of playing the game. There is an energy bar, but it gets replenished from leveling up, so I haven’t had any issues.
The gameplay in Digimon Heroes, while simple, is engaging to play if you have time to kill. With your party of five digimon (as well as a guest digimon from someone online), you have to battle waves of digimon in each themed level. The point of view is similar to a standard dungeon crawler. On the bottom of the screen, the player has to line up three cards of the same color, so the digimon can attack. There are also multiple colored cards, which can be a replacement for a normal colored card. If you have three multiple colored cards, you can make a special attack–called the wild attack–with every digimon in your party.
What I don’t like is that the game instantly makes a chain of your cards once you have connected the first three cards. It would have been great if we did this manually rather than the game doing it for you. The chains continue to chain up the party’s attacks. You can also set a digimon as a leader, which can give benefits to your party or switch the type of cards you have in your hand. There is no challenge or strategy to the game, but the aesthetic presentation and use of attacking sounds from the game keep me coming back time and time again. The enemies rarely take any damage from the party either; most only take 1HP away which is laughably low. Plus, the ability to collect the digimon I watched as a kid and recognizing them once again, is a treat. It would have been great, on the other hand, if they brought back the music as well. I would have loved the soundtrack from Digimon the Movie and the Digimon theme songs in the game instead of the generic soundtrack in Digimon Heroes.
Overall, this game is fun for those who grew up with the series and want a fair monetary system in a free-to-play game, but the lack of depth in the battle system is something that will plague the game’s future.
If you want more Digimon, you can check out Ethan Buck’s thoughts on Digimon All-Star Rumble.
Digimon Heroes
Free-to-play with microtransactions.
Pros
- A nostalgia trip.
- Very fair monetary system.
- It's fun to collect digimon.
- The aesthetic look of the game
Cons
- Lacking in depth.
- None of the memorable music.
- Laughably easy.
[…] Watch Wibble Wobble is a matching game like Digimon Heroes or Bejeweled. Players swipe to match one Wib Wob to another, creating a larger version. He or she […]