I just bought a genius new product – Warburton’s Square Wraps. I love tortillas, so to be able to make a wrap where all the stuff doesn’t fall out of the end and you get the same amount of bready consistency all the way along seems like such an obvious thing. I wonder why anyone hasn’t thought of it before. Much like a dungeon crawler for the 3DS.
You see, you got worried, but I brought it back like a boss. This is a review of Heroes of Ruin, not square wraps (which I would give a seven out of ten). On the surface, Heroes of Ruin seems like a genius idea. It’s a dungeon crawler with free global VoIP communication – without friend code faffing – so you join up with parties across the world for free with no monthly subscription. It also creates dynamic dungeons, so if you want to grind then it’s not the same play-through twice – a bit like Torchlight. You can also be a standard warrior, or a gunslinger – a bit like Torchlight. Oh, come one, let’s face it: the game is pretty much Torchlight lite, but that’s by no means a bad thing. In fact, with the multiplayer and voice chat, it actually improves on one of my favourite XBLA games in a very important way.
In fact, most of the problems that I’ve been having is the ways that it is different from Torchlight. Being used to Xbox controls, I couldn’t get my head around the “B” button being where the “X” button usually is, which meant that I quite often declined something I wanted to accept, and vice versa. One of the features this game has which seems to be an improvement over Torchlight at first is that when you find a piece of equipment, you can decide to use it then and there, or cash it in. This is done by pressing up to accept or down to decline. Because the analog stick to D-pad layout is swapped between the 3DS and Xbox, I ended up giving up my really good weapons and armor for crappy stuff as I pressed down when I should press up. Also, if you come across a piece of equipment that is “above your level”, then you can’t hold on to it for when you level up – you just have to cash it in then and there. It does get rid of the chore of sorting through your inventory or going all the way back to town to sell your wares to a vendor. You can also get rare items you can trade with StreetPass too, which is a cool freebie!
Still, it’s a hell of a lot better than something like Order and Chaos Online on iOS and Android where you have to control everything on a touch screen. Things like mapping health and magic to quick keys makes this feel more like a proper PC style dungeon crawler, although having the health and magic bars at the bottom of the 3DS annoyed the hell out of me. The world has trained my eyes to look at the top of the screen for health and magic. Don’t try and retrain my eyes, Heroes of Ruin.
There seems to be a little more variety in the level design than Torchlight had, too, and the 3D of the 3DS is really good at showing depth when you get into the high levels of the dungeons, although you’ll probably put the slider back to 2D to avoid the 3DS headache before too long. The dynamic sound effects that move as you move around the world are also surprisingly effective. The graphics… not so much. They do the job, but they just look like something you would expect to see on a smart phone, and not a dedicated games console
But just like a square wheat wrap when you really want a round corn tortilla, something just isn’t quite right about it. There are a variety of monsters, but they come along in dribs and drabs, and quite a lot of them are just size and palette swaps. There are loads of checkpoints along the way, which also act as portals back to your town so you can stock up on your potions and whatnot if a battle gets too tough, but things never get too tough. Even though there is “dynamic difficulty” which will up the challenge if one of your party is at a higher level, it never really seems to be something that you can’t handle. There are different classes and skill trees, but you’re four lone wolves. Even in a multiplayer party, it’s not like you need to have a healer or a tank, you just go in and beat the crap out of people. The fairly “zoomed in” battlefield also doesn’t allow much room for strategy. Also, despite its dynamic dungeons, it’s all fairly linear: agree to these quests, find this person, look for a message which for some reason is hidden in the stomach of the dungeon’s largest monster. It all progresses the story, but the story is… blah. You complete a quest, you go back to the same spot in the middle of town to get a new quest and a story that you don’t really care about progresses. Very. Slowly.
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