Battleheart

A real-time tactical rpg for iDevices, Battleheart is the closest thing I've seen to our vision.

You have a squad of four characters and battle your way through a series of progressively more difficult levels.

You control your characters by clicking and dragging them to a location, to an enemy, or in the case of a support character, to a comrade. If you drag a character to another entity, it will begin auto-attacking or healing that entity, as appropriate.

The art style is vibrant and cute, reminiscent of the super-deformed style of characters from the Super Nintendo era (though much crisper and smoother).

The first boss battle.

The first half of the game is a joy to play, with new characters, equipment, special attacks, and monsters being smoothly introduced on a fairly linear curve. The difficulty level remained steady and the rate of rewards made it feel like you were getting one (or even several) new things every fight. Even better, special abilities can be reconfigured painlessly at any time, eliminating the need for the player to worry about selecting the "right" ability and giving them freedom to experiment and change tactics in between battles.

The boss fights are unique and require the player to think of new strategies to handle them, adding extra spice to the gameplay.

Tragically, you only get a brief taste of the spice: these strategies are one-off things. They're completely unnecessary for any other monsters, or for other bosses. And you only fight a boss once, unless you specifically revisit the stage - the bosses are not recycled as monsters in later levels.

Color the goblins dark blue, and the bat red, and voilá! All-new monsters!

Speaking of recycling, after the first half of the game, there are no new monsters - merely palette switches and dramatically higher difficulty parameters.

While the first half does truly shine, the second half comes to a grinding, screeching halt. Namely, the time it takes to level up (and consequently acquire new special abilities and equipment, as well as survive tougher monsters) goes up dramatically.

The end result is that the reward received for the amount of effort put in plummets. Yes, I spend more time playing it than I would if I were able to continue through the game at the same pace throughout, but my overall enjoyment is far less due to having to replay a level again and again and again in order to have a chance to survive the next one.

Greater attention to play balance would have made this game enjoyable all the way through - with the simple adjustment of a few numbers.

Next, a more critical look at the control scheme.

It's largely unimaginative and could be replicated with a mouse, despite the iPad's innovative interface. While it is possible to move two characters at the same time using multiple fingers, in practice it covers too much of the action.

The second and larger problem with the control scheme is trying to select a character when several of them are next to each other. Especially during critical moments when I need to select a character and activate a special technique to rescue someone from the brink of death, it's extremely frustrating when I select the wrong character and a character dies as a result, which usually means that battle is lost.

I imagine these issues are exacerbated on a smaller iThingy.

Despite its flaws, Battleheart is among the cream of the crop of iPad games. I hope to one day be able to create a game like this - but with richer and more reliable controls, not to mention an engaging story.

Gotta get back to coding.