Age of Heroes Online Review

Anannya Sen’s Review

100,000 users and rising.

Nope, that figure is not a joke. Age of Heroes online or AOHO by Q-Plaze has attracted 100K users in Russia and over 11K users elsewhere. And the numbers just look like going up.

It was inevitable that this sort of game should come out for mobile. In fact we were expecting something like this years ago. But the longer it went, the more we thought that it would come to smartphone instead of java. Well, you can't be right about everything all the time.

If you're in any doubt as to what it is, it's the first serious MMORPG which for the non geeks stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. You should have heard of World of Warcraft. This is like that, but smaller, and more importantly, available for your mobile.

Graphically I guess the game varies between handsets. Our trusty K800i (which I've had for so long now makes me think I'm due about 3 free smartphones on my contract) has reasonably decent but smallish graphics. The maps aren't huge. Each village area consists of several screens, but so far none more than 4. While you're a beginner anyway.

First off you choose a race, from Orc, Elf or Human. Then a class, and then off you go. Each race and class have different stats which you hone and grow as the game progresses. You should know the score by now, wander round doing quests, getting into battle and improving your character. Controls are standard point and click with the pointer changing when you can do something and a bit of text telling you what you can do. Left and right softkeys bring up the different menus, lsk for your character, equipment, armies etc and rsk for more game related topics.

Quests can be a bit tricky to find when you start, but it's obvious who you have to talk to as they will have lots of exclamation marks on them. Being a Russian developed game, the instructions aren't always as obvious as they could be (and even have to be loaded from the web) but if you've played this sort of game, you should know what to do.

I guess I have to get to the battles. As that's the bread and butter of these sorts of games. You can wilfully attack things, get drawn into fights or even take on other players and compete in tournaments. I would leave those last two for a while though, best to build up your character first. When you get into a battle, the game cuts to a battle grid which looks like a giant game of Blockbusters. The hexagonal grid allows more options of who you can attack or how you can move. It also allows you to get more easily surrounded though.

Battles are fought with your armies which you buy from the Tree of War. The troops you can actually use in battle depend on what level you are at, as you can wilfully buy the higher levels of troops, you just won't be able to use them. There are 8 different types of army you can buy, although I am assuming as you get further in the game, this number should increase. You buy them in lots and then arrange them in up to 7 groups. You can chop and change them once you've bought them, adding troops here or there. These 7 groups represent the starting positions on the battle grid so choose them well, as the front line are obviously more likely to get attacked first.

The fighting is actually turn based combat, you can attack or pass. In addition to your armies, you have your main character who can attack if they have an ability or cast magic during their turn. Abilities are gained and improved as you win more battles. Losing battles will lose you troops, but don't worry, you'll never be killed. Instead, if you lose all troops you will start back at the beginning screen and have to build up your armies again. Of course, this takes more gold. So keep some in reserve.

As you wander around, the world map becomes availble to you, and you can see there are a number of towns to explore. And you can get transported to the Orc Realm and Human realm. But this is an online game right? So there are lots of other players online at the same time. Just check out the message list to see. Like other MMORPG games, people are always chatting and you can chat to them too if you want using your handset. It's text based, but the 8 button on my handset switched between numbers and letters so it was a bit weird.

With so many players you can barter and also have online fights. I wasn't powerful enough in the short time I played the game to try this. So the game really requires you to invest a fair bit of time. As it's an online game, I'm not sure about the internet charges you pay (I'll check when I get my bill), but I'm assuming it's fairly cheap.

The developers have also added another profit based side of the game. The online money in the game is called Divine Grace and you can do a lot of things with it. The game says you can create new heroes, zeroise skill points, speed up development, restore armies, see the unseen and do many other things. So quite a lot. But Divine Grace costs real money and you have to SMS to get some. And with the cheap salary I'm on here at MGFS I wasn't able to try it out to see what it does. But if anyone has given it a go, leave a comment or write in to let us know how important it really is.

There are some drawbacks to the game. Graphics are a little on the small side and while detailed, I guess the pre Zelda look isn't so polished. There's no sound and although it would get irritating if you're playing for long periods, an effort would have been nice. The game screens do take a bit of time to load, even if you've just come back and want to go back to the previous screen. The game also crashed on me a few times (maybe I reached my online limit). And the quests can be a bit hard to find at first. I was also going to say most of the online conversation seems to be in Russian, but I don't think I can call this a drawback. With more English speakers, hopefully there will be more integration.

So definitely some areas to work on and some improvements. But you can certainly see that this is a very bold attempt at creating a decent MMORPG. It succeeds on the size factor, things you can do with the character, the battle aspect and of course the number of online players. You have to be online the whole time to play it (an offline adventure building up your character first would have been useful) so make sure you have plenty of online time available or you get permission of whoever plays the bill. But as a first attempt, this certainly works. It's fun to play, ambitious and always busy.