I started playing Hero Emblems last week and, despite a rough start, I'm really loving it.
The start was tough because I feel the mechanics are not very well explained. Skill attacks, buffs, Super skill attacks... The game is seriously lacking a written tutorial.
Apart from that, I guess I benefited from playing the game a few months after it launched, as probably there's been plenty of stuff polished, tweaked and fixed.
Getting killed in a dungeon and still receiving xp at the end I think, for instance.
Or difficulty adjustments. So far, I've been killed in many stages, but none of them felt unbeatable without a bit of grinding, or an equipment readjustment.
The game is a blast to play. It's fun, visually charming, has interesting mechanics and requires strategy while playing it. The sense of progression is very well achieved, and the fact that the game is not F2P allows the difficulty curve to be smoother.
I really recommend it, more so now that it's on sale for 1.99.
Minor grips: I'd like that the pieces matched (ie, the movements that the heroes will do) were added to a visible stack, so that it's clearer what happens in a turn (such as Fat Princess does). Also, the sound effects are terrible.
All in all, one of the most addictive games I've played lately, and one of the best implementations of a match-3 game.
Recommendation for anyone that liked it: play
Fat Princess: Piece of Cake. It's similar in the sense that there's also 4 different heroes that relate to different types of board pieces, and there's quite a bit of strategy involved when playing.
I'd say, together with Hero Emblems, it's the best match-3 game I've played.
The only problem is that, since it's F2P, it has rough difficulty spikes, and I stopped playing when I couldn't get over one. But I still got lots of hours of enjoyment out of it.
