[Review] Call of Duty: Heroes for Android – Heroes wanted. Inquire within…

While it has already appeared on the iPhone for some time, it’s only recently that Activision’s flag-waving, base-building extravaganza has made it to Android phones. Most Call of Duty games have some semblance of a story – yes, we’re stretching it – but the storyline for this outing is absolutely bananas as it involves a bizarre clash of timelines in the franchise and the sort of weird time travelling hijinks that would likely give Stephen Hawking a migraine. Most Call of Duty games also have you shooting people from a first person perspective. This particular outing is a pay-to-get-things-done-faster strategy game that has you – surprise – still shooting people albeit from an isometric angle.

The bizarre plot has you as a commander of a military outpost somewhere in the world taking on a host of enemies – who they are, what their ideology is or what they fight for doesn’t matter. They’re the enemy!

Apparently, you’re cut off from support so you’ll have to scrounge up your own funds, kind of like wandering into the office cafeteria after the lunch crowd is over and attempting to salvage something remotely edible from the sad remains that everyone left behind but no one bothered to buy like that shrivelled old frankfurter in the corner tray and that sad glob masquerading as fried noodles. To that end, you’ll have to build up a base, source funds to expand it, train up troops and then attack sods just like you presumably because they’re enemies of the state even though you all sport the same hardware. Odd? Forget that, you have things to blow up!

If you’ve played Clash of Clans, you’ll grasp the mechanics easily. The tutorial starts off with some basic base building and introduces you to the obligatory currencies used in the game – gold, oil and Celerium. The first two can be acquired by raiding other bases or establishing your own gold mines and oil wells. Celerium is only doled out for accomplishing weekly tasks or diligently clicking and checking in on the game several times through the day. Like other premium forms of in-game currency in a host of other games, you can use it to speed things up, get things done or buy stuff. Building too slow and you can’t wait? Use Celerium. Need to buy that upgrade for your troops? Use Celerium. Need that fancy widget to grace your base front lawn? Use Celerium. You get the picture. Needless to say, you can fork out real world cash to not only get Celerium but in-game oil and gold as well which is how the game is monetised.

You’ll basically have a decent base set up inside of an hour with a simple defensive perimeter that can presumably deter a few angry protesters with some defenses and production buildings. From there on in, it’s a matter of upgrading your buildings, expanding your production buildings and generally improving your base like a militant realtor.

What next? Like Clash of Clans, you’ll have to hustle up some troops to raid bases owned by other people to score points, gold and oil.

Mustering the Troops
Like Clash of Clans, you’ll have a variety of units to do so split between infantry, light and heavy drone units. Infantry units are squishy and can’t take more than a few shots but are cheap, fast to build and expendable with your choice of basic rifle toting grunts, the infamous armoured Juggernauts that carry riot gear to act as walking tanks, special forces units that crack open defensive walls with demolition charges, snipers with extended range rifles and balaclava clad rocket launching toting grunts. Once you’ve spent a bit more cash, you can build drone manufacturing bays that help you make all manner of light and heavy combat drones that range from gun-toting flying Dragonflies to cute but insidiously lethal gun toting robot tanks and even a walking AT-AT style death machine. While the basic units of any troop type are naff, you can beef them up with research by building up the proper research labs. Needless to say, research costs real-world time and in-game money, both of which can be dealt with Celerium.

When you attack a base, you pick what units to deploy and then drop them on the map. After that, they’re left to their own devices. The trick here is where to send them and in what numbers to make the most of what you have. While launching an attack on a base sounds easy in principle, cracking open a base takes a bit of knowhow as you need to understand how the AI for each of your units works. Snipers will target resource buildings first. Juggernauts will plod up to and bludgeon the nearest turret before anything else. Drones will flit about and shoot everything in sight. Naturally, no one is going to simply let you waltz in without a fight and depending on whoever you visit you’ll have a host of defences to deal with ranging from your basic defensive wall to sentry guns, artillery pieces all the way to huge microwave lasers that fry targets one at a time. Needless to say, the expedient measure of destroying the largest defensive pieces first works best.

We Need a Hero
While you’d be forgiven for grasping the idea that CoD: Heroes sounds like Clash of Clans with automatic weapons, you’re slightly off the mark as it offers an interesting gameplay tweak – heroes. The game offers about a dozen different heroes that can be used in combat. Some are unlocked from the get-go; others require Celerium to purchase. What they all have in common is that these heroes are vastly tougher than your basic grunts, have game-changing special abilities ranging from calling in a drone strike all the way to dropping football sized EMP artillery rounds on the map and, best of all, are controllable on the battlefield. Unlike the rest of your minions that, once unleashed on the battlefield, generally wander about like trigger happy idiots blasting everything in sight based on their limited AI, heroes allow you to choose what they shoot at and where they go. Unfortunately the control system in use is naff at best and in stressful situations, you’ll likely bork it and end up with a dead hero.

[perfectpullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”#FF0000″ class=”” size=”16″]…heroes are vastly tougher than your basic grunts, have game-changing special abilities ranging from calling in a drone strike all the way to dropping football sized EMP artillery rounds on the map and, best of all, are controllable on the battlefield. [/perfectpullquote]

Fret not though, they’re simply knocked out and they’ll be ready after a period of time. Heroes also have the benefit of projecting auras around them that can enhance the performance of your troops like increasing their toughness or their rate of fire. The default heroes are decent but unexceptional. Several can only be unlocked with purchases or by accomplishing in-game tasks. Naturally, the best heroes cost real world money.

This is where the game takes a surreal turn as the heroes you can select are from all over the Call of Duty universe from both living and dead heroes in the franchise. You’ll get the likes of Price (indestructible and virtually immortal) to Yuri ( dead in the campaign but hale and hearty here) and even the infamous skull-balaclava-toting Ghost (again, dead but in a twist of the time space continuum alive here) from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and 3. You also get characters from Advanced Warfare and Black Ops like Reaper ( a killer robot with a gatling gun for an arm. Don’t ask) and Ilona, the only hero in the game capable of controlling troops in the field by throwing target flares.

Matches are random affairs that are seemingly separate from the assets you are capable of building as you can be randomly pitted between someone of your own grade all the way to deranged lunatics that have built up bases that look like sentry gun infested and landmine strewn golf courses of doom. Once more players are available on Android they can presumably have fairer match set-ups. If you’re attacked, you have no direct means of defending your base barring building up passive defenses so it’s a matter of making things as tough as you can for potential invaders, ergo all those turrets, walls and landmines.

[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”#FF0000″ class=”” size=”16″]…the game takes a surreal turn as the heroes you can select are from all over the Call of Duty universe from both living and dead heroes in the franchise[/perfectpullquote]

If you tire of that, you can also opt for a gauntlet mode where you are given a random assortment of heroes and troops and tasked with attacking a series of increasingly better defended enemy bases with each demolished base yielding tasty loot. You can also opt for a Survival mode where you can deal with a never ending horde of enemy troops out to raze your humble base to the ground. The most recent updates offer more interactivity now in Survival mode as you’ll have to collect energy airdropped all over the playing field that you can use to call in air support. The longer you survive, the more air support abilities you’ll get though enemies will start getting tougher.

As you’ll likely surmise, you’ll need data to play this game and it has a fair number of real world timers that have you waiting on stuff as they build to incentivise you to spend cash. There are no hard pay walls and if you’re fairly patient, persistent and lucky, you’ll be able to climb the ranks without forking out wads of money. Barring speeding up gameplay, most of the ingame items and bonuses that you can purchase are vanity skins and gewgaws for your base. While the purchasable heroes and their abilities are nice, they are not essential if you’re fairly adept at the game (and patient).

Aesthetically speaking, the design of the game can be summed up as a grungy military themed jaunt through familiar territory. It’s a combination of liberal lashings of camo paint schemes, Brutalist inspired buildings, sleek chromed guns and drones all mixed up to a sadly repetitive tune combined with canned audio chirps and death shrieks from your troops that you’ll inevitably mute out after five minutes. The option to play your own tracks would have been welcome.

All said, this is a Call of Duty themed take on the usual Clash of Clans base-building and raiding formula with enough unique twists to make it a distinct contender. It succeeds as a real timesink, more so if you have already invested time and money in other similar games. If you’re still keen to take the plunge, it’s a fairly engrossing thumb twiddler that will have you keeping an eye on your phone every few hours.

What We Liked Heroes, Interesting Survival  and gauntlet mode
What We Didn’t Imbalanced match-ups, repetitive music, gameplay plateaus off after you’ve unlocked all troop types
What We Say It’s a fairly entertaining timesink with enough interesting twists off the traditional base-building strategy model to be well worth a whirl
*Free for iOS and Android
To download it on Android click here. To download it on iOS click here.