Hero Academy 2

I have been playing this game since January on PC and Android. I really like the overall idea of the game, it is a grid based strategy game where the positioning of your units matters a lot. You normally can have up to 5 units at a time, they can be melee or ranged, you can buff your units by using spells or weapons, be careful with using weapons since they don't stack and the newest one will replace the older. Decks are made with 30 cards from various rarities, such as Legendary (Gold), Epic (Purple), Fantastic (Blue), Rare (Green) and Common (Gray). You can have up to 4 copies of certain cards in your deck, the yellow rectangles beneath the cards in your collection tells you how many copies do you have of each card. Extra cards are disenchanted for Ink which allows you to craft the cards you need. Once you reach certain milestones in your collection you can unlock special cards fro free. If you unpacked too many copies of a single card you can also unlock its golden version (only for hero baed cards). I appreciate that RNG doesn't affect the overall outome of the matches and the better player most of the times wins. What you can expect for RNG cards is random distributed damage and random card generation, such as random weapons or units. Every turn the games draws cards until you have 5 cards in hand. You can also discard 1 card per turn if you feel your hand doesn't have what you need. Overall the game is fun and has a lot of potential to grow. The devs have been tweaking the economy of it several times making the game more generous and friendly towards F2P players. They also regularly do balance patches when cards get too strong oroverused, which in my opinion is one the best advantages of digital card games that devs from similar games refuse to recognize. My advice is to focus on unlocking the Campaigns and try to level up as fast as you can, since each time you level up you get a free card pack. If you have an iOS or Android device you can unlock your chests there and play on PC/Mac later on. This way you won't miss the extra resources.

The game can be played for free on mobile devices by downloading it from the respective official app store, which I recommend to everyone who wants to try it out. There were a lot of changes to make the game more f2p friendly, thus many people might be okay with not spending money. However, if you are hooked after some free testing, buying the game on steam and also buying special ingame offers will considerably speed up your progress towards new cards, which are really needed to enjoy the game in my opinion. Just make sure to select "already have an account" and log in with that if you decide to purchase the game on steam after you have already created an account for the f2p version, in order to not lose your progress.

[h1]School's out for-EVAH![/h1] That said, if you're reading this, then it's likely that this game's server has permanently shutdown. Or if you're reading it within the next 12 hours of this review's posting, it's still active. That said, it may seem like it's bad taste, but it may help the developer's future game decisions. [i]Hero Academy 2[/i] was a tactics game that focused on destroying the enemy's crystals while protecting your own. That said, it was mostly a Tower Defense title with a board to interact with while using cards to function with the board. It's a nice concept and I regret not getting a chance to try the first one with the TF2 characters utilized. You had three factions to work with, one unlocked from the start. You had Council (Human based. Unlocked at the start), the Dark Elves (Unlocked next), and the Warren (Elves, fairies, mushrooms...nature itself, really). One wish that I had would be that the units would have an RPS utility between the three factions to have some dominant over others while being weak to the others as well, to create a challenge and to create more unique decks...like Darkness overwhelms the Nature, while being beaten by Humans....something like that. I also enjoyed the models, but found the unlockable gold armors to be rather pointless. Will there be a return of a [i]Hero Academy[/i] game like a third installment or just bringing it up on a new server in the future? Hopefully one day, but at this point, it seems to be unlikely. Though I did enjoy this game (in the short term that I've been able to play it), I don't imagine that I would have played it longer than I did. It's obvious that there was a pay-to-win barrier that was in place by the inclusion of the 3 currencies (Gold (free), gems (premium), and ink (free)) and how the developer gave a million of each upon this game's conclusion. If it does return, I hope that it will be either F2P without the pay barrier (maybe Pay-to-support or some sort of workshop inclusion to aid the developer) or going for a price with content to match. That said, it was a nice run, but with its conclusion, I cannot recommend booting this title up (maybe if you're fast and act on it within the next 12 hours as of this review's posting). You'll most likely get the usual shutdown screen notification (eternal loading, cannot connect to server, notice of shutdown, title screen, etc.) upon booting this up if you still have this in your library. 3/10 A nice concept, but it's sad to see that it only lasted 1 year...

I love turn based tactical games. Latesly Ive played everything from duelyst, to Tactical monsters, hearthstone and a bunch of others. I like this new hero academy the most. The graphics are great. I can play on my phone or on steam, both interlinked. Lots of cards. Never crashes. Lots of single player campaign stuff to do. GET THIS GAME if you love turn based tactical.

tl;dr: The game is worth the $20 entry fee. Get it on mobile if you want it for free but buy it on here when you're ready. This game is a nice break away from the current onslaught of TCGs that we have in the market as they often rely on mana curves. This game reduces RNG by being very generous with card draws and mana. I put this game closer to Gwent in terms of strategic value, despite it not being as strategic as its predecessor. I've been playing it since before it was released on steam then found out they're charging $20 for it after releasing it on here. They offer you a good amount of stuff for paying the $20 and I had already dumped that much into it myself. (Hint: anyone who's angry about the move then check your email, they gave you a steam key). I'd say it's worth the money, but if you're a pure F2P player then you should get it on the phone where it's free. If you decide you want to put the money into it then buy it here on Steam. Overall, I believe the game is worth it. It's pretty similar to the original hero Academy, but they added card mechanics to it. This vastly changes the playing field. The original Hero Academy was pretty well balanced, but because they added cards it's going to make it much harder to do while keeping it constantly interesting at the same time. Balancing is a problem ALL card games have, even the all powerful Hearthstone (especially lately). I just wish they still had the rights to have TF2 characters on here. I like the grid mechanics. I tried getting into Duelyst but just couldn't. Faeria had balance issues that weren't really being fixed. This board is a little smaller than those two and I think that makes it a better fit for TCGs. The graphics are apealing and I always play on mute so I can't comment on the music. Card draw and mana aren't really issues on here. You draw up to a 5 card hand every round and you gain 5 mana every round. There's only a few factions that you can choose from on here that are actually playable. The rest of the factions are just cards with a theme. The playable factions each have several unique power cards, of which you can choose 2 powers to take with you. (They act like Hearthstone powers) The goal of each game is to destroy the enemy crystals and each board will have different mechanics/obstacles on them. I wish there was a bit more variety with the board mechanics, though. Most of the games I've played just have the obstacles arranged differently. There are a lot of single player campaigns. Most you get for free or you can pay with free coins, but some have to pay with costly gems. There's quite a bit of variety here and all of the money I've spent on the game were on the paid campaigns. Campaigns give you powerful cards and a lot of fun along the way. I hope they do some things with campaigns in the future that break the mechanics a bit, because that's always fun. Getting card packs is easy. It started off pretty difficult at first but they fixed it. You get the daily rewards as always. Unpacking cards progress each of the factions to unlock other cards you can't get from packs. This is also how you unlock golden cards. So you're always getting things on here. I've gotten quite a few legendaries and epics even from regular card packs. Maybe I'm just lucky, but it seems like there's a good rate on them. That's it. Enjoy the game!

The core gameplay is fun. Unfortunately the Devs have seemingly abandoned the game. We've been asking for them to say something to us here on Steam, anything at all. And we haven't had a single response yet. Add to that the lack of new content, or any mention of new content, and I honestly don't see this game going anywhere.

They did the exactly same thing with this game like they did with Hero Academy 1. Game required contact to their ♥♥♥♥♥♥ servers so when they shut down the servers the game was not playable anymore. No bots, no solo, no LAN - nothing. Just another money grab from worthless scammer devs. They should get banned from steam =) Well at least they included P2W and third party account ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ =D

There are many turn-based tactical board + card fantasy games. Most are meh. However, Hero Academy 2 is surprisingly awesome ! This great F2P game deserves more popularity.

This is not a proper Hero Academy sequel!