It's no exaggeration to put this inventive design up there with Advance Wars as one of the most elegant distillations of strategy gaming ever conceived, and it makes popular competitors like Puzzle Quest look crude. This simple puzzle gameplay is transformed into unfathomably moreish brain food by a simple but exquisitely balanced net of systems: attack charge times, the linking and fusing of units to increase their power, champion units, the way a unit's strength encompasses both its defensive and attack values, and so on. They form attacks by stacking unit types in threes. The story isn't the main attraction, but it's told with an entertaining and light touch.Ī quick recap: in Clash of Heroes, two hero characters face off across a battlefield grid. It's buggy, fiddly, scruffy, poorly optimised for phones and, at 2GB, hugely overweight for its new home.

It's not done by Capybara itself but by another developer, Tag Games. What we have here is not a bespoke version for phones and tablets but a more-or-less straight port of the home console and PC game, Clash of Heroes HD. (Two, if you count the fact that reviewing Clash of Heroes is a sure sign that you won't be writing for Eurogamer much longer - I'm surely pushing my luck writing about it twice.) Clash of Heroes is a classic game and this iOS version returns it to the portable touch-screen gameplay it was originally designed for. So if you're a regular reader, you already know the high esteem we hold this game in, and if you're not, the above should be all you need to draw one easy conclusion. 'The gameplay system at Clash of Heroes' core is a thing of rare, bewitching beauty - a creation so deep and so elegant that it will keep you up at night,' Fred wrote, and he was right.

Clash of Heroes HD demands your immediate and undivided attention.' Then I awarded it Game of the Week (RIP) and eight months later, after it had appeared on Steam as well, Fred Dutton (RIP) anointed it as one of our Games of 2011 (it had topped his list outright, and mine). Kristan Reed (RIP) went further when he reviewed the remake for Xbox Live Arcade and PSN a year later: 'With a depth and longevity that humbles most full-price releases. We've had more than our fair say on Capybara's brilliant hybrid of role-playing game, turn-based strategy and match-three puzzler already.ĭan Pearson (RIP) reviewed the DS original three years ago, calling it 'a very good game indeed' - with some understatement. 'You're reviewing Clash of Heroes again?' Tom asked me in yesterday's meeting.

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