Muster Your Heroes And Patience In Hero Academy
Hero Academy (Free) by Robot Entertainment is kind of like Words With Friends, but instead of taking turns spelling words, you’re taking turns casting spells. Or even hacking and slashing.
Both you and your opponent control an army on a small battlefield grid. The goal is to destroy the power crystals your opponent controls before he or she destroys yours.
You can either play against a randomly selected player, or against your Facebook or Twitter friends. If you choose to go the “randomly selected” route, you’ll need to create an account with an email address.
Both players have an inventory of six items on their rack, which can have characters, spells, or power-ups. Deploying the items take up an action each time.
You have five actions allowed for each turn, which can also include moving, fighting, or using spells. Once you’ve used up all five actions, you submit your turn. Then you wait.
How long you wait depends on how involved your opponent is. It can either be a matter of minutes or hours. I highly recommend enabling push notifications.
If there’s really some animosity between you and your opponent, you can submit your turn with a taunt. Although “taunt” is used lightly, considering how mild they are.
Without paying anything, you have access to the Council team (humans, as you may have guessed). As long as you can stand dodging ads left and right, you’re fine.
However, if you want cooler characters, or just want to get rid of ads altogether, the Dark Elves team can be purchased for $0.99.
The ads are without a doubt the most annoying thing about this game. Finished with your turn? There’s an ad. Want to look at your list of games? Ad. Want more features? Then it's an in-app purchase, which, in a way, is an ad if you think about it.
This game is fun and easy to pick up though, which means the casual player can download the app and start playing against an opponent within minutes.