The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Sure, Tiny Wings is all well and good, but the game I’ve seriously been putting a long time into on my iPod is Battleheart.

This is a game you have to buy.

Battleheart is a strange mix of brawler and RTS that works perfectly on the iPod. You build a party of 4 different characters, and equip them with gear and so on. Then you run into battle scenarios that are kind of like one screen of a brawler. Your party members have a very low level of autonomy. They will attack enemies that attack them, but that’s about it. You issue commands by dragging the characters to what you want them to do. Drag your knight to a goblin, and he starts attacking the goblin. Drag your healer to another party member, and they start healing the party member. Drag your thief to an open area? They move there. While this keeps the number of moves each character can do pretty limited, it’s also fantastically intuitive.

Tapping on a character brings up icons of that character’s special abilities at the top of the screen. These icons stay until you tap another character: you can give drag commands and not change what icons you have up top. There’s no MP or anything, but these abilities have cooldowns you have to manage. You simply tap the icon to activate them. All the character classes have different abilities, and even within the same character classes, you can spec out your character’s skill tree in different ways. For example, my cleric has an attack buff spell, but I could have, instead, taken a defensive buff spell, if I wanted. You can respec a character at any time at no cost, and you can have plenty of characters in reserve that you can swap in and out of your four person party, so you can even tailor the loadout to the type of enemies in the battle you are fighting, if you’d like.

The game really does a fantastic job of being hectic, and keeping you on your toes, but not feeling so crazy as to feel unfair. You are constantly juggling healing targets, pulling enemies away from your magic users, and activating buffs at useful times. It’s a game that requires complete concentration, and it is a ton of fun for it.

If there’s one downside, its that it can sometimes be hard to select the character you want if you bunch them up. If your Monk and your Knight are in the same place, sometimes it’s hard to pick the character in the back. However, this doesn’t really bother me much. The game is good at staggering characters attacking the same enemy, or putting one in front and one in back, and it is rarely an issue on most levels. If nothing else, it’s just another thing you have to plan for as you manipulate the battlefield.

I don’t know how long the game is, but I have put multiple hours into it already and it has not gotten old. Plus, I’ve only used maybe 5 of the 8 or so classes in the game, so if I wanted some variety, I could try switching in classes like Bard and Barbarian that I haven’t tried yet. It’s a fine value. What’s more, it’s a game perfectly suited to the platform that is a ton of fun. If you like gaming on your iDevice, I highly recommend the game. I doubt you will regret your purchase.