The past couple of weeks have been very transitional, in no small part, due to a change of location and new office.
Due to this, consoles and PC's have been packed up and yet again the trusty Switch Lite is the hero of the hour!
Not having the time (or furniture) to sit down to engage in long periods of gaming, I was looking for a fun, casual, easy to dip in and out of title to fill my downtime.
Battle Hunters ticked all the boxes.
Battle Hunters is a real time tactical fantasy combat game, that reminded me a little of a simplified "Final Fantasy Tactics". The game makes no apology that it is pretty much an out and out battler (as the title would suggest).
There is very little in the way of story: Wise old guy appears to you like a force ghost .."there is bad shit happening in our world, monsters and such, you must defeat them or worse things will happen" ...and off you trot into the core mechanic tutorial.
As the tutorial progresses you soon get a full party of 3, with each character being a unique class with 3 respective special abilities that are unlocked as you level up. Each time you level up a character, you also get 5 ability points that can be used to increase stats and shape a playstyle.
While the game lacks aby reals story it more than makes up for this in character pool, with 28 in total that need to be unlocked and levelled up, making this game the Dynasty Warriors of tactical battlers!
As is standard fare across fantasy rpg's each class has its pros and cons, melee classes for example, attack at short range and have a large health pool, magic users are more glass cannons, with high ranged damage but low armour and health.
The battles unfold in real time but you can pause the game to evaluate the battlefield and issue new orders, likewise certain events will trigger a pause and require you to issue your next order.
Graphically is OK, nothing to write home about. I wanted to be optimistic and formed the opinion that the graphical appearance of the game intentionally paid homage to the retro games of the PS2 era, that had so obviously inspired it. But I was wrong.... it's an iOS port.
Audio is decent enough, but there is no voice acting for the snippets of story that do exist.
However the gameplay is really great fun and as I mentioned at the start of this review it really is a perfect game to play for short bursts. It lends itself perfectly to short sessions and convenience. On the flipside it would be come a little repetitive if played for any serious length of time.
Battle Hunters is available now on Nintendo eShop priced $16.99 as well as on Steam for $14.99. The original iOS is $4.99. The sweet spot for value for money, in my opinion, would be around the $10 mark. But definitely to add to the wishlist for a sale.
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