Tactical Heroes Review

Tactical Heroes is a free-to-play strategy base-building game, much like the ubiquitous Clash of Clans. Players build a base, train soldiers, go on missions, collect resources, and more, primarily in the pursuit of being able to build a better base, train better soldiers, etc. To set itself apart, Tactical Heroes gives players direct control of their soldiers on the field of battle, much like more traditional turn-based strategy games, but this twist isn’t quite enough to make it feel especially outstanding or worthwhile.

For those unfamiliar with games of Tactical Heroes‘ ilk, players start out with a basic set of buildings and units before being funneled through a sequence of heavily tutorialized missions designed to show them all the different things to do – of which there are a lot. As a hybrid, Tactical Heroes plays like part city-builder, management sim, tower defense, strategy, role playing, and more, albeit all smashed and jumbled together.

Tactical Heroes in particular is set in a sci-fi universe where players build up their base of space marines to go on missions to fight aliens. As they progress, they can then also go on raids against other players’ bases to get even more rewards. When in battle, players take turns moving and shooting with their characters in a simple but functional turn-based strategy system.

When not fighting, players can upgrade all aspects of their base to get more resources, build more units, unlock new buildings, etc. The ultimate goal appears to be for players to build the best base possible and get the best units to defend it as possible. Part of the strategy is to have buildings and units expertly placed so as to drive enemies toward traps and ambushes, and Tactical Heroes does a pretty good job of encouraging this by allowing players to move buildings around the terrain freely at almost any time.

Although everything mentioned sounds pretty great so far, the hang ups for these types of games – particularly for me – is in their free-to-play structure. Much like others of its kind, progression in Tactical Heroes can be painfully slow unless players shell out money. Gathering resources, healing units, building buildings, and almost everything else has some sort of time gate on it, which starts out pretty long and gets even longer the further players get. Although I understand why this system is set in place, particularly for games that are completely free otherwise, Tactical Heroes feels like it handles this system particularly poorly as I found myself pretty regularly running out of things to do after a few minutes of play.

Tactical Heroes follows the formula of a lot of its more successful colleagues and adds a turn-based strategy combat system that’s not groundbreaking, but is definitely serviceable. Unfortunately though, it’s marred by some painfully slow wait timers that make grinding out progression slow to a crawl pretty quickly. Fans of games like this may get some enjoyment out of Tactical Heroes‘ spin on the genre, but otherwise it’s probably best to steer clear.