The high definition craze is hitting with force this year and Ubisoft is making sure it is at the front line of this new fashion. In its zeal to outnumber anyone's HD rehashes it is now releasing re-skinned versions of one year old DS games. Well, at least they've had the decency to spearhead this new idea with a decent game, which did not get the attention it deserved. Unfortunately, the port didn't get the love it deserved, either, and it is just a port, with small fixes and brand new outstanding problems.
I will not go in depth into Clash of Heroes' mechanics and merits. To cut a long story short, it is an interesting and entertaining mix of your average tactics RPG with Magical Drop and Magic: the Gathering. Or something like that. It is quite unique. For more info, internet is full of reviewes of the DS original, and the modifications made to the new version do not invalidate them.
Regarding the common ground between both versions, I'll say that my favourite part remains intact: the puzzles, in which you are given one turn to prepare a number of attacks. They serve as tutorials for advanced configurations and how to best take advantadge of the rules. The bad is mostly the same, too: the last chapter is too simple and uninspired, consisting of, basically, going forward to advance, backwards to grind, fight the two final battles and that's it. Balance could also be improved, with random battles sometimes featuring too strong enemies for the current level of the player, or the level of bounties being inconsistent. Also unfixed is the possibility of losing bounty hunts without being warned, if the player decides to try a different one.
About the HD remake, I will say that the new art is, in most cases, great and very well designed. The only problem here is that some generic portraits are direct high resolution exports of the DS's vector graphics, looking like crude drafts in comparison with the rest. Also updated were several powers, units and objects, which were greatly needed. Things seem a bit more balanced now in multiplayer, which was absolutely vital for it to have a change to succeed. Also, the story mode difficulty has been reduced, but you'll still want to throw the controller a couple of times, specially during the last chapter.
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| Multiplayer is almost the only ocassion when the game's heroes actually clash |
But the greatest difference with the original is not in gameplay. It is much more basic, and its impact so deep that it turns a very good game into a test of patience: loading screens. The DS version had them, in a way, but they were never longer than 5 seconds. In the PS3 and 360 version of the game, loading screens last from 5 to 20 seconds. And, given the mini-sections and battle arena design of the game, they are used way too often. And, usually, there is no more than a few seconds between each of these pests showing up. By the time I got to the third episode I was so bored of seeing them that I ended counting how long each took: the average is 12-15 seconds.
So you'll wonder: "How terrible can this be? Most games have load screens, and nobody complains*." Well, let's say I find a bounty target I have to fight. The sequence would go like this: talk to the target (5 seconds), accept to fight(2s), loading screen (12s), actual fight (2-5 minutes), loading screen (12s). OK, the bounty has been hunted. Let's report back: exit the current map (5s), loading screen (15s), go to next map (5s), loading screen (15s), go to tavern (5s), loading screen (15s), report and get new target (10s). And now go back to were I need to go, which will require at least a couple more area changes and the corresponding loading screens.
So, of the, approximately, 70 seconds it took to report back, I've spent 45 looking at a loading screen, and one whole minute of the last 7 of gameplay was spent in them. After a couple of hours of this madness I had already started to decide what to do and where to go, not based on advancing the game or collecting the most objects, but on minimizing the number of loading screens I'd trigger in the long run. And still I have the impression I spent about 25-30% of my 40 hours of gameplay watching the dreaded "Loading..." text.
Of course, the game quickly stopped being fun. Only the battles kept me attached to it, as they were several minutes of blessed uninterrupted joy.
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| Boss battles. Nightmares are made of these. |
I'm sure someone in Capybara said loading took too long and the reply was "Nah, it's not that bad. And the cost of making them shorter would be too high". And that phrase there damned the game. I had a similar experience in my first job, with a tool I co-developed, which was barely usable because of load times. We tried to lie to ourselves saying it was not that bad, too, but once we managed to fix the issue (much simpler than we expected), we could admit the truth: there was no way anyone would use that tool the way it was.
Capybara should have accepted the criticism and worked until a solution was found. It might have been as simple as using a second core to decompress sound effects, which I'd say is the cause of the issue. Or more complex, like rewriting the whole asset manager. But it would have been worth it, if they managed to make the game as entertaining as it was on the DS.
Conclusion
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| I couldn't come up with many similar games... |
Since Capybara and Ubisoft wouldn't care to redesign the game core to get rid of or, at least, improve loading times, I have to recommend to stick to the DS version. The changes are not that great, exploring is not a despairing experience and you can find it for way less than the new price (15€ for PS3, 1200 points for 360). And, most important, you won't be rewarding laziness and low cost ports of games.
For my part, this and Beyond Good & Evil are the last and only Ubisoft HD versions I'll ever buy. After giving them a chance, I will not make the same mistake again. I'm even considering cancelling the Ico + Shadow of the Colossus pre-order, in case Sony turns out to be as cheap as Ubisoft in these matters.
* I can only remember one other game I hated as much for the same problem: Star Wars: the Force Unleashed, which had loading screens in the options menu and character customization screens. Of course, The Force Unleashed is one of the worst games I've ever played, while Clash of Heroes (HD) could have been a great game.
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