Heroes Vs Hordes

Your typical fantasy adventure game features all manner of ghoul and goblins, now imagine taking enough of those ghoulies to make Dynasty Warriors blush and removing your ability to freely choose your weapon and you’ll be most of the way to Heroes Vs Hordes. It’s one of an ever more popular top-down survival “shooter” genre with masses of monsters closing in on you until your inevitable demise. The gameplay is worryingly addictive, with each little incremental upgrade pushing you to bigger and better rewards. While random chance seems to hold the reins for the majority of your playtime you can sway the odds in your favour once you know what weapons work best for each character. Every round can either be a stress inducing travesty or come together beautifully, turning you into an unstoppable harbinger of death. Time to pick your poison and melt, zap or slash your way to victory.

Platform and Languages

Heroes vs Hordes is a mobile exclusive, which makes sense considering the movement controls. The game is free to download but does feature microtransactions (and a lot of adverts). These won’t have any effect on your readability other than perhaps levelling you up quicker and unlocking more items quicker.

You can choose between a healthy selection of languages from the settings menu in the main screen.

Glossary

Usability

I went into Heroes and Hordes not expecting too much in the way of language and usability. The gameplay involves entering multi-stage arenas of different themes and collecting a variety of upgrades in order to survive until you beat the boss and get a chance at the final coin rush. While you are in each arena you will on see the occasional text from special pick-ups or warnings of large hordes and elites appearing. The real fun starts when you collect enough XP to get yourself either a weapon or an exo, a supercharge effect that modifies your current loadout. With each level you are given a choice of 3 upgrades, each with a name and short description. The text here can very, ranging from a description of what the item is to a simple statistic of what changes with each level. There is also the added benefit that the gameplay will freeze while you make your selection meaning you can read at your leisure and even lookup words as needed. As you complete areas new weapons and exos are unlocked, expanding your readable content and, more importantly, given you a bigger roster to kill your enemies with. When the run is done you can start to see the perks back in the main menu.

In between runs you’ll find a hub-style menu where you can access your character detail, equipment, tasks and a incredible database of monsters and modifiers in the collections menu. Firstly, lets start with deciding which character to use (once you’ve unlocked a few, I suppose). The character menu will show you a brief story of your chosen character, their weapon and the rewards for levelling them up, such as new projectiles effects or special abilities. The equipment menu holds very little in the way of full sentences but a whole bunch of statistical language. The multiple perks of each armour piece and the functions you can carry out on them are succinct but none the less beneficial. The talents menu, while being a big investment for your gameplay isn’t much for learning. You’ll be able to purchase small but permanent upgrades similar to the exos, and while there are a lot to unlock, there are little to no descriptions. Even clicking on each unlocked item doesn’t show any more info unlike other aspects within the game.

The collections menu is by far and away the best source for vocabulary and grammar. When you venture to a new area you will have to fend off different tiers of monsters, from tiny bats and bugs to hulking golems. The variety here is surprisingly vast, with usually 8 or so new enemies introduced per chapter. Upon meeting each one you’ll get an additional tile to view in the collections menu. You’re spoilt for choice with a paragraph for each entry as well as text for stats and perks for beating set milestones. The language here is more advanced than anything else found in Heroes Vs Hordes, with more adjectives and thematic nouns. There is an added benefit that enemies of the same class i.e skeletons or sprites, and enemies from the same areas utilize similar words helping you revise and make links in your vocabulary. I found it incredibly beneficial to dip into the collections menu between runs to read new entries and review them as damage bonuses are unlocked.

Heroes Vs Hordes is incredibly word heavy, I genuinely think you can find every sort of menu if you look for it and it’s quite hard to find a point where there’s no text on screen at all aside from when you’re mid round. As stated, not all of these menus are borne equal. Many are pop ups for store offers or time-limited game modes and, being truly honest, they’re pretty dull (I suppose content is content). The stars of the show do really shine however so take each menu in your stride and focus on what writing style is being applied and why.

Heroes vs hordes has been a pretty enjoyable game. It’s simple in nature, will keep you hooked on getting even a few more coins out of the final rush. The gameplay can be kept surprisingly fresh if you aim for different weapon combos and, with the right goal in mind, you easily can absorb a tonne of usable content which can be used in similar games of this genre. I’ve played this game daily for about 3 months now and although this review is done I’m gunna have some trouble fixing that horde-fighting itch…

Challenges and Methods

Know your enemy

Bet you saw this coming. These collection entries are brilliantly bite-sizes. Small enough that you shouldn’t need too much persuasion to look up each words but big enough that you get a good feel for grammar and sentence structure. As stated above, whenever these are unlocked or you kill enough enemies to meet a milestone, read the entry and commit any new words to memory.

Hone your skills

I’ve banged on about focused learning and passive learning plenty of times before. I used Heroes Vs Hordes and its skill pop ups to better train my focus. It’s easy to get ingrained in to gameplay like this and just play through memory. However for each round you will have approximately 30 opportunities to level up, equalling 90 text boxes to read (more with shuffles). This would be wasted if you just skip so try making a point of stopping, focusing on the text and only making your selection when you’ve read and understood each choice.