XHero Defend Review

XHero Defend is what I would consider a weird mesh of the tower defence genre, along with the MOBA style of gameplay that you would get from games similar to League of Legends or Dota 2. The game was developed by Jupitech Solutions, and is available to both iPhone and iPad users on the iOS App Store.

At first glance, XHero Defend is really easy to mistake as your typical touchscreen MOBA. When I first loaded up the game, the tutorial walked me through something I would expect from that genre, except it made sure to hold my hand as I did so. Instead of telling me to tap over here or tap over there, the game simply highlighted what it wanted me to tap on, and wouldn’t proceed any further until I had. It wasn’t a great way of teaching me the controls for the game, as it didn’t give me the freedom to learn and play for myself.

However, what’s weird about the mash up of the two genres is the fact that the tower defence elements are really quite miniscule, and come across as nothing more than an afterthought. You can’t really do anything with the towers except protect them, and it just gives the feeling that the game was originally designed as an online focused MOBA, as the map is something you would completely expect out of one of them. But, the game is only similar to a MOBA in controls, and not particularly polished ones either.

After the game manages to get you through the tutorial, you’ll be thrust upon a couple of missions to tackle yourself. What I quickly found after doing one or two of these, was that the controls are very poorly optimised. This is definitely a game you want to be playing on a tablet to make your movements more precise, but even on a mobile, I shouldn’t feel like everytime I tap the screen, my character is going to walk into danger. On numerous occasions during the game, I tried tapping on an enemy to attack them, but my character instead chose to walk towards them, because apparently I hadn’t touched their hitbox. If that happens just a couple of times it’s down to me, but when it happens every other action I make, there is something certainly wrong with the game’s controls.

When the gameplay does manage to work out, it still isn’t anything special in the slightest. Your attacks feel like they have absolutely no impact at all and just makes you feel like you’re watching a health bar go down over time. Kiting around enemies is kind of fun, but again with the lack of impact it gets quite tedious, quite quickly. Throughout each mission you can spend your currency on new items and equipment for your character, but they do little more to improve gameplay, other than making it a little faster in the long run.

Visually, the game looks okay, at best. Characters throughout the game have pretty low-res/low polygon models, and it just leads to a lazy overall look. The towers don’t look too bad, nor does the environment all that much, but the lack of effort can really be seen in the enemies, especially when they die. When an enemy dies, their arms pretty much just go to their sides and they fall over onto their back, with little else happening before they despawn. It’s the first case of animations that really give some impressions of lazy game design.

Another instance of lack of quality control occurs when in-game text shows up on your screen. Throughout the game there are a number of spelling errors within the text, and even in one instance it’s completely not English. You can see it for yourself: just die and the game will prompt you with an elixir that revives you, but it’s completely in another language. I presume it’s Spanish, but I’m not 100% sure on that one. All I know is that if your game says the language is English on the store page, then it should probably be in just English, and checked for such.

On top of all of this, when you first start getting access to your abilities, the game has you use them right then and there, and I’m going to be honest, I cannot tell you for the life of me half of what my abilities did. Some were self-explanatory, like a fireball, which was easy enough to understand. Yet, another one had this circle thing leave my character with some lacklustre animation, and for some reason enemies health had been lowered, at least that’s what it had seemed like. There was no good description for the abilities the first time they crop up, and it really does make for some confusing gameplay.

Overall, XHero Defend tries to mix together two genres, that could probably go well together, if it was done right. Unfortunately, XHero Defend is an instance where it isn’t done as such. With the animations for more or less everything being dull, boring, and uninspired, really doesn’t help the game. Graphically the game isn’t particularly nice to look at, and the controls for the game as a whole are not polished to a good enough degree.

For these reasons, I can’t in good conscience recommend this game at all. For the majority of my time with this game I found it incredibly unenjoyable, and won’t be going back to it.