A different kind of game! Yay! I’m always scouring the game releases to find the out-of-the-ordinary (See My Singing Monsters for example) – the developers out there willing to take some risks. I am happy to say The Wall Medieval Heroes is a fun, genre-blending game, mixing elements of both resource management and tower defense. 

The story is essentially non-existent, but there is a quick basis for the game provided.

 

You have a wall that is protecting your village. The village is besieged by an evil army! That’s pretty much it.

 

There’s no discussion as to who this army is, why they are attacking you, why they are evil (perhaps simply because you decided to label them that way?), and why your village is worth saving. But alas, the geo-political and sociological nuances of this realm are clearly inconsequential. Kill stuff! Defend stuff! Sure, why not, sounds good for a Saturday morning.

The aesthetics of the game is familiar - bright, cheery, primary colors, with cartoony fonts. The title screen is very reminiscent of Clash of Clans.

 

Unfortunately the sides of the screen are dedicated to these fixed panels resulting in a more constrained play space. It’s odd to me they didn’t use the full real estate of the screen for the game play. 

The gameplay is where this game gets interesting.

 

First of all, the tutorial is a little long, but probably necessary, given the newness of the game mechanics. There is a wall, and on one side, you have villagers who are gathering gold and food, which is required to create units for your army.

 

On the other side of the wall, waves of attackers come, and you must create an army from a variety of units to defend yourself. The challenge is you can only see one side of the wall at a time, and very often while you are battling, you run out of resources to create units. So you must switch back over and collect the resources your villagers have generated. It was an interesting twist that I enjoyed.

 

 

This game is clearly a port from mobile. On the mobile platform, this is a free-to-play game where you purchase gems to accomplish all manner of things from unlocking new troops and levels, to getting interesting bonuses.

 

In the PC version, you must earn the gems – there is no way to buy them with real cash. Unfortunately I found this had an adverse impact on the pacing of the game. It was taking me too long to earn enough gems to unlock bonuses and unlock new levels. I kept having to play the same levels over and over to get the gems I needed. I wish the game designers had taken more time with the PC version to make these adjustments or just made the game free-to-play and sell the gems as a virtual item. 

 

 

I would encourage you try this game, but you may want to try it on both PC and mobile platforms to see which style you prefer. I give this game high marks for trying something new, but ding them for not taking enough time to create a well-paced game for the PC.