Battle Hunters – Game review

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Battle Hunters is a real-time strategy game with a pause mechanic to plan your next move and light RPG Elements.

Storyline

The story isn’t really meaningful or special. It’s pretty generic, but that doesn’t matter. Very early on you get a full party of three heroes, one after another joins your roster. There are 28 heroes in total and every hero has three different abilities which you unlock through leveling up.

You also gain five upgrade points per level up which you can spend however you like. You can increase health, defense, attack, parry, block, counter, hit-points of special abilities, the cool-down of abilities, and more.

Even if all heroes are different, there are basically three classes. Mage, archer, and tank. I said “basically” because technically a marksman is not an archer but the playstyle is very similar in Battle Hunters.

Archers are fast, attack from a safe distance, and don’t have much health. Mages also attack from a distance, but don’t move as fast and have more health and tanks are great in close combat.

The real-time battles let you pause whenever you want to adjust your units accordingly to new situations. As the battle starts, the game will pause and you have to manually decide which hero attacks which enemy. Every time an enemy dies you have to give a new command.

Abilities are on cooldown when the battle starts. To activate an ability you have to open the command control menu, select the ability and the enemy.

Gameplay

You can also command your hero to defend. They will suffer less damage but can’t attack at the same time. The defensive mode is a good idea when two or three enemies attack your mage, for example. If your hero’s HP almost reaches zero, you can use items to heal him up (food or potions). Giving items has a cooldown so you can’t spam it indefinitely.

If a hero dies, they will revive with one HP after the battle but forfeits any EXP. After every battle, heroes who survived will get 50 HP back, but that’s not really important because the game is meant to be played with different heroes after every few battles.

You can swap them at any given time. Heroes who aren’t in your party will slowly heal automatically. Also, everyone who isn’t part of the battle does NOT gain EXP. But again, that’s not a problem since you will be forced to swap them often enough (although there will be a point where you don’t use some heroes anymore).

The game looks like a mobile game and the controls are designed to be played on a touchscreen. But don’t worry, it’s not a cheap mobile game with micro-transactions. It’s not even available for phones right now but it will be soon on Nintendo Switch.

You can also play with a controller. I found it to be more relaxed playing with a controller when moving around the map and with a mouse when in a battle, but ultimately both are fine.

Battle Hunters needs a few QoL features. Starting with the battle system, you can’t command all three heroes together even if you just standard attack the same enemy. This would be easy to fix. It’s just annoying to click through all the menus especially since most of the time the game doesn’t register clicking on an enemy the first time.

You need to click two to four times ’til it finally works. Now, you need to do that for every hero and every time your target dies. Compare that to a button that lets you attack with your whole party.

Also, if your hero doesn’t have a target, they won’t do anything. The game will force you to give a new command, which just slows the game down unnecessarily. A user-friendly idea would be to just attack the nearest enemy. Most of the time, that would be good enough. In every other case, you could manually change the target or command.

Another annoying thing is the animation after winning a battle. You can’t skip it and it’s slow. It’s a pretty basic feature to let the players skip this nowadays. This heavily resembles old PS2 games, just as the ugly UI does.

Speaking of which, graphically the game is fine but looking at the map, it just consists of big fat pixels. This will give you another flashback to a time when the PS2 was the newest console on the market.

And there is something the game does even worse than most PS2 games, you need to buy every item individually and then confirm it. Do you want to buy 10 keys? You need to click 20 times. Why not add the feature to buy more than one piece of an item?

Even if there is a lot to complain about, the game is very fun. It can get repetitive but since there is no voice acting, almost no music, and just a few sound effects, this is a perfect second-screen gaming experience.

Complaints aside, I definitely recommend the game!

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