1.
Axiom Verge (Windows/Steam)2.
Fire Emblem Heroes (iOS/no IAP)3. Fire Emblem Heroes - Hard, Lunatic, and beyond: late game content
I already posted my FE Heroes impressions after beating the Normal campaign mode, but as expected of a freemium game, the game goes on, and it turns out that the game changes quite a bit as it does. Here are my impressions from beating Hard, making some early headway in Lunatic, and playing some higher level training tower missions.
FE Heroes is in so many ways a typical freemium game. You have 50 stamina points that slowly regenerate, and each mission costs stamina to play. Higher level missions cost more stamina to attempt. At lower levels this isn't a problem because there's more than enough stamina. But at higher levels, it can cost a third of your stamina to play a level. That raises the stakes for loosing the battle quite a bit. Further, higher level characters take a lot more experience, slowing level progression quite a bit. You remember how characters who die in battle don't keep any experience they earned? Well, that doesn't help. So you have to fight many more battles to level up, putting a real squeeze on your stamina supply. And that also raises the consequences for failure and death.
And you'll do a lot more dying. In addition to named heroes, the game has generic troops of every type. These generic troops seem to be able to be assigned powers and skills at random. This means you may go into a level thinking you have covered all your bases only to discover a random enemy soldier has massively high stats for his level and a skill that makes him immune to the advantage you thought you had (yes, this has actually happened to me). There's no way you can truly be prepared for these random events. You will inevitably find yourself in a battle where there is one opponent you can only seem to do 2 or 3 damage to with your strongest character. This can create a mess, as this randomly generated powerhouse tears through your troops while you bite your nails hoping you can take him down and get at least one character some experience. At lower levels this kind of randomness is a lot less fatal, but at higher levels you can get utterly crushed without any way of anticipating what you were up against.
On top of this is the cruelty of the random stat bonuses at level-up. You can have an otherwise great character and then just keep getting level-ups with only 1 or 2 stats boosted. In the early game it isn't so bad, but by late game those randomly generated enemy mooks can have wide ranges of stats, and some end up with some godlike numbers.
This aggravates the other freemium aspect of the game, the gashapon aspect. For those who aren't familiar with gashapon, it's basically those capsule machines where you put in your money and it spits out a plastic capsule with a toy or doodad in it. Most are cheap, but a few are really rare or valuable. When you summon, you get characters of varied rarity, and that rarity affects not only the likelihood of better stat gains at level up, but better starting equipment and skills. A 5 star character will start with a much stronger weapon and better innate abilities than a 3 star character. But you can still get shafted on level-up when it comes to stat gains. And when you promote lower value characters to higher star ratings, they don't automatically gain the new equipment or abilities. You have to buy it with SP. So don't promote immediately at level 20 or you'll still end up falling behind due to not having adequate SP to buy the necessary upgrades.
There's also the problem of over-powered characters. Fire Emblem has some neat abilities for combat, but because lower star characters don't have access to the best abilities or stat gains, only the highest-star characters will truly become self-sufficient on the battlefield. And some rare abilities can make certain characters very difficult to overcome. Random enemy soldiers, as mentioned above, can sometimes turn up with powerful combinations, but there are some preset ones. The two current game-dominating characters are young Tiki and Takumi. Both these characters have very solid stats and abilities that help negate their weaknesses, meaning they become game-changers IF you can get them. But they're both 5-star, so you have to get really lucky or summon your butt off.
tl;drFire Emblem Heroes's biggest problems are the interplay between the freemium aspects of stamina and gashapon and the effects of randomness - in level-up, in gashapon summoning, and in random enemy configurations - on game difficulty and balance. At lower levels you always have enough stamina, and characters are relatively easy to level up, and even 2 and 3-star characters can be useful in battles. Once you hit the higher levels, only 4 and 5-stars are viable, poor level-up boosts can neuter an otherwise powerful 4-star character, enemies can generate with randomly overpowered abilities and stats, experience gain is much more grindy and difficult, and the penalties of losing are much more painful.
For free players, the normal campaign is great, and the road to level 20 is pretty fun. After level 20 and halfway through the Hard campaign, things take a turn, and if you want to stay an effective free player you need to be cutthroat and lucky. Or you need to spend money and summon like nobody's business. Takumi or young Tiki could show up right at the next summon... Otherwise, prepare to be frustrated.
