HEROish

I came at HEROish fully expecting a dressed-up mobile port with nothing to say on PC, and I was only half right. The game started life on Apple Arcade, and that DNA is visible everywhere: the UI is oversized, the campaigns each clock in at around an hour, and the core loop is deliberately low-friction. What I did not expect was to find something that actually holds together as a competitive concept, at least for a while. The structure is a side-scrolling castle defense with deck-building threaded through it. You pick one of six heroes across three factions - the Imperial warriors, the Cursed undead, and the Feral tribes - and you push left and right along a single lane, spending mana to drop cards that summon troops or trigger spells. Your goal is to crack the opposing Soul Gem before yours goes down. There is no aiming, no movement tech, no mouse precision required. Your hero auto-attacks on contact. The tactical layer lives entirely in card selection and timing, which sounds thin but produces real decisions once the card pool opens up. Flynn Diamond throws an electrified hammer and stuns enemies; Vega sends volleys of slowing arrows and commands her wolf Ajax to bleed through enemy lines; King Bulvi is a bear who roars and cleaves. Each hero plays differently enough that swapping around does not feel pointless. The campaigns are genuinely the stronger half of the package. Sunblink built enough objective variety into them - freeing allied units, planting bombs, holding control points - that the single-lane battlefield does not feel as claustrophobic as it sounds. Each faction runs its own deck, so you are actually adjusting strategy across the three playthroughs rather than steamrolling with a single optimised build. The storytelling is campy and self-aware, which mostly lands. What does not land is the length: three campaigns at roughly an hour each is a light afternoon, not a feature. Multiplayer is where the ceiling drops fast. Crossplay is present, which helps the population problem, and there are casual, ranked, AI, and custom modes to choose from. But at launch and beyond, the player pool has never been large, and the competitive depth is constrained by only six heroes and two maps in PvP. Cards are locked behind a leveling system in multiplayer, which means early sessions are very repetitive since you are stuck on a narrow deck until progress opens options. Daily quests exist to accelerate that grind, though some reviewers flagged tracking bugs that stopped quest completion from registering. Random card draws can also tip close matches toward luck rather than reads, which will bother anyone who takes ranked seriously. If you are the kind of player who wants a competitive ladder with genuine meta depth and a healthy queue at platinum and above, this is not that game. For what it is, though, HEROish is clean and honest. There are no microtransactions, the crossplay works, the art style is vibrant and readable in a fight, and the audio punches hard enough to make battles feel weighty. It is a game that works best in short sessions, between other things, with a friend or two for 2v2. Anyone chasing a primary competitive experience with deep ranked progression will bounce off the content ceiling within a week. Anyone who wants a low-commitment, tactically literate game to play in 20-minute slots will find it earns its keep.

Fred · Scout Team

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