Mobile Game: Heroes of Atlan

Have you ever wanted to play Farmville with a Diablo 3 skin? Try WeMade Entertainment’s Heroes of Atlan. Atlan has all the trappings of an RPG, but the pesky combat has been removed.

To clarify, in-game combat still happens every other screen or so, but you have absolutely no control over any of it. At first, I thought I had to tap on the goblins in order to get my hero to kill them. Soon, I realized I didn’t have to. Whether or not a goblin or a demon or a centaur warrior dies at my hero’s hand depends entirely upon an invisible roll of the dice. All I had to do was sit there and watch my guy fight. As I realized this, I also noticed that there was a “SKIP” button at the top of the screen for every battle — except for the fights against real people in the arena (which you can pay money to skip), or the plot-related battles (which you can’t skip, ever, but here’s hoping they make a patch for that). The bulk of this game centers around your load-out screen, where you customize your armor, your potions, your “spirit” guides, and so forth.

The lack of combat would be fine by me if Atlan had the narrative weight of a Dragon Age or even if it had the enjoyability of character customization that, say, Diablo II had. But Atlan’s story is a piss-poor Diablo III knock-off; just replace “Diablo” with “Beelzebub” and make the characters repeat themselves a bit more, and you’ll have an Atlan cut-scene. Even me, a person who painstakingly read all of Diablo III’s dialogue, gave up on Atlan a few scenes in and stopped reading. I wanted to get to the game.

Yet, the “game” of Atlan is little more than a pretty slot machine, albeit one that requires you to rely on your friends (or, at least, your frenemies). Just as Farmville friends can help each other out with farming supplies, so too do you need your friends to enter the virtual world of Atlan and help you out. But Atlan also encourages you to fight against other heroes regularly, which is a particularly baffling choice in a game where the only way to “win” is to be a higher level than the other character. There’s some lee-way there in that you might technically be a lower level but have slightly better armor or gear, but if the other fighter is level 23 and you’re level 18, you’ll die for sure. The leader-board of Atlan is basically just a list of all characters in backwards order by level. This isn’t what a “hardcore” gamer would call a “skill-based” game … so why is there a leader-board at all?