After nearly a year of soft-launch and beta testing, Hothead Games has finally launched their new cover-based third-person shooter Hero Hunters (Free) in the iOS App Store. We first talked about Hero Hunters back in December, and officially the game was supposed to launch on February 1st, but as these things sometimes go it seems to have snuck out early here on iOS. Android fans might have to wait a bit as it’s still listed for pre-registration over on the Google Play Store. As for the game itself, Hero Hunters is a team-based third-person shooter which utilizes destructible cover elements and takes a page out of the MOBA book with a variety of character classes to play as. One of the coolest features is that you’re able to take up to 5 characters into battle at a time and then switch between them on the fly. So, for example, you might have a tanky character blast away some barriers where the enemies are taking cover and then switch over to your sniper to take shots at the now-vulnerable bad guys.

I’ve only played a few minutes of Hero Hunters, basically through the first several levels and first boss fight, all of which act as an extended tutorial, but it’s a lot of fun so far. There are a whopping 40 different types of characters to unlock and play as, of course each with their own unique abilities and strengths and weaknesses. Being able to switch between characters at will is a lot of fun and allows you to kind of develop your own strategies in dealing with the various challenges of the game. There’s a full single-player campaign but also real-time PvP battles, co-op battles, PvE boss raids, and more in the online portion. The only down side is that, much like most of Hothead’s mobile games, Hero Hunters is free to play’d out the wazoo. It’s pretty typical stuff so if you’re used to free to play online shooters you’ll feel right at home, but if you typically don’t enjoy free to play games there’s nothing here that’s going to change you mind. Even if that’s the case though, I’d recommend at least downloading Hero Hunters and playing through the first few missions to see how the player-switching and cover-based shooting works, as it’s quite solid and fun.