The idea behind the TouchArcade Game of the Week is that every Friday afternoon we post the one game that came out this week that we think is worth giving a special nod to. Now, before anyone goes over-thinking this, it doesn’t necessarily mean our Game of the Week pick is the highest scoring game in a review, the game with the best graphics, or really any other quantifiable “best" thing. Instead, it’s more just us picking out the single game out of the week’s releases that we think is the most noteworthy, surprising, interesting, or really any other hard to describe quality that makes it worth having if you were just going to pick up one.
These picks might be controversial, and that’s OK. If you disagree with what we’ve chosen, let’s try to use the comments of these articles to have conversations about what game is your game of the week and why.
Without further ado…
Battleheart Legacy
If you turn the clocks way back to February of 2009, when two-person developer Mika Mobile released their very first iOS game Zombieville USA, I don’t think I could have imagined that five years later they’d be the ones producing something as epic as Battleheart Legacy ($4.99). But, that’s just what they’ve done, and it shows an impressive evolution of a talented developer in the iOS space. Beyond all that, Battleheart Legacy is just an incredibly awesome game. I can’t count the number of times in the past two days I’ve thought to myself “I’d do anything to blow off [insert responsibility] so I can just sit back and play more Battleheart Legacy." Luckily, I kept my nose to the grindstone which is why there’s been stuff to read on TouchArcade, but now that the weekend is upon us, I know what I’ll be spending all my free time doing.
Backing up a bit, Battleheart Legacy is the follow-up to Mika’s stellar 2011 game Battleheart. But, it’s not a direct sequel at all, and in fact Legacy is quite a bit different from the original. First and foremost, you’re no longer controlling a party of characters, rather you’ll control just one character who has the ability to gain a multitude of different abilities all culled from the same types of classes found in the first Battleheart. At first I was a bit disappointed with this change, because the party system was the defining feature of Battleheart. However, as we talk about at length on our podcast this week, I’m actually very happy with Mika Mobile’s decision to make Legacy this way.
For those who don’t want to listen to the podcast (shame on you!), I’ll try to summarize what I mean. Basically, I’m happy that the two games are so different from one another, as it gives me reason to keep them both. The original Battleheart has aged well, and is still incredibly fun. Rather than replacing it with the next game in the series, I’m happy to have them living beside each other on my device forever and ever, and I can choose to play either depending on what kind of mood I’m in. Plus, I know there’s room for a true Battleheart 2 someday, with a party system like the first but a grander game build around it. But I wouldn’t want to change Battleheart Legacy for anything in the world, I love how it turned out.
Despite the two games being quite different, Mika has successfully retained the staggering amount of character customization that made the first Battleheart so great. It’s just contained within one character. It feels like there’s a near-infinite amount of different ways you can build out your character in Battleheart Legacy, because there is. Couple that with a massive hand-crafted world to explore, dozens of different missions and stories to discover and complete, and vibrant 3D graphics that still somehow capture the charm and style of Mika Mobile’s previous titles, and Battleheart Legacy amounts to one of the finest RPGs ever released on the iOS platform. We cover all the reasons why we love it so much in our review, and when it came time to pick our Game of the Week, Battleheart Legacy was a no-brainer.
