Single-handedly assemble your team of heroes, literally | Full Review - Rumble Heroes

Rumble Heroes : Adventure RPG is a free-to-play mobile RPG where players control a ragtag team of heroes looking to save the princess.

🟩Pros

+simple but fun one-handed gameplay

+interesting adventure RPG elements

🟥Cons

-combat lacks depth

-heavy amounts of grind needed, unless you pay

Rumble Heroes’s gameplay is similar to Vampire Survivors; you only control using one hand and you only control movement of the characters, nothing else. However it adds more complexity and depth to the game by introducing various adventure RPG concepts: Traversing through the land, encountering different characters, building your party, and resting in camps and villages.

The graphics are goofy and somewhat cute, but the animations are really well-done and accentuates the gameplay even more with its fluid-looking swings, slashes, and death animations.

Gameplay Analysis

The combat is fun and satisfying for the most part that compels me enough to play, and it does it without requiring any effort from the player. Unlike other single-handed games, the character instead auto attacks only when not moving, adding a distinct tactical flavor to the combat that players may or may not like.  Players just have to bring the party within attack range, stop moving, and they will automatically bash and hit their enemies to death.

However, it becomes clear that this is a trade-off for some proper skill-based combat, as there is no way to handle enemy attacks but to mostly brute force tank them. There isn’t even a way to reliably control which character goes in front and gets damaged. So if you’re looking for a game that is deep on the active combat mechanics, this is not it.

When heroes die, they become incapacitated for a few seconds and a cooldown starts before they can get up again back to full health. A pretty straightforward and player friendly feature as to not overly complicate things. After all, Rumble Heroes was designed to be played with one-hand.

Players generally control multiple characters at once, and gather more characters to choose from along the way. Or sometimes, in a gacha-like recruitment system. There are many different heroes to gain, from simple axe-wielding joes to full-on rogues and mages.  This group/horde movement scheme is designed to be simple and easy to control, but there are some minor pathing and navigation issues because you do not have an exact positional control of the characters.

In Rumble Heroes, progression is tied to the series of increasingly difficult areas in the world — all can be traveled to seamlessly — requiring you to upgrade your characters and level them up to be able to withstand further locations. Players will encounter dungeons and quests along the way that gives players another excuse to kill monsters. The dungeons are wave-like and require players to clear all enemies, one level after the next. There are bosses in both the world and dungeons, providing a hefty challenge to players.

The quests are only barebones, with characters mostly requiring some sort of resource in exchange for a reward. Speaking of barebones, this is the same case with the plot where the only takeaway I got was that I have to save some princess. No cutscenes, no cinematics.

Further adding to the already gameplay rich world, there is a bit of resource gathering and minor base building elements while exploring the land, sometimes requiring you to gather wood, meat, and minerals, to be able to perform different actions like activating new structures, revealing locked zones, completing quests, recruiting heroes from the pub, and upgrading them.

Base building elements take the form of gradually upgrading your village using resources that will unlock new features, like a pub to recruit new heroes, or a dungeon portal to serve as a dungeon-crawling replayable section.  In the game world, loot chests are also encountered from time to time that grants you resources, with the option of watching an ad to further multiply the loot gained.

As for the free-to-play elements, there are indeed microtransactions where you can spend money to level up faster and recruit better characters. For the early game, it never felt like there was a pay-to-win element. Unfortunately, this is not the same case a few hours in, and players will soon hit a wall that will make them grind, or encouraged to pay.

Outside the pay-to-win mechanics, all of these gameplay elements result in a rather engaging dynamic system that seamlessly switches from killing monsters, bosses, to gathering resources and building structures, on a whim.

Conclusion:

In Summary, Rumble Heroes is simply a fun RPG game with interesting gameplay mechanics that was designed to be played with one-hand. However, its free-to-play nature is both a blessing and a curse, as they have crafted the progression with microtransactions heavily in mind.