Reviewed: August 14, 2007
Reviewed by: Jeff Gedgaud

Publisher
Strategy First

Developer
Quotix Software

Released: June 19, 2007
Genre: RPG
Players: 1

3
2
3
1
2.3

System Requirements:

Strategy First and Quotix Software published and created Call for Heroes and are probably sorry they did not spend more time on it. The game lacks much imagination and could have been a decent RPG style adventure but with the total lack of a story line and very repetitive levels it is a loss of a game.

You have a good assortment of weapons you can find on each level along with a very lot of health, regeneration and other goodies that are literally laying out for you to grab. The whole problem from the start is your level looks like one big amusement park with everything lying out in the open.

Each level will have a vast amount of power ups and such lying all over with a lot of obstacles such as walls, fences or holes in the ground. You have your spawning monsters that look terrible but that’s okay, so does your character. Some of the levels remind me very much of the Rainbow Six levels with not much in them but plenty of cover, only you can’t use cover for anything.

The monsters lumber at you and some even get to shoot fireballs or other things that sound oddly like laser weapons from Star Wars. What fun there is was ruined by trying to make the levels hard but only by increasing the number of monsters to an insane amount that just lumber at you.

You can easily dodge the fireballs or other range weapons and outrun anything in the levels when you start but after a few minutes of running around there ends up being about thirty or more monsters that are just lumbering after you. You do get levels and better strength, armor or weapons ability along with some other unique abilities like invisibility or god mode.

Starting out you would think the story would give some clue as to what you are doing. I like to pick up a game and see if I can play it without reading the manual, no chance here. You have to collect these Dark Souls in each level that are trying to possess humans of the world led by the demon Pompolic.

Starting the level it took me a few minutes to realize that the Dark Souls they were talking about are these spiked things and not some undead ghost running around.

You have no mini map and have to rely on a bar that goes up when you get near these spiked balls. Once you find all the Dark Souls of the level the portal to the next level is opened up and let you through to the next level. You get to start all over from here with awakening with a few new types in each successive level.

The weapons work okay for the melee based but there is no aiming device for the ranged weapons such as the bow and you just guess at where you’re shooting. Add to this that when near objects such as walls or big rocks the camera closes in on the back of your head and you really add to the difficulty of aiming.

The levels are not too bad and do have plenty of walls and other obstacles to keep the monsters at bay that are trying to get at you. I found myself spending more time avoiding the monsters and running around finding the Dark Souls than actually fighting as the fighting didn’t seem to do much good.

When you earn enough experience points you can level up your character in strength, armor or regeneration but they don’t seem to do much good. You can still be dead very quickly when surrounded by monsters that seem to spawn whenever you run into a power up or other objects laying around.

Call for Heroes is not that great a game and even comparing it to others is not fair as any game I could compare it to was by far better.

The far clipping distance looks terrible, as you often can see monsters or the power ups but no ground or other features. The textures and graphics are very outdated and were probably good back in the late 1980’s. The effects like the fireballs and other glowing things are not bad but they are not good either, again it is like they used all the older stuff for a modern game.

Both of the main characters look terrible as well, they jump like their trying to surf and their textures are not well rendered. The monsters are no better with some changes made from one to the next for several different variations of the same kind. There are a total of eighteen monster types but many are just changes to one species.

There is a skeleton and this larger monster that sometimes has arms but sometimes will be missing one and spiders of varying sizes. These one-ball things shoot fireballs or something like that at you but are perfectly round except for these horns with a texture wrapped around it. There is also this witch thing that shoots a laser type weapon with the sound of one to match.

All the monsters die by either popping in a red cloud of what I would guess is blood or by burning into a red or blue silhouette of what they were. Many of the smaller animations for things like dying or the transportation again looks very outdated and I do remember some things like it that looked very good back in the day.

The graphics are not good and really start off bad when the opening scenes are not even shown. I loaded the game and thought I didn’t get it right the first time because there was no opening scenes at all until the menu appeared. I reloaded the game and it did the same thing with no video or scenes at the beginning of the game.

The sound was there and you could guess at what was appearing on your screen but it was black. And that will bring me to the sound of the game as there were no cut scenes, no animations other than the characters jumping around and the monsters lumbering after you and dying in a red cloud or burning up.

Your character has this grunt whenever they get hit and they have this other huh sound when they jump but that is all the sounds they will utter during the game. You do get very tired of hearing the same grunt and huh from them every time they get hit or jump.

The theme music is not bad but there are very few other sounds that you would expect like from the monsters, it took me a few minutes to realize what was missing. There is the decent sound of the weapons and such but the monsters make very little sounds at all. They usually have some kind of growl or grunt when you hit them or they die but they make almost no sounds like roars of frustration, rage or anger while they lumber around.

Just playing Call for Heroes: Pompolic Wars is not fun enough but with the god mode on it gets tolerable. There is no real challenge to the game other than the hordes of monsters thrown at you and no real fun in that as they do the same lumbering walk at you to get in arms length.

Most of the monsters either shoot something or hack at you and it looks much like a zombie movie with you having to skitter your way out of their reach. There is really no replay value as once you do get though all the levels; the thing is exactly the same. For that matter the levels are pretty much the same as the AI is not even remotely good.