Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2014/04/17/heartstone_review/

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft – A jolly little war for lunchtime

Free-to-play WoW turn-based game when you have 20 minutes to kill

By Adam Fowler

Posted in Personal Tech, 17th April 2014 09:04 GMT

Quick review Hearthstone is a game that I've been a bit obsessed with lately.

Hearthstone is a free game from Blizzard for PC and iPad. Free to play to be specific, but there is definitely no requirement to actually pay money – I'll get into why later.

Using World of Warcraft themes and art style, it's an online turn-based card game. No, wait, come back. Yes, it's a card game, but it's actually good. I've never played anything like Magic: The Gathering or Yu Gi Oh, but I'm told they are of the same genre.

When you first launch the game, you're greeted with a fairly basic menu:

Screenshot of the Hearthstone opening screen

Such medieval, much Warcraft ... how the game greets you (click to enlarge)

Some options will be greyed out at the start, but the "Practice" section is where anyone new should head. The game starts off with some training and simple games against AI-driven players. This is a great warm-up and walks you through the basics without feeling too slow or too rushed.

Once you start to get the hang of the basics (which are fairly straightforward), you'll start to realise some of the strategies and choices you'll need to make when playing.

The game basically involves a deck of 30 cards and a choice of nine characters (each with their own cards as well as cards that can be used by anyone), and you take turns trying to do damage to the opposing player. You do this by ordering your hero character to attack your adversary, or summoning minions to do the job, throwing in spells, weapons and so on to get the edge over your enemy. Cards cost mana to use, so one must juggle their mana budget.

What cards you play, how you play them, and the effects the cards have on the gameplay is what makes Hearthstone so interesting. Once you're getting confident, you can start to play against randomly selected human opponents online under the "Play" option. You can play casual matches, or "Ranked" games. Ranked games let you get closer and closer to Rank 1 if you beat people, but if you lose and you'll drop in rank.

Daily quests also pop up, which are very straightforward. You can have up to three going at once, but you won't get a new one until the next day:

Screenshot from Hearthstone

Level up ... Your quest log in the game (click to enlarge)

The quest I have above is "Priest or Warlock Victory" meaning I have to win two games as a Priest or Warlock. If I lose, it doesn't matter, I just have to eventually win two and get 40 in-game gold rewards. Gold can only be spent on two things: packs of cards, or an entry into the Arena. Packs of cards cost 100 gold for a single pack, or you can pay real money ($2.99, AU$2.99 or £1.99 for two packs, and it's cheaper if you buy in bulk).

This is where Blizzard makes its money on the game, but most players will never spend a cent. As with most free-to-play games, it's only a small percentage of the player base that gives the creators all the money.

So, why do you want a pack of cards? For the rare finds. Like in Magic: The Gathering and similar systems, the more interesting or powerful a card, the more rare it is; on the other end of the scale, basic cards are rather common. When you get a new pack, five random cards pop out for you to keep. Mostly they're "common" type cards, but you have a chance of getting a card that's either "rare", "epic" or "legendary". Every pack has at least one "rare" card, so there's an incentive to crack open packs.

Battling real opponents in the Arena

Coming back to the other thing you can spend money on, the Arena is where the most interesting part of the game is for me. Using your hard-earned coins, you can enter the Arena for the princely sum of 150 gold (or $1.99, AU$1.99, €1.79 or £1.48).

The Arena gives you three lives – that is, you can lose three times, and then you're out. Each time you win though, you work towards better randomly selected rewards. Rewards can be packs of cards, gold, Arcane dust (you can destroy cards to get dust, then use the dust to make other cards you need) or even single cards may pop up as prizes.

The Arena doesn't rely on you having collected great cards, though: you're shown three cards, you pick the one you want, then another trio is shown, and this is repeated 30 times. Sometimes the cards are great, other times they're horrible. This is where you'll need to pick cards that work well together.

Screenshot of Hearthstone

Finding an opponent ... the suspense is killing me (click to enlarge)

While waiting to be matched with someone, you get a pretty spinner that does nothing apart from tell you when you've found a "worthy opponent". Finding an opponent is really quick though; it's rare you'll wait more than 20 seconds. I won't get into the full rules as you can do this yourself for free. But here's what the play field looks like when you're actually playing:

Screenshot of Hearthstone

Feast your eyes on the carnage and sheer terror of war ... Once the game begins (click to enlarge)

One interesting thing is now that the iPad version is out – it was released on 2 April – PC and iPad players can play against each other. It doesn't matter which platform you're on, and your settings and progress carry across between the two. The iPad version looks exactly the same as the PC version: they've done a great job of porting across the software between the two, and you can barely tell the difference:

Screenshot of Hearthstone

Beat your rival about the head with this slab ... the game running on an iPad (click to enlarge)

I suppose Blizzard will make more money from the iPad version; many Apple slab-fondlers are used to micro-payments in their games, and will probably have iTunes credit sitting there just waiting to be spent. Interestingly, for Australia at least, where your reviewer is based, the costs are more expensive on the iPad - for example, $2.49 on iPad instead of $1.99 on a PC for Arena admission. This is probably due to Apple's in-app sales tax that Blizzard will have to pay for each transaction, but the end, the player picks up the extra cost. On PC, payment is done via Paypal.

The Reg verdict

Hearthstone is a visually appealing game, for just being a set of cards being played against another person. If you're a fan of light strategy, and playing against random people who can't abuse you seems like a dream come true (you can pick from a list of provided sentences to send to each other and that's it), then there's no reason not to give this a shot. (Unless you're the type that's easily addicted to short games, but you're doomed anyway.)

Games take between 10 and 20 minutes on average to play, so Hearthstone is a great one to just sit down and play without feeling like you need to commit hours in a single sitting. Finally, a tip: if you play this on the PC and then the iPad, you'll be awarded a free pack of cards. ®