On its surface, HEROish doesn’t feel or look like anything special. Its cartoony aesthetic and linear gameplay don’t scream unique; however, it’s only when you get your hands on HEROish that you realize that it sits in its own genre—or somewhere in the middle of two great ones. From developer Sunblink, HEROish is a mash-up of card-based combat and strategy MOBAs, where you use a deck of cards that dictates your attacks.

In addition to the genre mash-up, HEROish provides two modes of play: a single-player campaign and 1v1 or 2v2 multiplayer. The game throws you into the single-player campaign to begin with, as this acts as a great tool for teaching you how to play and becoming familiar with the heroes on offer. While the story is nothing to write home about, the gameplay itself is a little addictive at first. With varying difficulties to select from, you traverse a map with objectives and challenges as your hero, with the goal of thwarting all enemies in your path. Each objective is fairly linear, with the goal made clear at the start. These are mostly geared toward clearing the enemy out, taking control of a base, or downing a boss. Upon success, you receive some XP for your hero, a new card reward, and some coins. The cards that you earn can be added to your deck to improve them or alter your strategy, and the coins can be used to level those cards up, providing them with more health or more strength.

In terms of how you actually play the game, it’s pretty straightforward at first, but as the difficulty rises, the depths of how strategic you can be also increase. As the hero, you control the movement of said hero and also command the cards in your deck. Your own player automatically attacks, and you have a rotating 12-card deck full of other attacks at your disposal that you can spend constantly replenishing mana on to play that card, which will join you in combat. These vary from knights, archers, bombs, wizards, and unique attacks when playing as your hero. Each card has its own cost and serves a different purpose, meaning you have to be sure you are spending your mana correctly. Do you want to save a little time and maybe take some damage, or retreat to use a more powerful attack, or do you want to spam minions to charge forward and chip away at the enemy? The decision is all yours, and both sides have pros and cons depending on the scenario.

The reason the game is called HEROish is that you may not always be the hero of the story. The single-player campaign is split up into three stories, led by three different factions: Imperial, Chaos, and Feral. Each of these factions offers you two “heroes” to select from, for a total of six in the entire game. This felt like an issue at first; however, each hero and faction feels distinct enough that the same tried-and-tested tactics used by one hero may not work for another. For example, the Imperial factions have some devastating attacks that come from your hero themselves that can wipe out large numbers. Whereas with the Chaos heroes, you have a large slew of minions that can be used to simply overwhelm your enemy. It’s fun to test them all out in a campaign that you can cater to your own skill level.

HEROish is a very colorful and pretty game. You can see that its visuals are perfect for both big-screen action and small-screen action, ideal docked or in handheld. The use of color helps to differentiate enemies from allies, which is helpful when a lot is happening at once. The heroes are all well designed, completely unique from one another, and capable of displaying a lot of personality in both combat and the brief cutscenes seen in the single-player campaign.

The campaign can be completed very quickly—in a few hours of solid playtime; however, that doesn’t mean you’re done with HEROish. The multiplayer aspect is where you can now showcase your skills against your friend, family, or someone somewhere in the world! In multiplayer, you’ll begin with a base hero and a pretty simple deck. From here on, you’ll play multiplayer matches and grind your way to better heroes and cards. To build the perfect deck, you will need to earn it, which can be frustrating if you haven’t nailed that balance of card and mana usage because you can get dominated quickly! I had my reservations about multiplayer, expecting it to be just like the single-player stages, except I’d lose more. There’s a lot of fun here. It makes you think differently as you aren’t playing against a mindless AI anymore; however, it becomes pretty repetitive and stale pretty quickly.

The core game and mechanics are great, but with the small pool of heroes and cards at your disposal, having to grind again for cards and heroes you’ve already used extensively in the campaign just feels like you’ve hit the reset button and gained no reward from the hours you have already committed. There is potential here for this to become a much larger game than it currently is, but its variety in heroes and cards and overall game cost have heavily impacted this. I could easily see HEROish becoming a free-to-play multiplayer-only game with a similar system to other MOBAs on the market. I’ll be keeping an eye on this, and if further heroes are added, I’d love to jump back in and give them a go.