Hearthstone explores a new kind of video game with Mercenaries, its new roguelite. Blizzard wants to transform its goose that lays the golden eggs into a gas factory that goes far beyond its traditional card game. A way to exploit the world of Warcraft on mobile without pronouncing the name.
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Read the conclusion Hearthstone Mercenaries
- Jouable en free-to-play...
- L'univers Warcraft en roguelite...
- Thought-provoking Heroic mode bosses
- Perfect for beginners of the genre
- ... but quickly time-consuming with daily tasks
- ... without lore or story
- A lack of depth in gameplay
- A farming game
During the last Blizzcon, which was held exceptionally online and in February, Blizzard announced many new features for Hearthstone, its financial locomotive. In addition to the arrival of the Classic mode and the integration of the fundamental set into the Standard format, it was the formalization of Mercenaries that caused a lot of reaction at the time.
"With gameplay inspired by strategic role-playing games and roguelike-style missions, this brand-new mode will offer new challenges with every game," Blizzard promised at the time. After the success of Champs de Bataille (better known as Battlegrounds), its autobattler, we were eager to get our hands on this second game mode for Hearthstone which does not involve cards, decks or pickaxes. .
Long compared to Slay the Spire or RAID: Shadow Legends and accused of being a gacha by part of the community before its release, let's see what it's really about with Mercenaries.
The test was carried out on PC and Android mobile from a personal account and with a free-to-play perspective: no pre-orders or packs or advantages were added to our account in order to best transcribe the experience lived by a player who does not pay to progress.
An untapped background of mercenaries
To prepare us for Mercenaries and gently raise the sauce, the Hearthstone teams had concocted for us since the beginning of the year the Book of Mercenaries, a solo mini-adventure that allowed us to know a little more about the lore of certain characters who would land a little later in the real new game mode. But it remained based on the original Hearthstone principle, with card duels against the AI and pre-built decks. Not really exciting.
But now the real Mercenaries game finally arrives, so important to Blizzard that it was decided to redesign Hearthstone's home screen to make it prominent rather than integrating it into the "Modes" tab. game". The player is propelled into a hub, the mercenary village, from which we will be able to access the different sections of the game: PVE, PVP, shop, collection of mercenaries, task board (the equivalent of the quest log)…
Logically, only the single player mode is available at the start, just to familiarize yourself with the game mechanics. The PVP mode is quickly unlocked thereafter with a few gold coins, a currency that is… impossible to recover while playing in Mercenaries, Blizzard forcing us here to play Hearthstone to collect golds and improve the infrastructure of its mercenary village. Which is therefore essential to access multiplayer and benefit from advantages, such as additional daily tasks.
900 gold coins: this is the amount you have to pay to unlock all the improvements in the village: access to the Pit (PVP), to the heroic mode of the PVE, and to two additional slots in the task panel. You have to play traditional Hearthstone to collect these gold coins.
Blizzard likes to make bridges between its different games, but we wonder if some of the players who don't come from Hearthstone and are only interested in Mercenaries will not be discouraged by this system. And speaking of bridges: between a mount offered on World of Warcraft for Mercenary players and 15 Mercenary packs offered for any six-month subscription to WoW and Diablo who joined the game's line-up, the very first character who never It's not from the Warcraft universe to invite itself into Hearthstone, Blizzard clearly encourages its players to touch a bit of everything in its ecosystem.
Another surprise, there is absolutely no lore, story, or scenario in this game, we just chain the PVP games or the PVE runs. Surprising then that Hearthstone is usually generous in this area with its solo game modes (Heroes and Mercenaries books in the front line) We are not even entitled to funny interactions to which the card game has accustomed us when some characters who know each other in Warcraft lore meet: between Sylvanas and the Lich King or between the Stormrage brothers, Illidan and Malfurion, for example. It's clearly not the same style of roguelike, but Hades has raised the bar on that lately, proving that with a few clever ideas, the genre isn't doomed to put the script aside. Even the unique board is bland compared to those varied and rich in interaction of Hearthstone.
The mechanics of roguelite…
The developers preferred to focus on the gameplay, and there's a lot to be said for that too. We are therefore dealing with a roguelite. To start a game, the player is asked to choose a region from those he has unlocked, then a difficulty mode and finally a boss. Once this is done, a map whose route is (partly) randomly generated appears and we are then free to take the path that suits us, knowing that certain stages are only available on one side, to reach the boss. Small particularity here: the player can see the entire map from the start of the run, and therefore decide to abandon it to relaunch it if he considers it not very advantageous.
Three types of enemies are on the road to the boss: the classic trash, the mercenaries (the very ones who are playable) and the elites, mercenaries also but of a higher level, and more numerous (four instead of three). These can cause some problems and manage to eliminate members of our team, which will thus be more difficult against the final boss, but in return gives more experience and better treasures. Because as in any roguelite, each step completed during the run grants a reward, here an ability (active or passive) for one of its mercenaries.
Roguelike or roguelite? Mercenaries is a roguelite: the player retains the advantages amassed during his progress even (except the treasures of course) after a defeat.
In addition to enemies, the architecture of the map also counts on several events that can be triggered by choosing the right course. Again, a classic of the genre. It is important to carefully analyze the map before launching to estimate what its course will be if any bonuses may interest us: resurrection of one of our mercenaries, special effects for certain types of mercenaries, explosive hot potato which can tip the destiny of a game… In addition, as there is no possibility of seeing the map to adapt to future opponents when choosing your treasure, you must therefore have it in mind in its entirety from the start to optimize their choices.
Runs are faster than in most other roguelites, logical for a well thought-out game that is especially designed for mobile. Be careful by the way: by quickly linking the parties, we quickly forget that we have changed the map and that the treasures acquired previously are no longer active.
… but this strange feeling of playing Pokémon
And the fights in all this? The player must compose a team of six mercenaries, but only three can be present on the board at the same time. The other three constitute the reserve and take over on the death of the incumbents. Three main families of mercenaries are offered:
- Spellcasters (blue) attack from a distance, weaken enemies or heal allies.
- Fighters (green) use physical, melee or ranged attacks.
- Protectors (red) heal themselves, attract enemy attacks to them, reduce enemy threat, prevent the opponent from healing.
What must also be taken into account is that the attacks of a certain type of mercenary are effective and have their damage doubled against another type. Spellcasters thus fear Warriors, who are sensitive to Protectors, who themselves fear Spellcasters. Small mnemonic device to remember it, use the colors: blue (water) beats red (fire) which beats green (plant) which beats blue. This is only a weakness system, and no resistance, the attacker does not take double damage when hitting against a mercenary of his weakness.
JVFR
Then we also have synergies between races, factions or schools of magic. For the races and the schools of magic, everything is pretty much clear: it is written on each Mercenary what his race is (human, demon, elf, orc…) and the attacks also inform the school of magic to which they belong: fire, frost, nature, shadow… But for the factions, important in the choice of treasures since some give boosts to Alliance or Horde characters, Blizzard did not think to give any information. Players unfamiliar with the Warcraft universe will thus find themselves completely lost, not knowing which faction their mercenary belongs to. It is therefore necessary to learn which races are in the Alliance and which are in the Horde, which does not protect against exceptions: the Lich King is surprisingly a human in Mercenaries, but is not part of the Alliance. My thousands of hours of Warcraft and WoW play saved me those worries, but not everyone will.
Mercenaries level up as battles go on, up to a maximum of 30, a fairly quick threshold to reach. Each level makes the characters gain raw characteristics (attack and life points). A mercenary has three abilities. These are associated with a speed data which determines the order in which they are executed during a lap. Because yes, Mercenaries is turn-based, with a preparation phase and another resolution phase. These abilities do not improve with the rise in level but with coins specific to each mercenary (which have nothing to do with gold coins). Finally, mercenaries can unlock three pieces of equipment. The player must choose one before his game without being able to change it afterwards. This equipment improves the abilities or grants a passive effect of the mercenary. Like abilities, gear can be upgraded with coins.
JVFR
A somewhat confusing progression
Concretely, the fights are very similar to those of Pokémon: turn-based with a team of six, weaknesses to certain types, equipment, the need to find a synergistic but versatile team that will not fall in its entirety against one weak point...
Even the progression is reminiscent of Games Freak's game: each fight brings experience to all the mercenaries on the team. But it quickly becomes repetitive because we have to always use the same compositions, with the mercenaries that we have made progress, and we often use the same abilities and in the same order, because there are only three techniques per mercenary, one or even two of which are often situational.
Mercenaries, simple mode of Hearthstone or game in its own right? Hearthstone becomes a hub that has several games independent of each other. Mercenaries takes this strategy even further with the camp, from which you can access the store, the collection of mercenaries or the opening of packages without having to go back to the main menu. The link between the three games remains the virtual currency, the gold coins, useful for the three titles.
Too many runs are really formalities in normal mode when you use your comp A, you hardly need to think about rolling over opponents, bosses included, especially if you've hit the most powerful treasures. It is then difficult to derive any form of satisfaction from it. The heroic cards are already more interesting once you arrive in Felwood, and the last ones can even give a hard time if the composition is wobbly or the treasures affected are weak.
JVFR
Normally, there is a difficult balance to find between rolling around the map with its best comp and incorporating a few less powerful mercenaries who need to level up. Sometimes you have to voluntarily lower the potential of your team to make progress interesting. Especially since next to that, you have to complete the tasks of the dashboard, which is sometimes complicated with low level characters likely to be one-shot in combat and therefore unable to progress in the completion of their personal quest. The solution: return to a lower level card, which is not very exciting.
The progression system lacks fluidity, so we think more about which team to bring on which map with which objectives of tasks to accomplish than during the fights themselves.
In love, fidelity is important, in F2P too
Like many free-to-play mobile games, Mercenaries relies on player loyalty and uses mechanics to encourage them to come back to the game regularly. But in this case, we pass a milestone to reach the stage of jealousy: if you want to play without paying in an optimized way, you will have to connect every day to complete your quests, Blizzard does not want us to venture on other games between two sessions: tedious.
Where Hearthstone (if you know, the card game) has been more and more generous in packages over time, Mercenaries is rather stingy in the matter, preferring to farm coins than to offer the precious sesames to players as a reward as they progress. And where in Heartshtone you can go away for 2-3 days and then come back to do your last day's quests so as not to miss too many rewards, Mercenaries does not allow it: not playing daily means losing precious resources .
JVFR
Battlegrounds was in the retention and capture of players, Blizzard taking fear that part of the community migrates to the autobattlers of the competition, Teamfight Tactics in mind. This has resulted in a game designed for players that can be enjoyed in the short or long term without having to pay. With Mercenaries, we feel that the title was designed from the start for the economic model it serves. This is not always detrimental, but in this case the string seems a little big.
The technique and the UI behind
It's an understatement to say that Hearthstone isn't the most cleanly coded game out there, and that obviously shows on Mercenaries. The game can sometimes crash (on any device) and we noticed some performance issues and freezes on an entry-level Android tablet. On a smartphone and a better equipped PC, the experience was better, even if there is a certain lack of fluidity in the navigation and an omnipresence of loading screens. Slay the Spire doesn't want to.
The interface can be improved with sometimes too many clicks to make to get to the desired screen. We feel that the game has been designed for mobile in the navigation within the UI. But the worst is undoubtedly what impacts the gameplay: we have seen a lot of visual bugs, in particular with the display of false information, such as an incorrect level of ability displayed among opposing mercenaries in PVP. To which must be added some rare but existing textual or translation errors, with different effects in practice to what is described. Fortunately, these are errors that are very simple to correct.
JVFR
On mobile, it is currently not possible to see the abilities of opposing mercenaries in PVP, so that we play completely blind without taking into account the opponent's board if we do not know the heroes played opposite. In addition, the history of combat events, modeled on that of Hearthstone, is difficult to convince to transcribe past actions. It is thus difficult to understand what happened and what the adversary did. In general, there is a flagrant lack of information for the player, a problem that is not insoluble, however, as Slay the Spire has proven.
Hearthstone Mercenaries: the opinion of JVFR
We found many flaws in Blizzard's first foray into the roguelite genre. Some can be corrected easily over the updates, others may remain in the long term because they are part of the gameplay elements inherent in the economic logic of the game.
If you like Hearthstone or Battlegrounds, you won't necessarily like Mercenaries. But it is a gateway to roguelite that you should at least try to get interested in, while fans of the genre, who are probably not the target, will no doubt feel that the game suffers from 'a certain lack of depth and favors too much the farm (or the wallet) to the real reflection.
Hearthstone has always had a fondness for mobile platforms, Mercenaries seems to be even more suited to this medium. The game has potential and exudes a certain charm despite all its problems, and we can be sure that a regular and serious follow-up will be carried out by the teams. Blizzard places great hopes and shows ambition with Mercenaries and for two years, the feedback of the players is better taken into account and the reactivity to correct the concerns more prompt on the side of Hearthstone, even if there are still areas for improvement of this side. We only ask to raise this note with future updates!
Hearthstone Mercenaires6
Hearthstone Mercenaries lacks the maturity and depth of gameplay to set it up as a roguelite benchmark. Added to this are some unwelcome interface and navigation issues. But we can clearly have a good time on this game, even without having to take out the blue card. One or two parts on the smartphone on the toilet seat, we know the song.Most
- Jouable en free-to-play...
- L'univers Warcraft en roguelite...
- Thought-provoking Heroic mode bosses
- Perfect for beginners of the genre
The lessers
- ... but quickly time-consuming with daily tasks
- ... without lore or story
- A lack of depth in gameplay
- A farming game
