A Tale of Two RPGs

Two cool Fantasy Role Play­ing Games have caught my atten­tion lately on my iPad; The Battle for Wesnoth and Battleheart.

Yes, they’re both RPGs, but are so dis­sim­il­ar in their approach and exe­cu­tion that they’re not really tread­ing in each oth­er­’s space, so to speak. Here’s why…

It’s Big
The Battle for Wesnoth (which I’ll call Wesnoth from now on) is a large, turn-based strategy-style RPG. Think back to the old-school ver­sions of War­Craft and you’ve got it, without the hew­ing of trees or min­ing of gold.

Now if this sounds a bit famil­i­ar, well it is. The iPad ver­sion of Wesnoth is a port (the offi­cial port) of the free Linux, MacOSX, and Win­dows ver­sion of the game.

Accord­ing to the developer:

Battle for Wesnoth is the offi­cial port of a gigant­ic, com­plex and detailed full-scale strategy-RPG. We made sure that noth­ing was cut from the game, everything from flags flap­ping to skel­et­ons jug­gling their heads, it’s all here!

Wesnoth is a unique com­bin­a­tion of tac­tic­al strategy RPGs like Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, Pan­zer Gen­er­al, and Final Fantasy Tac­tics. Using your hero, you need to cap­ture vil­lages to gain income, and recruit new units to do battle. These units gain exper­i­ence through com­bat and can level up into power­ful new classes. But make sure to pro­tect your vet­er­an troops, as they can be recalled through­out a campaign!

Yes, it’s big. And fun! And long!

• Almost 200 cam­paign scen­ari­os across 15 major cam­paigns — lit­er­ally hun­dreds of hours of gameplay!!
• Over 200 fully anim­ated unit types in six major fac­tions, all with dis­tinct­ive abil­it­ies, weapons and spells
• Exper­i­enced units gain power­ful new abil­it­ies as they advance
• Bring your battle-hardened troops with you as you fight through campaigns
• Highly detailed and var­ied ter­rain graphics
• Three levels of dif­fi­culty for cas­u­al to expert players
• Cross-plat­form mul­ti­play­er matches against iPhone, PC, mac and linux players!
• Pro­fes­sion­al music score with 90 minutes of ori­gin­al music
• Open­Feint integ­ra­tion with achievements

Being turn-based, you have the lux­ury of time to care­fully plot out your moves — not so in this next RPG!

Battle­heart
Fun. Cute. Enga­ging. All words that eas­ily describe my cur­rent quick-RPG-fix.

Battle­heart does­n’t really have a fleshed out story, rather it’s more of a RPG forest & dun­geon crawl with a set of scen­ari­os encountered by your hearty band of adven­tur­ers, here’s my crew.

You pro­gress through the scenerairos, lev­el­ing up, col­lect­ing loot, find­ing and spend­ing gold.

As with any good RPG, as you level up you get access to new powers and abil­it­ies. And as you get more gold, you can buy bet­ter weapons, armor, and magic­al objects to make your char­ac­ters more powerful.

Cre­ate a unique party of her­oes, and lead them in frantic real-time battles against mon­sters of ever increas­ing power. Lay waste to your foes with dozens of unique spe­cial powers as you gain exper­i­ence, upgrade your party’s equip­ment, and craft them into the ulti­mate battle force!

• Eas­ily com­mand your army via simple touch commands.
• Cre­ate a unique party from numer­ous char­ac­ter classes, includ­ing stealthy rogues, power­ful wiz­ards and sto­ic knights!
• Cus­tom­ize your her­oes via dozens of unique skills — lit­er­ally hun­dreds of class and skill combinations!
• Make the most of your party’s skills to con­trol the bat­tle­field — turn your oppon­ents into frogs, stun them with pois­ons, or simply des­troy them with met­eor strikes and whirl­winds of steel!
• Over 100 unique items to col­lect and equip across a 30+ level cam­paign, com­plete with epic boss battles!
• Put your cus­tom party to the ulti­mate test in sur­viv­al aren­as, where rare and unique rewards can be found!
• Incred­ibly sharp anim­a­tion and art designed spe­cific­ally for the Ret­ina Dis­play and iPad! 

My crew hav­ing a BBQ…

A simple and quick game to get into, but one that becomes chal­len­ging after a few hours of game play, which it should as it con­tin­ues to chal­lenge you!

Two Games, for two game experiences 
As I men­tioned at the out­set, these two RPGs are only sim­il­ar in that they *are* RPGs. Which is great for me because when I tire of push­ing my party-of‑4 through the next scene in Battle­heart, I can switch over to Wesnoth and slow things down a bit, while crank­ing up the strategy factor. More pure RPG fun!

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