Back in 2001, the folks at Nival Interactive released their turn-based strategy title Etherlords for the PC. I remember it being hailed as a 21st-century spiritual update to the venerable Heroes of Might & Magic (HOMM) series. I didn’t really got the chance to check out the game at that time (probably due to a strong preference to HOMM), but to my pleasant surprise, I got the opportunity to check out the game in its smartphone (iOS) form in 2014, and by and large, the team at Nival has done a bang-up job in bringing this game alive on the iPhone.
For those of you unfamiliar with the primary gameplay of Etherlords or HOMM in particular, battles are 3-on-3 turn-based affairs, with players taking turns to choose the type of attack in which their creature would perform on an enemy creature. The game conveys combat in a very convincing and colourful manner with the graphics engine depicting the 3D isometric arenas and playing out the attack animation such as insect swarms and earthquakes with ease.
The creatures themselves number at over 180 with a gotta-catch-em-all element going on in the overworld (more on that later) portion of the game. Each player will have a deck of these creature cards, somewhat like Magic: The Gathering and yes, certain creatures have different levels of rarity as well. Creatures can be equipped and upgraded to make them even more formidable during combat. The upgrade process involves using Ether that is earn in combat and players can sacrifice/consume creatures to upgrade one particular creature.
Nival has certainly taken the complexity of the original PC title and made the entire experience totally mobile friendly. This is not the case of dumbing-down as players will soon realise that the AI opponents they encounter are no pushovers.
The storyline for Etherlords is pretty simple. Players take on the role of the Etherlord task with putting back together a broken world. This is done using Matter which, like Ether, is earned through combat. Matter is used to rebuild and unlock tiles in the Overworld and should a player complete a particular section of the map, he or she might be awarded a rare creature card. Another avenue to get rare creature cards would be to take on boss creatures at the end of each level.
With Etherlords being an excellent amalgamation of turn-based 3D combat and collectible card games, the game does suffer one particular flaw. It takes a very long time to complete transactions, be it claiming a reward or trying to do an in-app or talking to the server upon start-up, on a bad day you might as well be doing something else. This is a bloody shame considering how good and how much I like the game.
So, connectivity issues aside (hopefully Nival can resolve this as soon as possible), we rate Etherlords at a 4.5 out of 5. It’s easily one of the better games of 2014 on the iOS platform. The game is available for FREE on the App Store, so check it out over here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/etherlords/id808158334?mt=8
