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Heroes and Merchants Review: Old school RPG fun for Mobile

Do you long for the days of old school RPGs before fancy graphics, cinematic cut-scenes, and more recently Pay2Win completely dominating the category? Today we would like to share Heroes and Merchants, an old school RPG designed by just one guy and his wife.

You can read our full interview with Oliver Bohnes here.

Growing up in the era of pixelated 2D characters, Pokemon, and button mashing. Heroes and Merchants was one of the first games that actually came as a surprise. Upon first launching the game you are greeted with… very little… 😅

After years of working in game journalism and constantly having a multitude of different “things” within a single game grabbing for our attention, the simplicity in this game was (and still is) almost frighting, because, for the first time in years, we actually had to stop and think about what we were doing.

If you’ve been following along with gaming trends on mobile in recent years, popular mobile games have taken a steady shift toward intuitiveness. Idle games being the ultimate example of how simple some games can get – if you can even classify a game where you are meant to do literally nothing a game.

Heroes and Merchants is kind of the opposite in every way imaginable. Featuring a mostly text-based interface with very obviously hand-drawn graphics, your mission in this game is to manage both Heroes and Merchants (as the name suggests) by sending out heroes to collect materials which can be crafted into items to power up your heroes, be sold for money, or used as materials to make something even better still.

As the developer states in our interview, the game plays like an old browser game with plenty to do and no pay2win elements. So far the game has been entirely time-based costing you more “time” to sell your items at a higher price than it would a lower price.

Unfortunately, this means the game takes much longer to play than say a casual game you can have pretty much figured out in 15-20 minutes. We are still learning new things while in the midst of writing this review.

Based on how the mobile gaming landscape is currently laid out, Heroes and Merchants will probably be a harder game to sell, especially for younger generations who have grown up playing games that practically play themselves.

This having been said, if you enjoy the slow pace old school classics you used to play on your browser, we haven’t seen a better game than Heroes and Merchants in a very long time. If you put in the effort to learn this game, you will be rewarded.

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Find it on App Store / Google Play