Welcome to Hell.
You're walking through a forest and unknowingly get tree sap on your finger. You sit to eat in a clearing overlooking an expanse of forest. There are mountains in the distance wreathed in wisps of cloud. The mid-afternoon sky is otherwise brilliantly clear, and the temperature cool enough to keep you from sweating. You sit down on a red and white checkered blanket and procure a meticulously prepared turkey sandwich from a wicker basket. You unwrap the tinfoil, grasp the bread, its doughy consistency yielding ever so slightly to your fingertips, and take a bite. The lettuce is still crisp, the turkey tender, the bread plump with just the right degree of moisture, yet there's something you can't identify. Four chews in, it's stuck in your teeth; it's the sap from your hand, and it's soiled your taste buds and ruined a perfectly good sandwich. Call for Heroes: Pompolic Wars is that sap.
Things are off to bad start even before you install the game. On the back of the box, a caption reads, "Character gains experience which will help him to upgrade his strength, armor and health." That's apparently supposed to be a unique gameplay feature.
We'd love to describe the narrative setup, but there isn't one in the game. The back of the retail box lists something about a dimensional rift being torn open. Led by some guy named Pompolic, demons are apparently trying to enslave the human race. Again, there's absolutely no indication of this in the actual game. Going back to the game box, the player's goal is apparently to collect Dark Souls to defeat Pompolic. These souls, according to the box, "are infiltrating our minds, and making us slaves of evil. They cannot be easily defeated…" Lies!
You see, dear gamer, these Dark Souls aren't doing anything except floating a foot off the ground in each of Call for Heroes' stages. They're waiting for you to collect them, since after a certain number have been acquired you progress to the next, even more awful stage. But beware, for after every Dark Soul is collected, a random number of idiotic enemies will spawn and drive you mad with their horrible artistic design and infantile AI.
If we were to compare Call for Heroes to any other game, we'd say it more closely resembles Gauntlet. But even saying so severely tarnishes Gauntlet's name, and in many ways Call for Heroes is an inferior product to even the 1985 NES version of the old-school dungeon crawler.
The game's combat is so frustrating because you're constantly swarmed with enemies. Trying to skillfully dodge anything is near impossible thanks to a floaty control scheme which, in combination with nonsensical stage designs and supremely imprecise jumping, ensures you'll inadvertently get stuck in corners or hung up on environmental obstacles. Adding to the list of woes is the fact that numerous enemy types, for some unholy reason, get homing fireballs. This means you'll waste countless lives trying to dodge the projectiles on stages with insta-death ledges. We even experienced one instance of falling into a water pit and surviving only to discover there was absolutely no way out. We had to reload the level. Brilliant!
Let's not forget one of this game's chief features - your characters can level up. Oh sweet redemption, surely the upgrades will drastically shift the gameplay dynamics toward the enjoyable end of the spectrum…right? Though there are defense boosting skills, sentry wards, and various attack enhancers, they utterly fail to add anything worthwhile. Picking up the other varieties of icons floating around stages like monster icons or coins net you a few special regeneration and god-mode type abilities, but again, it doesn't save this game. With continued use, the different melee and ranged weapons level up as well, though you can't really tell the difference.
And that's already more than should have been written about this game. Oh, right, and there are bugs and stability issues. Wait, there's also a map editor to facilitate self-torture. Bonus.
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