Champs Battlegrounds is an odd mashup of strategy board gaming and multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) mechanics. Quark Games has created something compelling, though, with this free-to-play iOS game, available on your iPad or iPhone.
You’ll take six heroes and battle against six enemy heroes on a grid-based battle board. Each hero class has its own move set, like chess, and range of attack. Characters constantly generate energy, which is used up per attack move. Moving a character, for example, is the first ability to recharge, while more devastating attacks take longer to level up. You’ll spend a lot of time balancing whether to move your heroes (to avoid attacks or get into attack position), or stand your ground and wait for a particularly strong attack ability to become available. It’s real-time strategic chaos, and it’s a ton of fun. Here’s a play-through of one of the early single-player battles in the game.
As you can see, Champs Battlegrounds is good to look at and delightful to listen to. It’s free to play, which means there’ll be a decent amount of online players to match your armies and skills against. You’ll earn currency with each victory, both a soft currency that can only be earned as well as a hard currency which is earned but also available for purchase. You’ll buy newer heroes as you go along to add to your army’s skill and win more and more complex battles.
Champs Battleground is our pick for iOS Game of the Week due to its frantic strategy and compelling gameplay. I launch the game, and then lose track of time in the frenetic, zen-like strategic thinking that ultimately wins battles. If you give it a try, let us know what you think about it in the comments below.
You can download Champs Battlegrounds in the App Store now, but you’ll need a device later than the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad 1st Gen or iPod touch 4th Gen to play.
