Battle On! Hero Academy

This is an idle game you can overlay at the bottom of your screen while doing other things. You select what heroes you have, and what class they pick as they level up, you equip them, as well as craft temporary buff foods for them. The goal is to beat the various assessments (boss fights) with your guild of heroes.

I have two main problems with this game. 1st, and most obvious, the localization is not complete. A lot of tooltips and messages are still in Chinese, and while I could usually figure out what is going on, it is very frustrating to try something and be greeted with an error message you cannot read. And even things that are translated are not the best, as for instance there is Academy Prestige and just regular Prestige and these are two different things.

2nd, the pacing of the game changes quite a bit as you play. While initially you have things to do and upgrades to purchase or place, heroes to tweak and meaningful progress is made every dozen minutes, as you approach the end game things slow down a LOT. Progress starts taking 10+ hours where you just let the program idle without interaction for long stretches of time. I personally think that it makes sense for idle games to either have things to do every few minutes or every hour depending how you want to play, but once it asks you to idle your computer overnight or longer, I think it crosses a line. It becomes a game you play by paying the electric bill.

Its a shame, because for the first 50 or so hours its quite fun by idle standards. But after that it feels like the game tries to artificially lengthen gameplay, where you basically do the same things you have been doing but now there is long, long gaps between decisions. Ironically, if the game had ended at the 50 hour mark I probably would have recommended it but after getting more and more bored as time went on, that good will disappeared and here we are.

Ultimately do not recommend this game unless the end game gets reworked to add more features or gets shortened, and the translation is complete.

Dude, please fix the translations. I promoted five heroes, and it says there’s an 80% success rate then all 5 failed, but there’s a Chinese phrase showing up that I can’t understand. Please improve the translation! I can’t make sense of most of the details.

That said, I still recommend this as idle game. I love the little guys running around on my screen (they’re pretty cute). Recruiting heroes is fun too. Overall, I’d give it an 8/10.

I was offline most of the time when I played this.
My playtime should be around 300 hours for 100%.
TLDR: Really enjoyed it, just wish the end-game didn’t drag this much.

What I didn’t like

(..that pretty much almost made me give this a thumbs down)

End-game is such a slog. Honor Prestige points are time-gated. The game basically wants me to leave it open for another 100 hours just to unlock the last two prestige milestones. “But it’s an idle game” you say. Sure, but this feels more like waiting than playing at this point with nothing left to do anymore. The only source of Honor Prestige is through graduates, which gives 270 per minute, and I need 3 million, lol. Do the math. I don’t leave my PC open just to farm these. I have the game on idle when I actually use my PC. So in my timeline, it’s 2 more weeks when I wanted to move on to the next game already.

Just today, when I thought I was done with the last achievement, unlocking Supreme Glory, which is required to get the Academy to level 9, suddenly threw in a 40-minute build timer. Mini surprise torture. Other main prominent issues are scaling and screen zoom, which were never fixed. And the translation is unfinished, but I didn’t really mind that.

What I did like though..

Doesn’t handhold you or force you to do things in a specific order. No quests to soft lock your progression. Profession paths are straightforward, with no RNG. Classes follow fixed promotion branches instead of changing randomly, making it easy to plan ahead and aim for specific roles or items. I had fun with the builds. There’s unexpectedly more to it than just leveling up the heroes. Crafting items for permanent stat points, 80+ different traits to collect for the heroes, and also crafting different tier gears with 80+ runes to socket into them (although any quality other than the legendary ones are practically useless). The sprites are very cute, I like seeing them running around. The grind is well-paced at first, but yeah, the end-game had too much padding.