Villagers & Heroes

I tried out a few new apps on my tablet over the weekend.  

Villagers & Heroes was an interesting pick.  It's one where you walk around the world looking for people with quests, and those aren't my favorite thing.  But the world is enormous and the quests come in well-written sequences that can be pretty challenging to work out.  Some quests are standard "kill those darn bees for me" or "go get 10 apples" types, but there was a long sequence involving a theater and an actress who vanishes with a variety of clues to look for and return to people.

In addition to the size of the world and number of NPCs, there are four or five gathering skills (plant lore, bug lore, fishing lore, mining) so you can always go get more things to sell or skill up.  There are a lot of crafting skills (smithing, tailoring, etc) and hundreds of items you can find or make along the way.  There are announcements of bosses appearing at specific times, and a small horde of players always shows up to wipe them out -- I joined a few at the last moments.  Various items and rewards have a chance to pop out when successful at any skill or battle, and you have lots of inventory space with the ability to unlock more bags later on.  

I was able to hop to a village with an available house plot and got a nice place on a shoreline with a shipwreck looming nearby.  We can't go inside houses yet to do any decorating, so right now you just get a chest out front called the Vault, and it looks like it functions like an ender chest, since I was able to open the Vault in another location and tinker with my stuff from there.

Speaking of tinkering, there was an odd skill called gnogmenting.  I assume this is a combination of "gnomish augmenting" but the word really doesn't work for me.  The idea is to merge two similar items into a more powerful item using extra resources or points.

I found a portal to a Valentine's Day map filled with NPCs who all had mixed-up character names from Willy Wonka, and I had to beat Sugar Gnolls and variety of other semi-comical mobs and go mine chocolate chunks and dig up gummy worms for quests and xp.

There IS a lot of walking around, though.   I'm getting better at reading the mini-map to find objectives, and there's a faint yellow arrow beneath your feet that points to quest locations you need to return to.  One thing that threw me off was that I upgraded my tunic and the available spell slots changed with it.

I have yet to find any location where I can go mining, but I'm sure if I find some ores I can stop at any blacksmith station to make some metals.  I have not done any crafting yet due to lack of ingredients.

I don't know that I will stick with this one for as long as some other games on my gadget, but it does let me explore, unlike the Kingmaker game where I feel like I'm stuck on one plot line.