BattleStone is an action-rpg type of game where you move a character around to accomplish quests that often are simply to kill things using swiping motions and special powers that fill up over time. You can rack up combos by keeping away from the enemies's attacks and get gold that way. That being said, a bad camera and aggressive free to play design makes it difficult to get into.
The controls are fine in BattleStone. You move your character around by holding down your fingers on the ground or taping somewhere for a quick jump to that location. You swipe enemies to attack them and depending of your character, you'll be able to attack three or four in the same combo. There is some exploration although most levels are fairly linear and some missions require you to destroy things that are scattered around on your path. My main issue is the camera, the game is too zoomed in, it's unpractical and unfun for ranged characters because you can't see enemies until they're almost in melee range, why not let me zoom out a bit more? I want to shoot things before they can hit me, otherwise I'd play a melee character.
The game gets pretty tough, you see the enemies flashing before they attack you, but most free characters don't have much hit points and defense, and you get stunlocked easily. When your character goes down, you can spend gems to heal them, and these are fairly rare. Gems are the premium resource of this game, they're used to summon magical weapons, recharge your energy (used to play the game) and summon better heroes. I'm always bummed out when games are so heavy on these premium resources because you know they're balanced around making you buy them. I'll never be able to summon the best heroes if I don't spend money!
There are some interesting concepts in the combo system that gives you bonus gold if you keep a big chain going without getting hit, but that's difficult with the lack of good battlefield vision and the number of enemies the game can throw at you sometimes. Your special abilities are varied, some heroes just deal damage around them, some have you draw lines where enemies will get burned, some charge towards enemies, but it's not really explained what these abilities do, I couldn't find a tooltip explaining them beforehand. Also, heroes have elemental affinities? What does that do? Are my attacks more effective against certain monsters and vice versa?
When you summon a new hero, it takes some time (but you can speed that up with gems) and you can fuse heroes together to strengthen the ones you like. I mostly like ranged characters so I fused my uncommon fighter with my fire mage. Was that a bad idea? I'm not sure. Uncommon heroes have more perks but there's no description of what these perks do , you should be able to tap them to get an idea of what 'Spellslinging' means, for instance. Also the summoning process is random, but that's fine.
There are a few good gameplay ideas for an iOS game like this, the controls work fine most of the time and the multiple levels should provide enough content. However, the lack of good rewards, explanations to help you pick up heroes you'd really enjoy playing with and aggressive micro-transactions turned me off from BattleStone.