Battleheart Legacy is a fine iOS RPG that has some of the mechanics from the older Battleheart game. While it's predecessor was a series of RPG fights in single-screen rooms, this game is more of a complete adventure where you move around, fight random and scripted encounters, learn passive and active abilities for various classes, buy gear and complete quests. It was a good time even though I've had a few issues with it's mechanics and the way it told part of its story.
First of all, the world map is not that easy to use and does not help you figure your next moves. While I don't mind having to walk around and fighting random encounters - always can use the extra gold and experience - I don't like the fact that you don't see the levels difficulty of the map without walking to them, the game should surface that better and show you places of your level. You have a few markers for the quests you get, but otherwise you have to walk randomly around in order to find the next place where you can logically go. Also, you can go everywhere and there's no logical way to go for a logical leveling-up experience. Maybe you shouldn't be allowed to go everywhere like that, maybe the game should be more linear, maybe it should give you better directions.
The battle system is pretty okay, although I have some concerns about it's difficulty. I've started on Normal and I got destroyed pretty quickly most of the time, so I lowered it to Easy and some classes still had a ton of problems beating the first maps with melee classes. I decided to then go with magic users and destroyed pretty much everything with spells. Everything works with cooldowns and the fact that you can mix and match classes is pretty fun. There are melee classes, ranged classes and magic users. I went with mage/witch/necromancer for my run. The potion system is very weird, you have potions that heal all of your health and they replenish when you leave a map but they have a weird input delay when you try to use them and I have died because my potion would just not use itself. Why don't the potion just auto-use themselves when you're about to die? Also, at the easiest difficulty, you have an infinite number of potions, I guess that removes ALL difficulty.
By default, you don't automatically walk to your targets when you attack them in melee, but it works weirdly with ranged attacks, when you select an enemy and auto-attack it, you character will still walk everywhere you tap without actually attacking your enemies, so if you're walking somewhere and an enemy appears and you tap them to attack, you'll continue walking to your initial destination, then start attacking. And of course, enemies attack you regardless. Another thing is that you don't automatically walk to chests and NPCs you select to talk to, that should be in. The fact that you can destroy chests is also a bit weird because in that case you can't loot them at all. The items are like the ones in Battleheart, reducing cooldowns, improving your stats and the skills are various attacks, healing moves and general boosts to different things. You need appropriate stats to learn levels of skills, so it helps you place your stat points that you get by leveling up, which is a good thing.
One last weird issue I had with BL was the way the story is inconsequential to actual gameplay. You get quests, you do things, like murdering the castle guard, or killing all the mages in a tower in order to learn necromancy, but then people act like nothing happened and the mages are all back when you re-enter the mage tower. Why not actually make me choose between knight or ninja? Mage or necromancer? Make the story mean a little something? At least it would feel like having a choice, otherwise I just pick the thing that will give me a good reward without caring about the story beats. But that's not a terrible issue, the core gameplay is still great.
