Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft Reviews
'Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft' provides endless hours digital card entertainment with familiar Blizzard lore and mechanics at a price that is as cheap as you want it to be.
Don't sleep on Hearthstone - it gets almost everything right. It's fun, flashy, and totally playable for free.
If you somehow haven't tried it until now, this is a better time than any to jump in.
In fact, Hearthstone is unlike a lot of games. It's a card strategy game that is bright and accessible. It's a free-to-play game with generosity of spirit. Heck, it may not have all the features its fans are demanding just yet, but it's even a Blizzard game where "coming soon" actually means coming soon. It's overflowing with character and imagination, feeds off and fuels a vibrant community of players and performers, and it only stands to improve as Blizzard introduces new features, an iPad version and expansions. And now it's finally finished! I can't wait to see where it goes next. Job's done.
Hearthstone is addictive, highly strategic, and chock-full of fun collectible card battling; the fact that it's totally free (if you want it to be) makes it one of the best values in gaming today. This is your new obsession; embrace it.
Addictive and entertaining for free-to-play players, competitors, and collectors, the game brings the often-daunting digital card game genre into the spotlight
Hearthstone pulled me into a new genre and refuses to let me go
Hearthstone is a free-to-play collectible card game that embraces new players through its presentation and simplicity and satisfies veterans with complex strategies hidden between the lines.
When Blizzard announced they were making a digital CCG, we all expected it to look and sound beautiful, and there was little doubt that it would be well-balanced, but I don't think anyone anticipated this level of sophistication and subtle brilliance. Its turn-based nature and straightforward mechanics make this one of the most immediately accessible competitive games ever devised, but at the same time its depth is positively cavernous.
This type of call-and-response has always been the lifeblood of card games but Hearthstone's position as one of the first potentially mass-market CCGs with an excellent online infrastructure makes things exciting. As for the 'free-to-play' tag, this is one of the few games that will make Western players love the business model. It's as simple as that.
As someone who hasn't touched collectible card games since the mid-1990s — and hasn't played Warcraft since it was still a real-time strategy game — I'm amazed at not only how quickly I picked up Hearthstone but also how much I've played it. It's easy to learn, easy to get into matches and play, and it's fun. It's led me to check out other digital card games — and I'm again surprised at how much I enjoy these.
This new single player adventure for HearthStone is full of good and funny moments, specially if you like to do bad things, but kinda poor for The League of Explorers. But, if you like new, good and interesting cards, take a look at this adventure.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Whether you want to treat Hearthstone as a frivolous time-waster, or you're looking for a new obsession, the game is a blast either way. It caters to every type of player. If you're a Warcraft fan, there are plenty of nods to the series you love. And even if you've never crafted war, it really doesn't matter. Hearthstone is thoughtful and complex, but at the same time welcoming and almost irresistible. It may just be a card game, but it often feels like so much more.
Overall Hearthstone is a lot of fun to play, and has potential to be a game that stays around for a long time. While it may not be as complicated as an actual collectible card game, or have the appeal of showing off your collection to your friends, it is a great videogame that has minimal issues and is in a neat package, so it would be foolish to try to compare it to something it's not trying to be.
Video gamers may wonder why they would play a card game when their medium has moved beyond such limitations; tabletop gamers may bemoan the fact that people are getting excited about the wrong card game. But if you fall awkwardly between those two groups, Hearthstone will keep you hooked for some time.
Hearthstone is at its peak and doesn't seem to be even going to slow down. Frequent updates, regular in-game events and a full-fledged dialogue between developers and their audience rightfully make the brainchild of Blizzard Entertainment one of the most interesting online projects in recent years.
Review in Russian | Read full review
On a more personal level, Hearthstone is solid enough that if it gets its hooks in you, they will dig deep. The game takes on a Civilization-like level of addictiveness where instead of one more turn, you'll often tell yourself "just one more game". That one more game can quickly become five, or ten, or more depending on how much time you have to spend and I imagine this is going to only be amplified once the mobile versions of the game come online.
Hearthstone does for collectible card games what World of Warcraft did for MMOs: taking a niche genre and transforming it into a mainstream-friendly hit that's primed for success. It's hugely accessible and incredibly enjoyable, even when you're getting crushed, yet there are layers upon layers of strategy to be explored. If you haven't tried Hearthstone yet, then do so - just don't blame us if you can't give it up.
It doesn't matter what you're playing it on: Hearthstone is a fantastic CCG that gets the balance just right and needn't cost players a cent.
Hearthstone is accessible and fun. Even without purchasing cards it's a very fun game to play and winning repeatedly is very possible. The game's mechanics are easily learned, but combining them into a winning strategy is a complex and fun process.