EZ PZ: Byte Heroes

I opened EZ PZ: Byte Heroes because its pixel-art Three Kingdoms look was fun to look at, and the first ten minutes really were fun. Three heroes stand in a row fighting on their own, loot keeps raining down with pillars of light, and every ten seconds or so a comparison panel pops up asking whether you want to swap in the new item.

My team's power jumped from 295K to over 320K thanks to a single purple sword, so at that point it felt like I was winning pretty easily. Then I reached the red gate at the end of chapter 1-5 and everything stopped, because Zhang Jiao was waiting there with 542.9K power while my team had only 327K.

The fight ended in round four with all three heroes on the ground. The summary screen offered exactly three pieces of advice: train your heroes, upgrade your gear, adjust your formation. From there the game won't let you go any further, so you have to choose between grinding again, paying up, or finding a way to hit harder.

A stage goes by in under twenty seconds

The gameplay barely needs your hands. Each chapter is split into a chain of small nodes, and your team runs over to fight each group of Yellow Turban soldiers on its own. Once one group is cleared, it moves on to the next without asking.

Attack order is decided by position in the six-slot formation, and the small number in brackets next to each hero's name is that hero's turn. In other words, rearranging the team changes who strikes first and who strikes last.

Each hero also has a signature move. Zhurong, for example, sweeps a line of fire across a whole row and follows up with a few yellow critical numbers. Heroes belong to four factions, Wei, Shu, Wu and Neutral, which counter one another, so building a team also means watching the colors.

There are only two places where you really have to tap. One is choosing whether to swap gear whenever something new drops; the other is hitting the red gate to fight the chapter boss. Bosses are very different from regular groups because the fight is capped at fifteen rounds. You can't win by simply tanking hits: if you don't deal damage fast enough, you lose even with plenty of HP left.

One good item makes the whole team stronger

What I like most about this game is that the gear is shared by the whole team. It isn't split per hero like in most games of this type. Pick up a rare helmet and the team's power goes up right away, with no need to work out who should wear it.

Gear comes in twelve rarity tiers, starting with gray Crude, then green Fine, purple Rare and on up from there. The comparison panel appears the moment an item drops, showing exactly how much power it adds and whether it unlocks any new stat for the team.

A purple glaive I picked up added a straight 22.7K power, plus 1.08% crit chance the team had never had before. Just one item, and every hero on the team got stronger.

Spare heroes don't go to waste either, because you feed them into the Team Bonus panel, which applies to the whole formation. When I checked, the thirteen heroes in my roster were giving 15.1% each to attack, defense and HP, so pulling a duplicate still has value.

Beyond the main stages: the rank ladder

Your lord's level is capped by rank, and to be promoted you have to meet three conditions at once. At the first step the game asks you to reach level 5, clear the main stages and raise your Fortune level to 3. In return, the level cap rises by 5 along with a pile of stats.

This is the game's real funnel, because while the level cap is locked, the XP you earn just fills up and sits there. When I played, the XP bar read 810 of 140, nearly six times what was needed, and it still couldn't budge a single level.

On the bright side, hero recruitment is more generous than the gacha average, with three free pulls every day. The game also guarantees a Legendary or Mythic within the next 50 pulls, and after 88 pulls it unlocks the option to pick the exact hero you want.

And this is where the game starts asking for money

Ingots are the currency you buy with real money. The smallest pack is $0.99 for 60 ingots, and the biggest one on the list is $49.99 for 3,280. Every pack doubles what you get the first time, which is why the First Top-up banner clings to the corner of the screen the whole session.

You'll see how heavy that number is when you visit the Market, where a stack of ten Recruit Orders is on sale for 2,240 ingots. That means the $30.99 pack still isn't enough; you need the $49.99 pack just to afford a single ten-pull.

The game tightens things further with a daily loot limit, shown as a small number next to the battle button. Mine started the session at 84 and fell to 48 after about an hour. When it runs out, gear stops dropping, and to raise the limit you have to clear more new stages.

In other words, getting stuck on a boss doesn't just mean losing one fight; your whole loot machine grinds to a halt along with it.

A mod that lets the game play itself

Open the game in VipMod and you'll see a red MOD button in the left corner; tap it for three switches. After flipping any of them, tap the restart line right below. The game closes and reopens on its own, and after about forty seconds the patch is actually in place.

The first switch is a Vietnamese translation. It starts off, so the game stays in English unless you turn it on in the MOD menu. With it on, every button, hero name, chapter and stage name, the rank panel, the market and even the ticker across the top of the screen turn Vietnamese.

The original game only ships English and Chinese, and the Vietnamese entry in the game's language list is put there by the mod. Turn the switch back off and tap restart, and the game returns to its own English text.

The second switch unlocks the Auto Mode panel, opened with the round button in the bottom-right corner. Normally its last two lines, auto boss challenge and auto quest completion, sit empty and can't be ticked, because the game locks them behind your Fortune level.

With the mod on, both lines come ticked, along with auto battle, auto-equipping higher-power gear and auto-dismantling old gear. We let it run on its own for about ten minutes on a brand-new character, and power went from 38K to over 70K without anyone touching the phone.

The third switch is Battle speed-up, with a ×2, ×3, ×5 or ×8 multiplier on the line right below. The game itself only goes up to speed 3, and the mod multiplies straight on top of that. A few things to know up front so your expectations are right:

• The game's speed button still shows 1, 2 or 3 as before; only the pace of the fight speeds up. We confirmed the patch runs exactly where the game sets its speed, but haven't recorded a before-and-after comparison yet, so if it doesn't feel faster, let us know.
• Auto mode still spends a War Hammer on every fight. Leave it running for a while and the hammers run out and it stops; it can't grind forever.
• The "Stop when gear power increases" line is the game's own setting, not the mod's. If you don't want the screen blocked every time gear drops, untick it yourself.
• The translation can't touch text baked into images: the Formation button and the Wei, Shu, Wu, Neu faction labels stay in English, and some dropped item names still mix in English.
• If you do use the translation, leave the Vietnamese entry selected in the game's Language menu; switching to either Chinese entry wipes it out.

How it plays in practice

The pixel art is the cutest part. The characters are tiny but you can still tell who's who, and the hero portraits on the loading screen are nicely done. The pace is quick too: open it and loot starts dropping right away, which suits people who play a few minutes at a time while waiting for something.

I have two complaints. First, the gear comparison panel pops up constantly and covers most of the screen. It even gets in the way when you want to tap something else, so every time I had to deal with the item before I could reach what I actually wanted.

Second, the game is still in an early test phase, so the server is shared with Chinese players and the world chat shows Chinese names almost nonstop. Server time also runs on UTC+8, so the daily reset comes at midnight UTC+8, which is 4 p.m. UTC. Keep that in mind so you don't miss your free pulls.

On Google Play the game has 4.7 stars from more than 4,500 ratings and around 10,000 downloads, the numbers of a fresh release rather than a blockbuster. It also requires a connection. When I tried airplane mode, it sat on the loading screen and still hadn't got in after more than a minute and a half.

So who should download it

If you like games you can leave running on their own, and you enjoy picking up loot and watching your power number climb, this is a relaxed choice. It doesn't ask for much of your time each day, and the Three Kingdoms cast gives it a familiar backdrop.

And if you downloaded it before and gave up, chances are you got tired of sitting there swapping gear all session. The auto mode switch takes that off your hands, and the speed-up makes the grind go by much faster.