Mighty Party: Epic RPG Heroes

I opened Mighty Party expecting a card game, and the first thing it handed me was a tower puzzle. A white-haired hero with a number floating over his head stood next to a red tower full of monsters, and a cartoon hand showed me where to drag him.

That opening says a lot about the game today. The card battles are still the heart of it, but my first hour was a stream of tower puzzles, tutorial arrows and reward screens, with a couple of long video ads squeezed in between.

A tower of numbers before the first card

Tower Wars is simple math dressed up as a siege. Your hero carries a power number, every monster in the tower has one too, and you drag the hero into a room whose monster is weaker so that its number gets added to yours.

Some rooms hold pickups instead of monsters, like a sword worth +15, crossed blades that double your power or a cannon that takes 3 away. Later towers put a caged ally at the top with a 49-power brute guarding the floor below, so the order you clear the rooms in starts to matter.

Each tower is a stop on a winding map, and a cleared tower paid me 100 gold. Every few stops the path turns into a Victory over Players node instead, which swaps the puzzle for a real card battle and paid 25 gems when I won.

Getting stuck isn't the end of the world either. When I ran out of good moves on one tower and tapped the skip button in the corner, a red Defeat screen offered Skip next to Retry, and Skip simply moved me on to the next stop on the Tower Wars map.

Two lanes, a Warlord and a hand of heroes

The real battles look nothing like the towers. Your Warlord stands on the far left of a small board, the enemy Warlord stands on the right, and you play hero cards from your hand into the lanes between them. Mine was called Adam, and he started one fight with 11 health and a later one with 41.

Every card shows two numbers, blue for attack and red for health. My Swordsman came in at 3 and 9, while the Archer hit for 4 but had a single point of health, so the Swordsman went up front and the Archer sat behind him.

The lesson that stuck came in my second fight. I left one lane empty, and the guide pointed out that my Warlord had taken damage because nothing was protecting that line, which is the kind of rule you only need to learn once.

Twenty-five Pilgrim cards for one level

Heroes grow by collecting copies of themselves. My first chest held 25 cards for a Common hero called the Pilgrim, plus 75 gems and 27 gold, and those 25 cards were exactly enough to promote her.

Promoting her took her to level 2, raised her attack from 3 to 4 and unlocked an ability that gives +2 attack to Order allies for one turn. A second ability that adds health stays locked until level 11, and the next promotion already asks for 50 more cards.

That card count is the real clock of the game. Every hero you care about needs a steady stream of copies, and chests are where those copies come from. Heroes also belong to factions, and the Pilgrim's Order badge is what decides which allies her attack bonus reaches.

A castle full of padlocks

Between fights you return to a lobby of floating islands. The castle in the middle holds the Summon Hall, and around it sit the Event Center, Legendary Draft, Gems Mine, Divine Arena, Journey and Guild, several of them still padlocked when I stopped.

The Fight button takes you to the Hall of Fame, where I started in League 30. One win moved my trophies from 0 to 10 out of 20, and each victory drops a chest into one of four slots, with four more slots marked Add slot.

Two currencies run all of this. Gold trickles in from towers and chests, while green gems are the premium money and come in smaller handfuls. By the time I opened my first chest, I was holding 205 gems and a little over 1,300 gold.

Where the ads and the waiting come in

The game never pushed a paid offer at me during the tutorial, but it was happy to show me ads. Between Tower Wars levels it played full-screen video ads, and the first one ran for well over thirty seconds before a skip button showed up.

Tapping that button didn't even bring me back right away, because it opened the advertised game's page in Google Play. A later one ended on a static card with a small close button tucked into the corner.

The slower squeeze is the card count. Heroes ask for 25 copies, then 50, and those come from chests that wait in a handful of slots, so progress depends on how many fights you can push through in a sitting.

Nine speed settings, and what changed at 5x

The VipMod version puts a red VIP badge on the left edge of the screen, and that badge opens the MOD menu. Mighty Party gets one switch there, a game speed-up with levels from 1x to 5x in half steps and 3x selected by default.

I left it on 3x for most of my session, and then I timed two duels inside Tower Wars to see the difference for myself, one with the switch off and one at the top setting.

At normal speed, the duel between my hero and a 20-power monster took about two seconds from the first swing to the new total popping up. At 5x, a duel against a 10-power monster was already over less than a second after I let go of the hero.

Changing the level or switching it off took effect immediately, without restarting the game. A few things to know up front:

• Speed is the only thing the mod changes, so card stats, chests and gems all stay exactly as the game hands them out.
• The ads still play at their own pace, so the speed-up doesn't shorten them.
• Switching it off brings back normal speed at once, which is handy when you want to watch a tricky battle play out.

How it held up after an hour

The best part is the card battles. The lanes make every placement a small decision, the art is bright and readable, and pairing a sturdy Swordsman with a fragile Archer already felt like a plan instead of a guess.

The weaker part is everything wrapped around those battles. The tutorial keeps steering you back to Tower Wars, the lobby is full of locked buildings at first, and the video ads show up often enough that I noticed them every few towers.

On Google Play in the US it holds 3.6 stars from about 467,000 ratings, with more than 50 million downloads, and it's rated Everyone 10+. The language menu has ten options, including English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Japanese and Korean.

So who should give it a try

If you like collectible card battlers with short, readable fights and a big roster to chase, Mighty Party is easy to start and has plenty to unlock once the padlocks come off. The Tower Wars puzzles are a nice change of pace, even if the game leans on them too hard early on.

If you already played and drifted away because every session felt like watching the same animations over and over, the speed-up is the reason to come back. At 3x the grind for cards and chests moves along at a much more comfortable pace, while the game itself stays exactly the same.