
Still, summoning up new ones isn’t so difficult, and the most important alerts do come in. You know when your castle and bannermen are under attack, but you can easily get overwhelmed by the loss of units that you didn’t even know you lost in the chaos of war. Managing both combat and unit-summoning is never too difficult, though I do wish you were notified more often of when you lost units. Heroes and Castles 2 does a great job at keeping its disparate elements all tied together and working in perfect harmony. Your character gains experience, can use a variety of weapons, and unlock different abilities along a skill tree. You also will be running around the battlefield and attacking enemies, though if you die, you lose.

Generally, getting to and staying near your maximum unit count is ideal for trying to win. Some have advantages against certain enemy types, so you need to be smart. You will need to both summon up different units, using your recharging currency of command points to bring forth a variety of offensive and defensive units.

But if you die or your base is destroyed, then you lose that property. If you fail to protect your castle, which is the main progression, with 50 total waves, there’s no penalty. The new lands you conquer will net you bonuses and new units to use in battle, but they must be periodically defended to keep them. The structure surrounding the game has you trying to protect your castle from invasions, while freeing other lands from the skeleton armies that have invaded. That might have just sold you on the game, and hey – it’s $2 and it lets you destroy the skeleton army’s castle. Fewer games offer you the opportunity to summon up an army of blunderbuss-wielding dwarves to go blow up the castle housing a skeleton army. Those latter missions are the most fun, just because so many games offer “kill everyone" levels. In general, missions boil down to “there are bad guys, take them out." But you’ll have missions where you’re defending your castle from invaders, missions where you are involved in skirmishes with random batches of enemies, and ones where you have to raid your enemy’s castle before they destroy yours.

There are heroes, which you control castles, which you try to defend there’s both heroes and castles there’s also at least 2 of each. Heroes and Castles 2 thankfully delivers on its title. And that’s where my issues with Heroes and Castles 2 lie: the game’s good, I just came to dread playing it because it isn’t a good fit for the mobile platform. But sometimes, they’re terrible fits for the actual platform. Heroes and Castles 2 ($1.99) runs into the problem that trying to bring big-scope, console-style games to mobile often have: these games are often well-made and can be fun to play.
