Amazing Superhero Squad Review on Xbox

Amazing SuperHero Squad is best described a text based corporation squad management sim. All reviews (unless stated otherwise) are based on the Developer/Publisher providing myself with a review code, which i am grateful for, but does not influence my outcome.

The premise is you lead a team of superheroes in a place called Storborg City. Here you try to prevent looming disasters and beat your dishonourable rivals whilst managing their own issues and keeping the companies profits, social standing and financial projections, positive.

The game boasts a varied selection of heroes, a hand drawn art style and numerous missions to send your team on and resolve. 

Gameplay

The gameplay with a short cutscene describing the creation of the corporation you work for and a recent incident that threatens all whom work there.

From that moment you are then dropped at your desk where you have to manage a superhero who is drunk and needs to be brought back inline. To do this you need to choose one of the other superheroes on your team to help them out, click on their profile and send them out to do the job. This is going to be the basis of all your interactions from now on so getting to grips with this mechanic is essential. 

You can hold up to 5 superheroes at any given time, but you will start off with only 4. Each of these superheroes each have unique stats and attributes they you will need to carefully understand, in a bid to get the very best out of each, whatever situation that comes your way. Some are great for public interactions, whilst others can in fact hurt your social standing depending if the missions fail or not. You will never see all the superheroes in one go and further playthroughs will be needed to see them, as they are often picked by random.

Any time of the day, you can purchase more superheroes should one be too problematic and need to be fired, or just die due to a bad mission outcome. The cost of said superheroes varies a little bit due to their stats, but in my opinion are all too expensive. They can be almost 20% of your total balance for one hero, and as one of the elements in which you can fail the game is no funds, this can be very costly.

And here is where the first issue presents itself, as you don’t get an actual in depth tutorial, but a abit of a broken English statement that doesn’t really explain the concept or the functions as well as you need. This in turn can leave you misunderstanding in what to do or more importantly what to look out for. For instance the game ends if you get too low on funds, poor social status or company projections. To ensure that you don’t, missions need to be successfully completed by putting the right hero for the right task. Each hero stats will impact the mission and there is a bar underneath the mission slot which will give you a rough guide how the outcome will turn out.

However, there seems to be still a bit of RnG involved as some missions still failed even though I had a high chance shown on the mission screen. Speaking of missions, there is a really good varied selection of them, however after about a couple of hours, you will have seen most of them as they are often picked at random from a set tile. The missions themselves provide a small description of the situation and are often quite humorous plots, and depending on your choice of superhero to deal with it, can also lead to some fun outcomes.

Be aware though, as you progress through the game, more missions will be presented than your team can handle and you will need to choose carefully which you accept and which you leave. Once a days worth of missions have been completed/ignored, you will get a overall statement on what was successful/failed and what impact that has on your companies standing/profits/revenue stream.

There is 4 weeks worth of missions to get through, but behind the normal day to day missions coming in, there is an on-going plot mission in which you really do need to keep in check. Each week a plot mission will ask you to resolve something like ‘’who is the hacker’’ and failure of this can lead to instant game failure. However unlike the main missions which gives you mini descriptions of what is happening, the plot missions are tucked away in your personal tablet, with you needing to regularly check and read, In a bid to understand and resolve what is happening.

Another aspect to the game is a timed clock which continuously runs down every day and determines when a new mission is dropped. There is even timed missions that if you don’t make a decision quickly, will expire and cause problems at the end of the days statement. You can speed up time, should you want to get to the next mission, but you cannot stop it.

Personally this was my biggest issue with the game, as the time management side was frustrating as it never really gave me enough time to carefully read the mission, find the best hero, and send them on their way. It got so bad, that I started just cycling through the heroes without checking their stats and dropping in the one that would give me the best perceived outcome, and not what was best suited. Combine that with when I did managed to choose a hero and mission that was perfect each other, the game would pop up another mission and they would automatically be allocated to the latest one. This would lead to me often sending out wrong heroes and thus frustrate me even further. A good solution to this would be allowing us to stop time, giving us a breather, so we can fully engage with the missions at hand.

Control wise, it is clear this was ported from PC, and was best suited for a mouse and keyboard in terms of speed. Getting to your heroes, buying more heroes or even hiring a detective, which appears as button under a mission was slow and clunky. And due to the time management, this can make things worse. When time is of an essence, flipping though all the elements on the screen just to highlight your heroes is not great. Shortcuts would be ideal and there are some for flipping between missions, but I do think they are missing others.

For instance buttons A & B, do nothing as would be perfect if these can used for instantly highlighting your heroes or opening your personal tablet. That alone would speed thing up and help reduce the frustration of the time management aspect. There also seems to be a glitch with the saving system, sometimes it would restart from the week you just completed, others back to the beginning, which could get easily tiresome.

Overall despite its flaws, the game is actually a very fun superhero corporation sim, and when you do get time to enjoy the missions you can find yourself really invested in what you need to do to ensure the corporation is always on top.

Graphics

The games visual style is actually a nice fun cartoon/comic book aesthetic, which really sell the games world and overall story it aims to tell. Each mission has a unique and fun image to showcase the fundamentals of what its trying to convey. The dashboard, is clear and crisp with each element perfectly drawn to show off this beautiful game world. Character design is diverse, intriguing and fun, and there is a ‘’got to catch em all’’ element once you have seen what they look like. Combine this with the various landscapes, missions and characters themselves beautifully drawn here and logged in your tablet for later viewing, there is a large amount of great images to go through.

Sound

The game sounds is where it really shines with a nice selection of cyberpunk synth soundtracks that unfortunately is just one track that is on repeat depending on the week you are playing. Some of these could easily be forgiven for being in a Mass Effect game. Regardless, each weeks track is punchy enough to enjoy regardless of it repeating. The main screens sounds ranging from choices which ‘’boops’’to mission notifications tonal uplifts, each help make the game sound more busier than it is and in doing so keeps that balance of music and action noise, to a perfect equilibrium.

Verdict

This leads me onto the rating of the game:-
Now I rate games in order of, avoid, on sale, great purchase and must own. My rating for Amazing SuperHero Squad is a "Great Purchase’’.

It’s a fun game despite its various hick-ups with the controls / time management system. For the price it asks for, to experience the story on offer, it does a good job at luring you in and keeping you engaged. Again my only real complaint is regarding those two elements which could easily be patched to provide a better quality of life experience.

The game is currently priced on Xbox at £5.59 or approx $7, and depending on skill and patience would give you about 5+ hours worth of gameplay. Whilst there is also a number of heroes/side missions to collect which you can go back and find, there really isn’t any other replay ability once all is done.

Yes it has some quirks and some elements can be a little frustrating, but passed that there is a good fun text based corporation squad management sim here. If these are the types of games you like, or would like to try, this would be ideal for a starting point, specially at its price.