MARVEL Puzzle Quest: Hero RPG Wiki

This game is great. It is the only game I’ve ever played that I have actively played daily since launch. During that time I’ve seen a lot of improvements to this game, most positive. I disagree with pay to play. If you put in enough time, and do the right events, you hit a point where the game is giving you enough tokens (in game currency) and covers to keep yourself going. You can win new covers through gameplay or legendary covers that they hand out as you level your character. You get rewarded with new characters for leveling existing characters. Or for $10/month you can go VIP and get daily prizes. The reason I gave it 3 stars is as follows. The game needs to figure out what to do with extra covers. If you have a character that is not championed and you get a 6th cover in any one color, you have to get rid of it. This makes it very frustrating when you do not have enough iso to champion the character, or you have less than 13 covers in that character. I’ve had many circumstances where I’ve had to throw away a 4 or 5 Star card because I couldn’t use it. It’s enraging considering these are rare pulls. The ability to use these duplicate cards towards another color once you’ve hit 5 covers in a single color would be great. There are also times when I have an issue with the game. Getting a generic response from customer service is not the best treatment of customers, especially when it doesn’t solve the issue.

... and still love the game, playing it every day! (Day 1584) Like any game things are easier when you pay. But that’s mainly in the beginning. And that’s only if you want to progress faster or challenge other well-established players and teams. If you just want to play events and collect covers, you can. You can select the difficulty level for an event even one below your current ranking, if that’s what you need. I’m at a point or I can get the 4-star cover progression reward for almost every event. I still can’t effectively challenge the top teams in PVP, I but that’s OK since it’s not necessary for the game (or me). It’s one of the few games that I felt the need less and less to pay to play the longer I played. Of course at first it took patience and perseverance and the need to resist the desire to have to progress to the top so quickly. I’m glad there are events that are pretty easy and those that are very hard, so it’s not too discouraging nor boring. I’m still experimenting with different combinations of players and teams. I will admit that like many it seems like the AI cheats, because he gets so many more combinations of matches than I ever do. (I call the AI “Sir Hacksalot”.) But most of the time I am a way stronger team than his so I can forgive it.

I love this game, I really do. The problem is that I can’t win any battle except for the beginning story battles of which I have completed a long time ago. The A.I. is way too powerful. It can obtain special moves and chains almost instantly while it takes me forever to get one special move. I am also getting pitted against way more powerful players/characters who win every single time. I can’t upgrade my characters because I can’t obtain any hero vault tokens. I can’t keep any characters I like because when I get a new higher tier character, I have to either delete a character I already have or I have to buy a new slot with hero tokens which are very hard to get unless you buy them. The A.I. also does 10x more damage than me and it has extremely long chains. I can’t advance at all unless I play for weeks and weeks or I spend $20. This is ridiculous. Fix the upgrade system and make the game easier to play, and don’t make the A.I. cheat when it’s losing because that happens often. As of right now I don’t recommend this game to anyone until adjustments are made! 😡

I haven’t missed a day playing this game for nearly 2 years. You do not have to pay to be good at this game, however, it does take time and consistency to collect the cards you most desire. I gave 5 stars, but I do have one critique. The money you have to spend for tokens is outrageous. Just like any type of market...deals sell!! You just don’t give enough tokens for what your spending. I have spend 25 on tokens and literally didn’t get anything good or anything I could use. It’s like you gamble your money to get something you may not need or want. For that reason and that reason only I just purchase the VIP. I realize how big this game is and our clan is pretty dope and we communicate a lot so regardless I’m gonna play but we have all discussed this issue and an update for this would be very much appreciated and would keep long time players very in tune with this game. Thanks for a great game! However, all good things can become better in some way.

A great Match 3 with some interesting strategy elements involved via team building and picking heroes with powers that complement each other. While you *can* pay to win, you can also earn an incredible roster of characters without spending a dime. I have about 60 characters and I think I have spent about 5 dollars total, just to unlock new character slots on my roster early on. Given how many hours I have put into the game, this is an incredible value. It has daily missions you can do, so the game can be something you grind away at, or something you spend a little time with each day. It will fit your needs. My only nit pick is that the computer AI is bad, and it will do things that no human player would ever do, like creating power tilrs then immediately matching them, or letting you bait it into making matches that leave the board state in your favor since it will always prioritize a match 4. Even over a match 5.

I’ve been playing this game for awhile now, and while I admit that I often find certain things about it frustrating, this game can very easily be played and enjoyed for free with no ads interrupting. Yes, it can be hard getting started but thats part of what makes it fun, it continues to challenge you and come out with new content regularly. I will say that finding the covers you need becomes increasingly difficult with the number of variations on the same characters and the more stars a character has the more difficult it is to get more than one cover for them. I recommend to new players that you stick with the characters your getting covers for in the beginning because those dark avengers covers will advance quickly to powerful characters. Something I did not realize at the time. The game also gives you a ton of ISO which as you advance starts stacking up in a ridiculous way because you cant use it for much of anything. I’m not a huge fan of the new thing you can equip to characters as I don’t find them to be very valuable but truthfully if you just want to enjoy a game and have fun then this is a great game for you.

So the plus side is you dont have to pay for anything to get where you need to go in the game. You play through missions for characters, their covers for skills and to upgrade them, currency to level, etc. But eventually, you hit a cap of just a few characters before you even finish the prologue. At that point, you will ALWAYS be struggling between what characters to keep and what to toss because ALL your gold coins need to be going to extra slots and even then, you will never have enough slots for the amount of characters you get. So plus, always getting characters but also a fail in that the coins you have to grind for and you will never have enough. I HIGHLY recommend dropping money on the VIP (even if just once), it was unplayable for me otherwise. It gives you a bunch of coins that you can dump into slots so you have a good roster to work with. Plus the extra rewards dont hurt. This is also why i give it 3star, because it is HIGHLY difficult without that extra push. But not unplayable. If i had to recommend anything, im surprised we cant save team setups yet and, as a comic book collector myself, it would be nice to have a collection we could see of all the covers we had because you have to throw away a lot that arent as good as others. Maybe rather than throw away, toss in a binder and get a reward for completing the set?

I will start by saying I love this game. I play it daily. It is like candy crush for marvel fans. I hope the devs read this as my only gripe is a large one, I hate how hard it is to add characters and upgrade them. If you play a lot, You get to a point very quickly where you get the same characters over and over, and once they are champions you can’t upgrade them. So it becomes a fun game with no purpose other than to kill time. The in game purchases are expensive, and only give you a chance at a new character or an upgrade to existing characters in lineup. I could spend $100 and have no guarantee of a new character I don’t already have and can’t upgrade. So I could spend $100 and get nothing of use in the game. I have spent money only to walk away with purple iso that you can’t use. I have millions of purple iso waiting to upgrade characters that I can’t ever seem to get. Why can’t we buy individual characters? Or Tokens that guarantee you a new 3 or 4 star character? I would pay for those. But not paying $20 for a 1-25 shot at a new character. My odds may not be exact but you get the point. Thanks for listening. Please consider changes. Shards was a step in the right direction

It's a fun app, character building gives it a nice aspect but the developers seem to think flooding the game with higher level characters (4* and 5*) is a good idea. The problem is that it makes it nearly impossible to build a complete four or five star character. Then if you should luck upon a coveted five star you probably won't get another cover for that character any time soon. The game is weighted to players who have been playing the longest when there were fewer characters. They were able to build those and have stronger teams. Due to this the same players tend to come in first in most events and tournaments which gives them high level rewards which again makes them even stronger. The developers actually need to play the game from scratch to get an understanding of how frustrating this is. Furthermore, while the probability of AI tile cascades is supposed to be adjusted to be lower it doesn’t bear out in the game with the AI routinely receiving a greater ratio of tile cascades. The Deadpool Daily has been glitched for two years with the same issue and after multiple emails to the developers they have yet to resolve it.

This used to be my favorite mobile game, but lately the designers have been forcing battles that don’t feel fun. The most recent example is the crash of the Titans which pits the player’s Rogue against the game’s Iceman in a one on one. While I was eventually able to overcome Iceman, I spent a large portion of the fight stunned and watched as all my red power got slowly drained away. This did not feel fun. This isn’t the only recent situation that felt more like a chore than a game. In the Alligator Loki intro event there were two more fights that felt incredibly tedious. One where I had to fight AL as Kraven, and another where I had to fight Yellowjacket as AL. In both situations the fight dragged on and I was left feeling like I just wanted the game to end, which is not a feeling any designer should aim for. To the design team selecting these match ups, it can be tempting to try to create these gotcha situations because you think more difficulty and longer matches equals fun. I recommend running some playtests with actual players to make sure these situation feel fun, and can be completed in a reasonable amount of time.

Previously, I would have rated this as a 5 star game. However, R223 which introduced an updated UI has degraded the game experience for myself and others. It feels like a change for the sake of change, without any thought out into matters such as accessibility. While the layout itself remains largely unchanged, the color scheme is not friendly to those with certain vision impairments. While I applaud the updated colors of the tiles, enemy tiles are difficult to distinguish, especially on black tiles. The darker tiles colors are welcome, but the lack of contrasts between the tiles, the black background and the icons on enemy tiles makes game play mistakes more likely, reducing the enjoyableness of the game. Also, the dimming of the whole screen during the opponent’s turn makes it harder to see what the AI is doing. A much better implementation would have been for the background to be a lighter color on the player’s turn and have just the background turn dark on the AI turn. And though not gameplay impacting like the other changes, aesthetically the purple background in the AP bar section is not pleasing, and I could see where someone with vision impairments may have trouble due to the lack of contrast between the purple background and several of the AP colors. This bar really should be a more neutral, contrasting color, like a light gray or silver.

Aesthetics aside, the dark tiles on an even darker screen makes it much harder to tell the colors apart; my eyes are straining to suss out what color/type of tile it is, which is giving me headaches and slowing my play way down. The lack of color contrast also makes it inaccessible for people who are colorblind or otherwise visually impaired. The narrower power bars make it harder to see when I have enough AP to fire a power because they don’t catch my attention as well. And the screen darkening even more on the opponent’s turn makes it so I can’t see what they’re doing or plan my next move. If you’re going to have a darker screen (which really should be a toggle switch for night mode, not the default mode) you have to make the colors for the tiles and AP/health bars a lot brighter. And really, there was nothing wrong with the play screen before. This makeover was completely unnecessary. I’m a commander of an alliance and a bunch of my players are already threatening to quit because they literally cannot play with this new UI. I’m a VIP player and I spend a lot of extra money on top of that, but I will no longer pay unless this is fixed.

I know developers need to get paid, but in the long run it is not worth it to pay in this game, with one exception. This game is constantly be updated with new content, which sounds good but is not due to the way you level up heroes. As the hero roster increases, it becomes more difficult to level up a character as the chances to get a hero card decreases. Also, they have this horrible leveling system that forces you to sell duplicate hero cards and give you basically nothing in return. And it’s made even worse due to the limited number of heroes you can have at any time and that duplicate heroes, which you may need later, expire. Regardless of how much you pay, you need to grind, a.k.a. Play the game over and over again just for a few rewards. It's not fun to play the same thing 4 times in a row, then time it just right to play 2-3 more times. Then there's the cheating. The AI gets insane chains, especially when it's losing or you are denying it a color it needs. And what’s even worse and where paying is worth it, if you pay a monthly fee, the AI cheats less. So you need to pay for the game to not cheat! If you still plan to play, go to Reddit for tips. And if you aren’t going to pay, remember that you have a long grind ahead of you, so make decisions for the long haul and avoid instant gratification. E.g. do not open any legendary cards until you are in the 3 to 4 star transition.

Updated: the new design of the jewel grid is so terrible to look at that I don’t think I can keep playing this game. Why are y’all systematically making this product worse? I have been playing for over four years and have watched as aggressive monetization has overtaken what was once a fun and truly free-to-play game. As other recent reviews note, new characters are added at breakneck speed—when I started playing there were maybe a half dozen 5* characters and more than 50 3* characters. There are now nearly as many 5* characters as 3*, and there hasn’t been a new character added with less than 4* in years. To make matters worse, many recent additions are truly, TRULY broken (Karnak, Polaris, Kitty, and Beta Ray Bill being the standouts here) such that they dominate virtually all versus events. It seems like it can’t be possible that the developer HASN’T noticed this. In addition, the past few updates have mostly been steps backward from a UI perspective, particularly the changes to the recruit screen in the most recent patch. I also agree with the reviews that have mentioned the frustrating lopsided AI cascade algorithm, which has never improved over all the years I’ve been playing.