Warriors of Waterdeep Review – A mobile micro RPG without gacha or autoplay

Warriors of Waterdeep is a rare find on mobile. It looks like a gacha RPG with its turn-based battling, focus on hero collection, and micro levels to complete, but it removes all of the stuff we hate in the genre.

There’s no autoplay. You actually have to take charge and play your way through all of the battles, thinking up strategies and managing your party yourself.

You also don’t unlock heroes through a gacha system. Instead – get this – you unlock them by playing the game. Imagine that!

There’s also no ridiculous star system or SSR heroes, which we’re quite frankly sick to the very pits of our stomach of seeing. Instead, you unlock a hero and that’s it – you have the best version of that hero.

Like in a standard RPG, you’ll have to level them up and find new equipment to grow them in power, but we never felt like we hit a paywall during our few lengthy playing sessions so far.

So how does the game work? Well, you’ll create a team out of a small selection of typical D&D heroes, like a Cleric, Fighter, Mage, Bard, Ranger and more.

You’ll create a team out of a small selection of typical D&D heroes

You can only bring four heroes into battle with you at once and there are only about eight in total to collect. Each of them play very differently though, so you’ll have a real choice as to who to bring with you into each level.

Levels take place on a small grid, much like in Fire Emblem Heroes or any other SRPG. You’ll face a few rooms full of different monsters you have to defeat to reach the end.

Heroes take it in turns to unleash an attack or skill, and you can visibly see the order in which enemies and heroes move thanks to a fancy little icon.

One of our favourite features of Warriors of Waterdeep is the dice roll you get on pretty much every move that isn’t a special skill.

A successful roll gives that particular move a secondary property, depending on the class. For example, our Fighter tank would Taunt nearby enemies while our Cleric healed random allies.

It gives you something a little extra to think about versus just using your most powerful skill and hoping for the best. We found that we often opted to move our characters rather than simply attack, in the hopes that we’d get a favourable dice roll.

Complete a level and you’ll get showered with rewards

Complete a level and you’ll get showered with rewards. These include new equipment and gold, as well as experience for your characters. Curiously, you don’t actually earn much experience from winning battles. Instead, each time you level up a character’s equipment, they get a nice chunk of XP.

Equipment comes in the form of cards, with various different rarities. You have to unlock more of the same cards to upgrade equipment, much like in the likes of Clash Royale.

There’s a standard campaign to play through, which features a very light story, PvP that you’ll play in real time against other players (in theory – we’ve almost exclusively fought bots so far), and a challenge mode that features the best rewards by far.

In terms of IAPs, there’s a rather expensive monthly subscription that provides more rewards each time you complete a level and you can buy gems for chests and all that malarky.

If you’re serious into PvP, it’s probably going to get a bit pay to win but if you’re just in it for the PvE battles, you’ll get plenty of content out of this for free. That’s down to personal preference.

Overall though, we’re quite taken with Warriors of Waterdeep. It’s a pretty standard mobile micro RPG but it removes the usual features we despise, like autoplay and gacha. What’s left isn’t very deep but it’s perfect for a quick playing session here and there. Grab it on Google Play.