Furthermore, the game keeps track of how many monsters you kill with each weapon, allowing your character to gain levels in using various arms. The better a character is with a particular weapon, the more damage that’s done and the greater the chance for critical or fatal hits. New alternate attacks become available as well. While such a character advancement system isn’t as complex as Neverwinter Nights 2 or Oblivion, it has the same spirit of strategic cost-benefit decisions.

On the action side, Call for Heroes is set up in the typical “collect all of the items and move on to next level” format. Your mission is to collect Dark Souls, and there’s no shortage of monsters to try to stop you. Your enemies are scattered all over the map, and move to attack you the moment they’re aware of your presence. Utilizing another gaming staple with which many people are familiar, picking up items will spawn additional enemies and sometimes even lock you in a room with them. Your enemies come in three main varieties: melee fighters, ranged attackers and swarming self-destructing enemies. At no point will you find yourself wandering around with nothing to fight unless you’ve picked up every single object on the map and are just standing still.

Despite the potential for a gruesome death, Call for Heroes doesn’t follow the paradigm of “save early, save often.” The game automatically saves your progress at the end of every level, but you’re prohibited from saving at any other time. Instead, the game has special items appropriately called Respawn Items. For every Respawn Item in your inventory, you may resurrect yourself upon death and continue the battle. Such a system integrates respawn decisions into the player’s strategy, forcing him or her to ask whether or not it’s worth using a Respawn Item in order to not lose progress.

All of these aspects of gameplay seem to be the ingredients for a successful release, if only because they make full use of previously successful game elements and mold them into a new title. However, the results are mixed, for reasons which I shall make clear.