Hello everyone, I'm Xiaomei. I usually love cute pets, dress-up, and farming games, and I hardly touch games with fighting and killing. Recently, while browsing the app store, I saw 'Xiao Xiao Hero' with its cute, roundish art style and decided to download it. As a result, once I started playing, I couldn't stop, and I play a couple of rounds before bed every night.
At its core, it's a match-three game combined with card battles. The board has pieces of four elements: earth, water, fire, and wind. When we match pieces of a certain element, it charges energy for heroes of the same element. Once their energy is full, they automatically use their skills to attack the enemy. It's not the kind of action game that requires frantic operation—just swipe with your finger and watch the chibi heroes use their moves, swoosh swoosh swoosh, so cute. Levels have step limits and objectives like defeating all enemies, and occasionally you have to fight a boss, but the monsters all look like ugly-cute little toys, completely not scary, so even someone like me who is afraid of gore can handle it.
I've currently played past level twenty, and I'm a bit embarrassed to say that I got stuck twice. Once, I didn't pay attention to attribute advantages, and my team was completely countered by the enemy. Later, I switched to a team with the right attribute advantage, and the damage shot up immediately. Another time, I ran out of moves while the enemy still had a sliver of health, which made me slap my thigh in frustration. So now I've learned to be more careful: at the start of a level, I first check the enemy's attributes and skill countdowns, and I don't make random moves.
Here are a few little tips: try to save four- or five-match combos for special pieces; bombs and rainbow balls work especially well when combined with a hero's ultimate. Don't just clear pieces as soon as you see them—first look for positions that can trigger chain reactions. Don't evenly upgrade resources in the early stages; pick two or three favorite heroes as your main, otherwise you won't have enough gold. My favorite is the wind-element little archer—her skill shoots a row with a 'shoo shoo shoo'; although the damage isn't the highest, her actions are just too cute. The lizardman mentor is also very interesting, like a talkative old master; every time you click him, he mutters away.
The advantages are quite obvious to me: the art style is healing, it's easy to get started, you don't need real-time battles, and it's comfortable to play in spare moments; it's free to download, you can progress through levels without spending money, and there are quite a lot of daily rewards. There are also some drawbacks: when stuck at a level, stamina is a bit insufficient and you have to wait for it to recover; in the later stages, farming materials can be a little repetitive. If you only like pure match-3 games and don't like card development, you might think the system is a bit too much.
In short, if you, like me, enjoy cute styles and also want to play a bit of light combat without it being scary, you can give 'Match Heroes' a try. I've already started treating it as a little bedtime treat. Has anyone played any cute games recently? I'd love some recommendations too~🥰