Shop Heroes: Mobile Game You Play as an NPC

Have you ever wanted to know how that shopkeeper NPC stocks her shop? Or why that innkeeper NPC sends you to fight the zombie princess?

Play Shop Heroes, by Cloudcade, and you will find out.

Shop Heroes takes your basic fantasy RPG and turns it upside down.  You play the shopkeeper/innkeeper, and sell crafted items to your heroes (NPCs) to make money to upgrade your city’s resources, hero training buildings, or crafter’s guilds, or the furnishings in your shop.  You also send your heroes on quests to fetch you more Iron Wood for your Recurved Bow.

You supply your heroes with equipment to improve their quest returns, and to level them up. You don’t always have to craft your heroes’ items. In the trade guild, you can buy and sell items with other players. This allows you to obtain better quality items for your heroes than you can craft yourself, and gives you another revenue stream, especially when you’re trying to level a crafted item, so you have ten or fifteen Venomous Hand light gloves sitting in your inventory taking up space.

Then you take those funds and invest them in your city buildings, to increase your crafting levels, hire new crafters, increase resource production, and access new quests (which give new crafting resources) and new heroes.

As you craft an item, you increase efficiency (decrease required resources, or crafting time) and increase value by raising the minimum level of the crafted item. Higher level items fetch a better price, and provide more energy or power to your heroes, as well as being less breakable.

Periodically, other city dwellers will enter your shop with special orders, paying with gems, special items, and other valuables. These orders are due within 24 hours. Usually the special order items are higher level so you want to make sure you have access to those blueprints before accepting the contract.

Shop Heroes also has a PvP arena, where you can pit your heroes against other players’ heroes for ranking, prizes, and coin. You can play in an automated arena, versus randomly selected players, or in the free play arena.

The PvP arena was released for beta testing recently, so not all players yet have access. It allows players to field five heroes for battle against other players.  The heroes available are linked to the level of your city’s Castle.  

You can equip your heroes with two sets of items, one for quests, and one for Arena battles, or equip the same items. Heroes receive new abilities as they level up, as well, Arena Abilities and Quest Skills. Some items give abilities or skills when equipped at Flawless or better levels.

Shop Heroes is a great game app for folks who love the behind-the-scenes action. It fills the gap between Farmville clones and RPGs, and lets the player choose whether to be very cooperative, with a city inviting outside investments and lots of PvP action in the arena, or just plod along in a private city, upgrading the city in their own pace and strategy. Or anywhere in between.

In addition to a web version, Shop Heroes is available for iOS and Android devices.