I have two news for you – good and bad (and no, this is not what you already thought). The good news is that Blizzard has finally come to the fore for android users and released their card game HearthStone for this platform. The bad news is that if you played HearthStone on your computer, you risk spending even more time on it, and if you didn't play and accidentally looked at the game by running it on your tablet, then … In general, this is another 'time burner', I warned you , be careful. Below the cut is a short description for those who, for some reason, have not heard about CCGs in general or HearthStone in particular.
Before installing the game, you need to download about 500 MB of data, after unpacking the files and installing HearthStone will take about 1.3 GB.
What is HearthStone? This is Blizzard's reimagining of the CCG genre, the collectible card games. One of the foundations of the genre is the tabletop CCG Magic: The Gathering, on its basis many computer variations have already been released, there are other games in this genre. HearthStone differs from all of them in its simplicity – the rules are simpler here, there are fewer cards (for now) and it is easier to start playing it without bothering to familiarize yourself with the many rules and small features of the gameplay.
It's very simple to play – you have a deck of cards, you take a small part of them into your hand, like your opponent, and then you get one more card at the end of each turn (or more, but this already depends on the deck itself). With your cards, you must inflict damage on the enemy hero, trying to reduce the amount of his HP to zero, or to the opponent's cards, with them he can block the damage coming from your cards, for example. I will not describe all the rules of the game, fortunately, the game is free and anyone can, having downloaded it, check and see everything for themselves.
I'll say one thing – HearthStone is pretty darn addictive. Even if you have never played CCG before and have never heard of such a genre at all, it is worth spending an hour or two playing a game from Blizzard, understanding it a little, and now you run the risk of spending a couple of hours every day playing HearthStone games.
The game has nice cartoon graphics, beautiful, bright animation, appropriate and not too intrusive music, there is voice acting, including in Russian, as well as many, many references to various stages and events from the WarCraft universe, of course.
However, not everything is so smooth. I would say so far, even on the contrary – not at all smooth. HearthStone for android currently has one discouraging flaw – terrible game optimization. I don't know what this is connected with, but the game slows down on different tablets, and the number of officially supported devices is ridiculously small (14 tablets) (full list), when there are more than two or three hundred of them on sale now, without exaggeration, only known ones models will be typed 100-150.
The basic requirements for hardware and software for the game are as follows: a screen with a diagonal of 6 inches, 1 GB of RAM, Android 4.0 or higher (Blizzard highly recommends 5.0 Lollipop) and a graphics subsystem NOT PowerVR540 / 544. I ran the game on Lenovo Yoga Tablet 8 – it slows down and gives out graphical artifacts, but it's understandable, it's PowerVR SGX544 that is used there. It's almost impossible to play. I also ran Yoga Tablet 2 Pro on Lenovo – the lags are terrible, everything slows down and barely moves, but you can still play. Why HearthStone lags on this tablet – I don't know. The game does not have super graphical effects, incredibly detailed models and high quality textures. By and large, there is nothing cool in it at all in terms of graphics – the usual cartoonish graphics familiar from other Blizzard projects, hence my sincere surprise at the game's brakes on any tablet, I quite reasonably believed that a game with such simple graphics and emphasis on the card table (and that's all) cannot slow down even on very weak hardware. That is why in the beginning I wrote about, this is my opinion, poor game optimization. I can't find any other explanation for the lags and brakes, and I really hope that Blizzard will fix the situation in the near future. However, if the game runs smoothly on your tablet – be careful, HearthStone is addictive!
