This game provides almost everything that I would want from an MMO. However, there are a few downsides. I'll start with the bad first.

First off is the Vim System. It is kind of a negative thing for the game, but I can understand why it was put in. Vim is sort of like your crafting stamina, and it unlocks when one of your skills reaches 16. After you hit that point, everything you do when it comes to that specific skill will take up Vim points. Now, they do regenerate over time, but it's like every other game that has energy regeneration: few minutes at a time, and you only get one point back at a time. That wouldn't be so bad if you didn't need mass amounts for quests. The more you craft at a time, the more you use (e.g. one at a time for one Vim, or 50 for 150 Vim.) Gathering only takes one for each click, and sometimes you get three items instead of one, so that's not too bad. The biggest issue with this is that it greatly limits what you can do in the game each day. Sure, there are refills that you can buy (with in game tokens that you can earn, no real money required) and perks that cut down on how much is cut out, but if you don't have enough tokens or those perks yet, things can slow down pretty quickly. There are small "free" refills that you can get to drop, like 15 Vim cornucopians, but those aren't very common; there are also big refills, but that requires you to level the skill. If you're running low, and you're only around 10%, you're better off coming back later. The good side of the Vim system, though, is that it DOES slow you down. Without it, you would see level 1s taking up all of the high ranking gathering spots, and people who could actually craft with what's gathered there wouldn't be able to proceed because of the farmers.

Second off is the way your skills work. (I'm going to be giving you my point of view, since that's all I really have to work with here.) The good thing about the skill system here is that you have 6 set usable combat skills. The bad thing about the skill system is that you have 6 set usable combat skills. Now, on my priest, that's not too bad; I get a personal heal, a shield I can give to anyone, and the rest are damage spells. However, if I want to be able to heal SOMEONE ELSE, I need to find a piece of gear with that specific skill on it. If I want to keep that skill, I have to keep moving it from gear piece to gear piece, and believe me, that can get expensive pretty quickly, especially if you want to keep A LOT of skills that benefit you. If you have more skills that the free slots cover, you have to either abandon all hope for them, or use special stones to be able to tack as many on as that gear piece or weapon has space for. (You can also earn these in game, but if you're like me, and acquire a lot of pieces with great perks, youre going to run out of them VERY QUICKLY. They aren't exactly common for daily bonuses.) However, this does force you to think about which ones benefit you the most, so no one person can hoarde all of the skills and be insanely overpowered.

The third thing that I found to be a little irritating is crafting costs. Now, to craft things, you need to go to a station with all of the materials required (that you gather yourself) and craft whatever your skill allows. Now, a few friends of mine and I have sort of agreed that it's a "station rent and craft time" cost, but the higher up you get, the more expensive things get. That's a little annoying counting that I have to gather up all of these insane things to craft it in the first place. The sellback value isn't too great for them, either. The most recent thing I crafted cost me around 15 and a half silver, and it sold for a measly 24 copper. Pretty crappy, right? It feels pretty imbalanced. However, with how much hunting and questing most people do to kill time getting back Vim, I suppose most don't notice.

The fourth thing is the party/friend system. This one isn't necessarily a bad thing; it's just more of an annoyance. When adding someone to your friend list, you have to be standing right there with them. There's no "Add Buddy" button on the friend menu. You have to track them down and do it yourself. And, while we're talking about the friend list, let me tell you what you can do with your plethora of friends. You can see their name (good, that's needed), their level (also good, I suppose), and if they're online or not(very good; I mean, you can't whisper them if they're not online, right?). Aaaand..that's about it. You can't do anything with them. Can't unbuddy them, can't invite them to a party, nothing really helpful for people who are doing their own thing and then decide to be in a party. You have to do all of that stuff in person. (Well, in character, I guess. You don't have to walk all the way to your buddy's house to do things in game.) Oh, and the party invites work the same as a friend invite. Have to be able to click on them.

The last bad thing that I've noticed about this game is how you discover new areas. In most MMOs that provide a means of fast travel (which, by the way, isn't free in this game. It requires travel stones to go from one area to another.), you only have to enter the area to register that it's been discovered. The two exceptions that I've run into are WoW and this game. Like WoW, you have to activate a specific something to be able to travel there. In this case, there are travel pads that you have to run over. You get a free travel stone for discovering it for the first time, and bam. Area is now open for travel. However, that is also the drawback. If you're entering a new area that is just below, at, or just above your level, you had better be methodical about killing everything along the way. Most areas have the travel pad around the middle of the map if there isn't a town there. If you die before you run arcoss it? Better hope you have a resurrection stone. Don't have any left? You get to try again from the start. It's still labaled as "undiscovered". Better hope that things haven't started respawning yet.



Even through all of the bad, there are a lot of fantastic things that I love about this game.



First off, it's free. No pay-to-win here. The only thing that I might recommend paying for is extra storage if you like to hoarde everything. But, even that's not necessary. You get a total of three bags to start off with, a vault (with, I don't remember, 25 or 30 spaces?), and, if you decide to get the free house license, ANOTHER storage vault. So, unless you REALLY like to hoarde EVERYTHING you pick up, you don't need to buy anything with real money.

The second thing I love about this game is that there is no limit to what skills you can learn because everyone can learn everything. Want to focus soley on mining and smithing? That's cool. Want to max out just your plant lore? Go ahead. Want to be a master in all things ore, wood, clothing, food, and potions? No one's stopping you! The sky is the limit, as long as you have patience for all of the Vim you're going to be blowing through.

Other than that, it's really just your basic, run-of-the-mill MMORPG. There's things to fight, places to discover, quests to complete, and lots of fun to be had. If you're looking for a casual game to play alone or with your friends, this one is one that I recommend wholeheartedly. 9/10

I don't often write reviews. However, I thought I should in this case. If you are looking for something slick with high intensity, this may not be for you. Combat is slow and a bit tedious. Speed of movement can be slow. Questing can be repetitive.

But what sold me is the community atmospher. I am too old for drama from my entertainment. There is, so far, no one creating flame wars in chat. People are just going about their business. I do this to relax and have a bit of fun. It is why I like this game. Zero pressure, and so far no trolls.

Update: as several commenters mentioned, this review is very old, I'm told the game improved a lot. So give a try it might be not as bad as it was 5 years ago ;)

The game should be renamed: Clickers and Heroes
or Grinding Heroes

At first glance the game is fairly cute and suitable for children. This is true and a positive thing.

But the core gameplay is a brutal GrindAndClickFest with agressive Pay to play concept: even the training missions are about craft 50 items... what means: you sit in the front of the monitor and click in every 3 seconds 50 times.
Also, this game is about epic grinding. Really, there are no challenges in the game, the loot and the resources are easy to reach BUT: you have to spend long minutes and hours just to click and click and click on the same spot to have the necessary resources.

All the gameplay is about just clicking and waiting, clicking and waiting, clicking and waiting.... while there are mechanics to reduce this tedioum, everything points to the shop.

Honesntly, if there would be a reasonable priced monthly fee to eliminate this click fest concept I would gladly pay for it (because I like the world and the relatively simple gameplay, and again the relatively non violent MMO concept). But at it's current state, the game really tries to enforce me to pay with the nasty "I will make your clicker finger suffer if you dont pay" method. What I really don't like and I won't bend. Instead of that, I quit game.

People keep saying that the controls feel like a facebook type game and the like. Well, this game WAS actually on facebook a long time ago. I played this game a few years back and when I log into facebook, I can still see this game on my list. While it has improved from it's facebook days somewhat, it's still not up to par. It is creative in it's own right (Bughunting as a profession!?) and it does offer player housing and growing stuff in your garden and caring for animals. I do like having some form of simulation aspects in my games.

But it is really clunky, and it has a lot of 'seen that, did it in another mmo!' type of vibe. It's also not graphically appealing and for the most part I kept the sound off.

It's playable and you might get some entertainment out of it, but there is definitely better out there.

While this is not the worst MMO out there, it certainly isn't one of the best.

Here's a Quick Look video of my tragic adventure in this game. All of what I descibed below is in there, though some parts edited for your sanity and bugs in the game. Even though it's long, I'll still call it a quick look since it's an MMO. Feel free to skip around if you want a general idea, or just read the short and dirty summary below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-bUgaTg8yc&list=UUsGKrLHOxr2113efbnkp5MA

I'll start off with saying that the first thing you do in this game is get plopped down in a tiny starter area and get asked to kill wolves. Pretty typical right? Well as I went to fight the most docile wolves apparently terrorizing the town, I got introduced to the combat system. You have to stay perfectly still and click buttons, and I STRESS perfectly still. If you move, you cancel your auto-attack. If you turn slightly, you also cancel your attack. Heck, even if you press the attack again, it cancels the attack and you have to wait for the ability to go off cooldown. If that's what the game is like right from the beginning, I can only dread what it's like late game.

But combat really isn't the main focus of this. Crafting and socializing is. So I excused the dated and poor combat system and continued my journey. What I found out was that you can infinitely gather from nodes that require no effort to get to. It didn't even encourage exploration. Not that there was much to explore. You play in linear zones that push you along a path. But hey, maybe the crafting was where this game shined...

Boy, was I wrong. It was as basic as the gathering. You click on the recipe, and let the game take care of the rest for you. There wasn't even some sort of minigame to make it more engaging. It was just a droll experience of clicking buttons and farting around.

Alright, well perhaps the social part was the point of this. I wanted to try chatting to some peeps, but I rarely encountered another person. And when I did, they were doing the same boring stuff I was doing. But regardless, counting on the community to make your boring game more enjoyable isn't what developers should be hoping for. So it fell flat for me again. Even more when I discovered there wasn't a /dance command. C'mon now? No dancing?

But I dredged on. And I found several bugs along the way. Sure, I understand most MMO's have them. The games are so big, it's kind of expected. But I don't think you should be encountering so many in the starting zone, probably the most tested place of them all. Why did my character leap into the water and flop like a fish when I asked him just to fish? Why are there strange black squares following me on the ground everywhere I go? Why is a fenced area full of hens called a sheep plot? Heck, I even had a game breaking bug that kicked me out of the game and corrupted my video footage. But even after all that, I suffered through this game some more to give a better review.

Most of the quests. if not all, where simple fetch quests. All you had to do was go to a place sometimes a few feet away to complete them. It's like the quest givers themselves couldn't be arsed to play their own game. The animations are terrible too. Sure, some of the attacks look flashy, but rarely do they actually connect to what you're supposed to be attacking. Walking sideways is the most laughable thing in this game. It was so bad, I actually enjoyed doing it. I even fell off a cliff and my guy was as stiff as a board all the way down. It's just not polished at all.

And when I finally reached the last boss of the tutorial, Grimbad the Deadly or something rediculous like that, I just walked right up to him and stared at him. He didn't even attack me. The big bad boss just aimelessly wandered around, looking for a way to escape his cruel fate.

That just broke me. There is just no immersion in this game. I couldn't get a feel for it, and the point of MMO's is to lose you in their world, which this game failed miserably at.

But after being so negative, I'll list a few positives. I like the jumping flips. You go so damn high when you get a boost from some boots. I like that the game's quest helper tells you exactly what to do, even if it does hold your hand too much by saying where you can get stuff. And, umm, some of the bugs were kind of funny? Eh, I guess that counts as something.

So all in all, even if this game is free, I can't recommend it. There are plenty of better MMO's out there, some free as well. Don't waste your time here.

My wife and I were looking for a free to play online multiplayer game to try out together. There were a few criteria for our search: 1) Both of our machines had to be able to run it (she has an older laptop with a low-end graphics card; 2) It had to be free (not interested in subscription-based MMORPGs); 3) It had to have a 'casual' feel to it so that we could focus enjoying the game rather than trying to figure it out. We sifted through the Steam searches, and came across this one.

I've seen Villagers and Heroes decribed as the "not too smart, but cute love-child of World of Warcraft and Runescape." After sinking 26 hrs into it, I'd say that description is pretty accurate. It's not a very complex game, but it's a fun game. My wife enjoyed a lot more of the gathering/crafting -type quests, and I was much more interested in the dungeon crawling and boss matches, but we were both able to play through the game together and have a lot of great nights with it.

The only CON that I need to add in here is the housing system. We were both really excited to purchase houses in one of the villages of the game, but they just act as inventory space (you can't enter them, customize them, or anything). Furthermore, you need to sign into the game every week to pay your 'rent' to keep the place... and I'm away for work quite often so when I came back after a project, both of our houses (and all of our stuff) was gone. I submitted an in-game ticket for support, but one month later I still haven't received a response. Damn.

Oh well, it was still a lot of fun while it lasted. If I get a response back and our stuff is recovered, we may take it back up again.

This is a nice game, with funhy cartoon-like graphics and a sence of humor. As many others have already commented, it is a next-gen Runescape. So if you are in to Runescape, go ahead and try it.
If you don't like Runescape or don't even know what it is, then DON'T try this!

Unfortunately, in my opinion, the game is heavily Pay to Play!!
From the 35 hours I have on record, the 30 or so were consumed on clicking on trees, mineral nodes and anvils in order to level up crafting skills..And I managed to get them to level 15...I can't imagine how much time it would take me to get to 50...Of course, you can speed up the process by using harvesters, but you have to pay real money to get them! ;)

Travel pads (the way to teleport between areas) require travel stones. You get 1 free for every travel pad you discover (I got 7). If you are 3 areas away from the main city, you have to either travel on foot or use teleport..After 4-5 freebies, you HAVE to pay to get Travel Stones..

It also has a farmville simulation! Plant. water, collect crops in order to level up your villager skills. At least crops deliver some good in-game cash...

There are lots of other examples of situations that you have to pay in order to avoid the EXTREMELY OUTRAGEOUS LONG and TEDIOUS grinding you need to do.

You will grind. A lot.

You will die. A lot.

At about level 19, you will essentially hit the paywall. At that point, you will find it hard to progress unless you start buying things with real money.

This is a fantastic game with a great community. However, I would strongly discourage you from playing the game via Steam. If you play via Steam you cannot login via a mobile device and as of today all item shop purchases are account bound. Only if you create your account directly from the company site will you have those features.

There are zero benefits for being a Steam player vs downloading the client directly from the companies web site: https://www.villagersandheroes.com/play-game/

Don't make the same mistake I did.

With the new update to Villagers and Heroes: Reborn, a lot of the annoyances of this title have been removed. The much-hated VIM system has been kicked out, and a lot of new features have been added. If you played this game before, you should definitely retry this game.

If you never played this game before, then Villagers and Heroes is a fun MMORPG. Quests, Crafting, Levels, Housing, it's all in the game. There's a lot of maps to explore.

Villagers and Heroes: Reborn is made by a small development team, but they delivered an epic update.