Revolve8 is a pocket-sized real-time strategy game with light gacha mechanics, but more importantly, it is the brainchild of two legendary names: Masayoshi Kikuchi and Koji İgarashi. For those who are curious, Mr. Kikuchi was the producer of “Yakuza” and Mr. Igarashi was the producer of original “Castlevania”. They teamed up to create Revolve8, a deck-based strategy game that contains lots of heroes to collect and lots of dynamic strategies to use. In this review, we will take a closer look at the game and find out what it really offers.

Basic Features And Gameplay

Revolve8 puts you directly in action at the beginning: You start the game on a tutorial battlefield and learn the basic mechanics. The battle area contains six towers in total, three of them belong to you and the rest to the enemy. Your goal is to destroy enemy towers and protect yours –  the side that destroys the most towers wins the match. Each battle lasts three minutes’ maximum, but you can still finish a match earlier by destroying the enemy towers.

The battle screen, the numbers above the towers represent their health points.

So, who will destroy these towers? That job is for your heroes, which you place on to the battlefield by dragging and dropping with your mouse. In other words, you can place these heroes anywhere on the map – by placing them strategically, you can stop enemy attacks or deal a strong blow to the enemy army. Once you place the heroes, you cannot intervene: They start to walk on a straight line and fight everything on their path.

The towers attack automatically too but they are quite weak. You need heroes to protect them.

Revolve8 is actually about lane defense: Your units will attack everything on their lane automatically. You just need to decide where to place them.

Seems simple enough at first glance, but Revolve8 involves complex mechanics. Every unit is stronger against another one and you need to know how to counter specific units. For example, melee dps heroes die easily against large groups of enemies but are very effective against single targets. After seeing which unit your enemy deployed, you must counter with the most appropriate one. And this brings us to the deck system: The “light-gacha” part of Revolve8.

Heroes And Decks: Building The Perfect Team

You start the game with 5 decks and each deck can hold 8 heroes. A deck represents the characters you can bring on to the battlefield. You can use all eight of them but only four of them are active anytime. In other words, you use the heroes in a certain order, which resembles a card game like Hearthstone. Take a look at the screenshot below to see how this system works:

The section marked in red shows the heroes who are ready to use. Once you use one of them, it will be replaced with the next one in the deck. You can see which hero will be available next from the section marked in yellow.

You can add new heroes to the decks (or replace them) from this screen.

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Now, each hero brings a different skill to the battle. In addition, they can take different roles, such as tank, ranged dps, healer, and melee dps. Your goal should be creating a balanced deck that includes different roles. Click on any hero to see its skills and default role.

This is a ranged dps hero that is effective on large groups of enemies.

You can click these buttons to activate the skills of your heroes. In addition to auto-attacking, they can do special (and more effective) attacks too.

Forming a balanced desk is mandatory to use strategies: Your deck must have a tank because they have higher health points and dps characters can “hide” behind them. Your deck also must have both ranged and melee heroes as they are effective against different enemy types. Your goal is to learn the strength and weakness of every hero/unit and create the “perfect” deck.

Getting New Heroes

So, where do you get new heroes? This is the “light-gacha” part of the game. There are books you can “summon” and each one awards a different hero. The results are random of course, you can get the rarest character in the game or a worthless one.

Yeah, we got the worthless one.

However, even the “not-so-good” heroes are useful: You can use them to level up others. That is the basis of Revolve8: Keep making summons, collect all heroes, and empower them by leveling. New books can be purchased from the store in exchange for gems, which you can buy with real money or collect from quests, and you get to make a free summon every day.

The level up process.

The “book store” for making summons.

Overall, Revolve8 is really a unique strategy game: It requires no base building like similar RTS titles and still offers complex and awarding deck building strategies. It has a fairly small file size too, so it will be the perfect companion for quick-paced battles. And as always, playing it on BlueStacks brings many advantages, as we mentioned in our setup guide. Due to its unique and original mechanics, we highly recommend playing Revolve8: Join us on BlueStacks and let’s fight together!

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