Exos Heroes: How does the game look?

Exos Heroes is a Turn-Based RPG game where you work towards building the best possible team from the vast pool of heroes you can collect. You build a five character team to fill a frontline and backline force; placing heroes outside their suggested location, e.g., putting a frontline hero in your backline, will decrease the hero’s Battle Power slightly.

The game’s artistic style is Manga and the artistic genre Hybrid as it, for example, contains castles but then again also has flying Air Ships, Machines (Golems, for example), and dragons, etc.

Since this post is on the longer end, covering each aspect of Exos Heroes gameplay, you can use the table of contents to jump the parts you’re most interested in.

Character Development

There are different five tiers for heroes: common, magic, rare, legendary & fated, obviously fated are generally the best because of Fatecore (more on this later on).

Each hero has a primary element, and these elements are split into Fire, Frost, Nature, Machine, Darkness & Light. This is very much related to Guardian stone, a mechanic that protects your hero to get “break” (which means you get stunned for several turns and take more dmg). You can increase the number of stones if you are equipping fated armor. The general idea is that if your hero is, for example, a Nature element hero and you see that an enemy has a yellow stone (Nature Guardian stone), you attack the enemy, and you break the stone. (Heroes of the same element work best against heroes of that element).Then the enemy gets stunned for several turns and takes more damage during the “break.”

Level up

Leveling up your characters mainly happens by obtaining scrolls that allow you to increase XP. There are several different kinds of scrolls, some more powerful than others, but also scrolls that give more XP when used for the specific element that they are meant for. Obviously, you want to level up as high as possible as only leveling up will open new slots to wear gear, like boots, for example.

Enhance

Enhancing your character boosts its stats a bit, and you can do it with spirits of heroes. There are different kinds of spirits that grant different chances of success in enhancing, and if you fail, you get a % boost for your next enhancement, so there’s some randomness factory involved.

Transcend

Transcend means that if you have the same hero (identical), you can use that to increase your hero’s level cap with a few levels.

Bless

With Blessing, you can increase your heroes level cap quite a lot compared to Transcend, but you have to have max level character, and it has to be Enhanced to max level as well. Blessing your hero increases the grade (stars), and for lower-tier heroes, it also opens some skills as they activate at certain star levels.

Items

You have six slots for items, and you can polish them to level up them, for example, from level 1 to 10. However, you need to reforge the weapon to increase its max level after that. A bit similar to Bless I would say, and identical to Blessing, reforging also requires some resources.

Of course, there are different item rarities the same as the heroes, common, magic, rare, legendary & fated. There are also some exclusive weapons that are character related, and they grant a permanent boost for the user, even if they were never to equip it. But these can only be purchased with a vast amount of premium currency.

Fatecore

This is by far one of the most interesting things in Exos Heroes. For Fated heroes, you have the option to have Fatecore, which in essence is a new look, sort of skin that boosts your character’s stats, can change the skills quite a lot, and on top of this, lets you utilize core sharing. This means that once you equip that Fatecore for your hero, you can use core sharing on your main characters and boost their stats without even having Fatecore hero in your line-up.

Some Fatecores are purchasable with premium currency, but most of them need to be obtained from Gachas with a very low drop chance. However, summoning events slightly boosts the likelihood of summoning the specific Fatecore featured in the event.

The game has a pretty long storyline; 10 chapters around +10 episodes each of which is further prolonged by a lot of clicking through conversations, although you have the option to press “skip” to proceed. There are some animated scenes in the story, making it more fun for the player experience because there is a lot of clicking through conversations in the storyline. Nevertheless, the story provides a lot for you as a player, to have something alongside all the other things the game offers you. Please feel free to take a look at GameRefinery’s FTUE to quickly check out how Exos Heroes introduces everything and which features are introduced in which order. I will guarantee that it will save a lot of your time in your daily routines.

The map in Exos Heroes is similar to the map in The Seven Deadly Sins. Still, it allows the player to move around by steering your character around talking to strangers (which gives you rewards like energy source Levistone), entering daily challenges, moving to different areas, etc.

For example, Daily Quests are happening around this game view, where you automatically move in the right direction to complete these tasks. You can also utilize it for exploration to get XP, resources, items, and so on.

Exploration is a big part of your daily routine as you can use Liffy to explore while your game is open OR Smart Exploration, which closes the game and allows you to gather recourses & gold while being offline. One exploration costs 1 Levistone, which is your energy resource that you utilize mainly for exploration as it is the best way to collect a lot of recourses.

Daily challenges

Challenges are a big part of Exos Heroes, and the closes way to describe them would be as dungeons where players get rewards. There are several different kinds of challenges that provide you with different rewards, such as experience scrolls, spirits, etc. Daily Challenges usually have different criteria to enter based on their level. For example, you could need 3 Nature heroes, so you’re forced to level up as many characters as possible to have the best results.

There are three passes for each Challenge, and they reset daily, but you have the option to purchase five more passes each day if you need them. Challenges have different difficulty levels, and at first, you have to play through them “normally,” after which you have the quick battle option. With quick battle, you can instantly play through the Challenge using your remaining passes and collect the reward. This is possible only if the Challenge shows up as “easy” in difficulty, which means your heroes are powerful enough to “unlock” the quick battle. If they are not, you have to play through the Challenge, although to do so, you can use the repetitive battle function in Exos to repeats the challenge battle until you succeed or run out of passes. The harder the level, the better the rewards. With materials, you always want to get the best because you can always dismantle them into lower-tier materials.

Experience Sanctum

Obtain experience scrolls to level up your characters

Spirit Sanctum

Obtain materials to enhance your heroes

Hero Battle

Complete dungeons several times in a limited time to accumulate mileage to obtain specific heroes

Ancient Gold Mine

The name says it all, obtain gold

Solar Trade Route

Obtain materials for polishing items

Lunar Trade Route

Obtain materials to forge equipment

Blessing Sanctum

Obtain materials to bless heroes

Battle (PVP)

Guild war, where you can compete against other Air Squadrons

Raid

Only guild members can participate in this (AI calculated results) battle, which allows you to acquire premium currency.

Zebenstunier (PVP)

Single player PVP

Yupir’s Labyrinth

Complete various dungeons to earn rewards (uses a Levistone, the primary energy source to enter)

Holy Dragon Grounds

Battle against a strong boss, you can use up to 10 heroes and earn rewards.

Shelter of Avarice

Obtain gold and treasures that you can sell

Side Story

Allows you to battle specific heroes’ past or future stories (usually quite normal heroes that you need to upgrade for them to be useful in battles. A condition to enter a story battle might require you to have four common heroes, for example).

Embodiment of Avarice

Again an AI calculated result battle where you can get rewards; one interesting bonus is that top-ranking players will earn pets. These pets will follow you around, and you can check them in towns.

Gachas

You can utilize Xes (premium currency) when recruiting heroes and sometimes also Crystals (premium currency), and there are events where Fatecore chance is increased when hiring heroes. You have an option for one free recruitment once per 8 hours, but the central part of the game is Premium recruitment, where you can recruit one hero for 70 Xes, but for 700 Xes, you get 11 recruits plus a bonus for enhancement. To limit the pool of heroes, Exos has a type of gacha called String of Creation, where players recruit from a select pool of heroes. A short animated clip plays when you recruit new heroes. I suggest checking this out from GameRefinery’s FTUE view.

In the Airship Forge, you can craft legendary weapons and fated armor with Xes, which is the easiest way for you to obtain these powerful items. One thing to mention here is that once per month, you can use Fate Weapon Craft to craft a Fated Weapon/Armor for 2000 Xes. You can gain the required currency from Holy Dragon Grounds, for example.

Town

This is something similar to games like The Seven Deadly Sins, where you can move around town with your character but while doing so, you can’t really do much else in there aside from:

Accessing different events,
Playing Mini games,
Bet on the best top 16 PVP players’ results to earn rewards
Completing hero challenges by combining the needed combination
Collecting login rewards
or enter the PVP mode through town.

Many of the examples of these cool features that you can see below you can see better in our service from Implementation examples where they are also categorized on a feature level.

Airship

Airship plays a big role in this game. It provides you with access to the most crucial things in this game, such as managing heroes, team, inventory, Fatecore, summon gachas, armor forging, and salvaging (or creating) items & units. On top of these, you can collect your rewards daily/weekly or achievements rewards from the Diary AND check-in to collect rewards from your guild’s Air Squadron or donate resources to your guild.

You can also purchase some equipment from the Exchange and enable notification if there’s a piece of legendary equipment in stock.

Door to Creation

Door creation is a place for you to craft some materials, recruit/re-recruit heroes & reroll their Guardian Stone elements. Recruiting and rerolling heroes is a big part of Door to Creation to try and get better heroes, but also to get some XP scrolls or Levistones that will help you along the way.

As you can see from these examples, there are some event related currencies for XP scroll crafting and hero recruitment that you can obtain from exploration. On top of these, there’s also the possibility to utilize some other Challenge related currencies that you earn, e.g., from raids that you can use for weapon crafting. This gives you plenty of options as a player to try and obtain as many different guild or challenge-related events that you can use in Door to Creation.

Currencies

I’m going to cover the main currencies used in Exos Heroes to give you an overview of the game, one thing to note is that Exos Heroes uses 2 Premium Currencies in the game; Xes & Crystals.

Crystals

These are used to purchase a few Fatecores, Battle Pass, Xes, Limited time IAPs, and different packages in the game, but can more or less be used to buy anything because you can purchase other currencies with it (Gold, Xes) to buy other things.

Xes

This is the main currency used throughout the game, that you can obtain from Achievements and Daily & Weekly quests. Xes is also used for recruiting heroes & forging weapons (Gachas), but also changing your hero’s Guardian Stone element at random. This is quite important because you don’t want all your heroes to have the same Guardian Stone elements. After all, it increases the chance for you to get stunned in battles (Break). It is also important because if you want to Transcend your heroes, they all have to have the same Guardian Stone element. Xes is bought with Crystals.

Gold

It’s useful to have a lot of gold since it’s used in many ways throughout the game. For example, you need to have gold for Polishing weapons, Reforging weapons, Assembling/Disassembling materials, Blessing heroes, Transcending heroes, Enchanting Heroes. You can buy gold with Crystals, but you can mainly obtain it by selling heroes and items as well as through exploration & challenges.

Levistone

This currency is your main energy source to complete exploration to gain materials, gold, etc. It is also for fighting Golems that randomly appear on your map (which grants a lot of materials but costs a lot of Levistone) and participating in Yupir’s Labyrinth. You can buy Levistones with Xes, but you can obtain it mainly from Daily/Weekly quests & as an online time reward. Also, you can craft some of them from “Door to Creation.”

Monetization

(Gachas covered earlier in the post)

Battle Pass

Exos Pass has two levels, the free version and the premium version. There are 30 levels in the battle pass plan, and the cost is 3000 Crystals to unlock the premium version. You gain experience by completing different tasks, but you also have the option to gain a level using 80 Xes.

Paid Progression

You can purchase two different Level Up Packages that both have five stages in them. The first package costs 3000 and the second 7000 Crystals. Both of them grant you Xes, some materials, and a weapon.

Subscription Plan

There are a couple of different Subscription Plans; Xes, Xes2 (more expensive, more Xes) & experience. The cost of the Xes2 package, for example, is about 10€.

Limited time IAP offers

These offers pop up from time to time in the game, and you can purchase them with Crystals. Usually, they allow you to buy materials on top of something else. Actually, they don’t appear that often but despite that, Exos Heroes gives players the option to hide them with “Do not show anymore today.”

Progressive IAP Reward

At the moment, the “Cumulated Purchase Event” grants you prices based on how many Crystals you’ve purchased. It has seven stages where the final stage is achieved when you’ve purchased 30 000 Crystals, allowing you to recruit one of the five presented heroes. To give some reference, 10 000 Crystals does cost 99,99€.

PVP

Coliseum

In this mode, you will use random heroes in a random formation and earn rewards every time you win. All the heroes are level 90 & 6 stars (the most powerful), and you can select your combination from a randomly selected pool of heroes. You do have a manual control option for up to 5 wins, but after that, autoplay will take over.

After your opponent is decided, you have the option to change one hero. It does consume one pass when you have three losses OR 12 wins, so winning is of course rewarded 🙂 You get three passes once the event starts but only once

Air Squadron Battle

You can participate in this PVP mode once you are in an Air Squadron (guild). In Air Squadron Battle’s, you face off against three opposing teams, giving you a chance to achieve three wins. There’s a small twist in the battle mode that happens in three stages, and it’s that your surviving heroes will be healed to full hp after each battle, but if one has died, they stay dead. The opponents you face are lined based on Battle Power so that you will face a more powerful team each round. You can participate in an Air Squadron Battle once per day, and ten guild members have to be ready to participate with the guild master or deputy master having signed up by Monday actually to allow the guild to participate.

You fight against the other Air Squadron that’s selected to fight your guild in the same group, and the number of wins your guild achieves will decide the group for next week (there can be some heroes that are banned from fighting each week, so you have to take this into account when forming your team).

Zebenstunier

This is the basic one-on-one PVP mode where you battle against opponents and are matched based on your score. There are two leagues; Common & Master League, and you have to be in Master tier to enter Master League, which differs slightly in how its score calculation works because both offensive and defensive matches contribute to your score.

You have a Daily Match possibility where you can SELECT your opponent and inspect their team and Battle Power. Winning the match consumes five passes, but you don’t lose anything if you lose the match, and you can try to win a match against other randomly selected players. This Daily Match is there only for tiers under Challenger 3, helping players reach a higher rank faster. The passes that you have will recharge every hour, so one pass per one hour.

Once you reach Challenger tier 1, you unlock Tag mode in which you can create three teams giving you three rounds to fight your opponents. However, this does consume two passes, and the Tag mode only appears every other week.

To Conclude

Exos Heroes is a complex Turn-based RPG with a lot of different game modes and unique implementations that introduce many of the characters through the story of the game. I would recommend taking a further look into the game because the unique implementations and broad spectrum of gameplay features could very well provide some inspiration for your next game.

As Exos Heroes is quite complex, a full breakdown of Exos Heroes on a feature level (and many others) and seeing the various feature Implementations for the game (over a 100). Take a look at Exos’ feature deconstruction in the service. And if you’re not already a customer, schedule a call, and I’ll give you a tour of what sort of valuable data we can provide to help with your research and mobile game development 🙂