There’s no question that while many indie games are built on new ideas or unexpected combinations of elements, many are simply variations on existing properties. While that could potentially give the new game some built-in appeal and familiarity, the risk that is run is that you’ll fail to reach the same level of polish or quality, and that you’re simply re-skinning the basic experience rather than enhancing it. Given the iconic quality of Plants Versus Zombies, and its pretty recent release on the Nintendo Switch, Heroes Battle Awakening absolutely takes a beating, and fails to establish much of a value proposition in the process.

Played as a semi-casual top-down strategy game, similarly to PvZ is very similar to tower defense in many regards, but using lanes instead of winding paths that you’ll need to defend. Rather than using a variety of plants as your means of defense, you’ll instead have monsters to work with. Gameplay will mostly revolve around trying to grab coins that will randomly appear, using them to pay for units that will either drop resources themselves, or give you a variety of defensive benefits. The trick, the further you go along, will be knowing how best to both use and even arrange those units, being sure to sufficiently defend each lane, and to diversify what you place to avoid having any vulnerabilities.

The problem here is really that when you take on gameplay that is so similar to that of an icon, you really need to bring your “A” game.. and this is coming in at a middling “E” at best. From the angle of performance there’s a sluggishness to your movement and controls, and in a game where every moment can matter that’s absolutely an aggravation. In terms of creativity it’s also no contest. Not only are the base designs of the various units lackluster overall, they’re also devoid of any real personality, an element that PvZ unfortunately excelled at. Finally, I’m not even sure the depth of strategy or fun manages to come close to meeting the standard of its competition, let alone do anything to exceed it, making this an even tougher sell. Lacking any measurable edge, outside of perhaps its price point, Awakening fails to justify more than a cursory look, and in the end it suffers from merely managing to be dull.