• Price: $6.99 USD (currently on sale for $5.59 until May 26th)
• Developer/Publisher: Sometimes You
• Release Date: May 25, 2022

A review code was kindly provided by Sometimes You. We thank them for being able to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

The superhero genre has become even more popular since the Marvel Cinematic Universe came on the scene in 2008. We all love to watch good triumph over evil (and the sweet superpowers and costumes certainly add to the appeal). What we don’t tend to see as much is the public relations aspect of the superhero world. In Amazing Superhero Squad, your heroes quite literally mean business.

In the game, you’ll control your own squad of superheroes in a corporate simulation setting. Missions will appear on screen, and you’ll need to choose the right hero(es) for the job. You start out with a few heroic employees, who each have their own elemental affinity that will help them succeed on specific missions. Each hero you hire will also have traits that impact missions, such as an increase or decrease in company share prices, followers on social media, income from the mission, and more. Some heroes will have higher chances of success if they go alone, while others perform better in groups.

It seemed like one of the heroes had a depressive episode of some sort almost every day, which decreases your manpower for the day. You then have to send another one of your squad to comfort them and bring them back, leaving you understaffed by two people. This was inconvenient for when certain kinds of heroes were needed for a mission – one mission may require a “pretty face,” but if they’re taking a well-deserved mental health day off and none of the hiring options fit the bill, you’re out of luck. There were missions that didn’t allow me to select a hero if they wouldn’t satisfy the mission requirements. I was unable to attend a mandatory press conference because none of the employees would work for it, so my funds and reputation took a hit.

You can only keep 5 employees at a time, and if you need a hero from the “employment agency” roster, you’ll have to dismiss a hero on your team and pay the new hero what seemed like a fairly high amount of money in order to hire them. There was a point where I was getting more than 5 missions on the screen per day, and it didn’t seem like you could re-assign heroes who already were on a mission. This meant that if a priority mission appeared after I’d already assigned heroes to other missions, I would likely be unable to complete that mission if the hero(es) left didn’t meet the requirements.

Unfortunately, you can’t level up your heroes or improve them in any way. Their skill sets remain the same, which was disappointing for a simulation game like this. Sometimes a superhero ends up dying for no apparent reason after a mission and your pool of hiring candidates becomes even smaller.

The game has you managing missions every day over a twelve hour period. Missions will appear every few hours, and you can speed up time to make the process faster. There’s a small sort of plot to the game where you try to find out who is committing corporate espionage, and you can hire a detective to help you with that. Using the detective option also frees up a superhero for other missions. (It might have been nice to be able to contract out other superheroes when your squad is out and additional missions appear.) You can – and should – read the detective’s findings under the reports section to help you find the traitor. The superhero corporation you manage also seems to have its own version of J. Jonah Jameson to criticize your heroes.

If the budget, company share prices, relationship with the government, or your followers hit zero, it’s game over. Unfortunately, once you reach a certain level for your followers and share prices, it won’t increase anymore, so you can’t make it so you have a “cushion” to fall back on for those stats should you have a bad day. If you identify the wrong person as the culprit behind a plot, it also may cause a game over. It felt way too easy to reach that point, as I was confused about what caused mission failures that decreased any of those meters.

You can’t make any manual saves to reload when you inevitably fail the overall mission – there are saves for entire weeks but not for individual days, and there’s not a way to save at a specific time on a specific day either. I did appreciate that when I messed up one week, it just restarted that week instead of sending me all the way to the beginning of the game.

The gameplay is both easy and difficult, if that makes sense. It was easy to hire and dismiss heroes and assign them to jobs. But it was made difficult by the addition of heroes’ traits; even assigning a hero with the elemental affinity corresponding to a mission’s requirements doesn’t seem to be enough sometimes. As I mentioned above, there are other traits each hero possesses that may impact the mission’s odds of success. However, it was unclear how those traits would impact the success of a mission; I understood that some traits would impact post-mission aspects like public image and company shares. But which combination of elements and traits would work best for a mission’s success was not easily understood. Heroes that performed better with companions were out of luck most of the time, as I was usually not allowed to assign a second hero to a mission.

While the management aspects needed a little more explanation, I really liked the art and the music for Amazing Superhero Squad. I thought that the art style was well suited for a comic superhero game like this, and the music was upbeat and seemed to match the fairly fast paced mission management.

I also appreciated the background information provided in the guide. You can find out more about the heroes and the citizens mentioned in the mission reports there. They clearly put a lot of effort into fleshing out the world of Amazing Superhero Squad.

Switch it ON or Switch it OFF? Amazing Superhero Squad had the potential to be “super,” but a limit on the number of active employees, an inability to improve heroes’ skill sets, and a lack of a more expansive tutorial prevent it from playing in the big leagues. However, the excellent art, music, and attention to background details are definitely the game’s superpowers. It’s an interesting game with its attempt at a plot, and I think that it would be cool to see a sequel with expanded and improved gameplay! 6/10