Is Heroes & Empires free to play?

Heroes & Empires is a mobile strategy game that combines RPG elements with the tactics of auto chess. It has an idle RPG system where you can collect over 70 heroes from different classes and races and set them training to defeat evil even when you’re not playing the game.

The gameplay is set up for you to combine the formation of your team of heroes with synergies and tactics that will help unlock bonuses. These will help you crush enemies more efficiently than previous weapons, build castles that will serve as a base for your team to live and train, collect materials from battles to craft even powerful items, and compete in multiplayer clan battles to reach the top of the leaderboards for the best rewards at the end of every season.

This begs the question: Is Heroes & Empires free to play? Unfortunately, the answer is no. It’s a play-to-earn game with cryptocurrency elements embedded in it. In other words, it’s a non-fungible token (NFT) game.

An NFT is a non-interchangeable piece of data (hence the term “non-fungible”) that can be stored in a digital ledger, called a blockchain, to be traded and sold on digital markets. NFT can represent easily-reproduced items, such as photos, art, and music, and uses blockchain technology to establish verified proof that you own that piece of data.

In the case of games like Heroes & Empires, NFTs allow users to control in-game assets like land plots and trade them on third-party marketplaces without permission from the game developer. This is because the game is made by a group of players who play games to earn cryptocurrency rewards instead of a regular game company that otherwise wouldn’t put cryptocurrency elements into the program due to the significant harm NFTs inflict on the environment.

Heroes & Empires releases on December 13 on iOS and Android devices.