Disney Heroes: Battle Mode is a fun game in which you collect up heroes (and villains) and battle waves of enemies in a variety of fun modes. It has a wide array of characters who are divided into different roles (Tank, Damage, Control and Support) and positions within a team. This, combined with the fact the characters are all equally good but do greatly varying things, leads to a lot of strategic options in how you build your team to make it balanced and synergized.
As I said earlier, there are a great many modes. The campaign is sort of the central mode mode and tells the core story, in which our heroes try to figure out what exactly these creeps are. After completing areas in this mode you can play them again in the elite campaign, where you can get hero shards.
The more enjoyable side stories come from Friendships, a feature which forms one of the most unique and interesting parts of the game. When you level two heroes to a specific level, they unlock a Friendship. You earn points by using these heroes together, and as you progress down this path, you unlock a side story about these two characters on some kind of adventure. Along the way, they team up with a group of other heroes who join them gradually until by the end they are all fighting together. Completing this campaign gets one of the two friends a gift, or Memory Disk, granting them an additional ability of some kind. As all the heroes have their own friends and different characters join them along the way, it is important to keep all your heroes updated* as much as you reasonably can.
There is also the City Watch, a daily survival challenge in which you must try to defeat a series of enemies while sustaining damage and KOed heroes from previous rounds. Each time you win, you get tickets to skip the city watch on a later day and still get the rewards, as sometimes you don’t have the time to do a whole city watch.
And there’s also the Creep Surge, another daily mode where each member of a guild can only use each hero once. As above, it is important to keep all your heroes updated* so they can help out in this mode.
And there’s also the Coliseum, a mode where you use fifteen heroes at once! There’s a leaderboard, and if you defeat someone above you, you move up to their spot. Stay in the top five for long enough, and you get a big bonus in various resources, including Coliseum tokens (more on these later)
There’s also the Arena, which is like an earlier-unlocked demo mode of the Coliseum, but it only uses five characters like normal battles. Kind of a weaker filler mode, can’t really see this being anyone’s favourite, but if it is, just you enjoy it.
There is also the Heist, in which five of your heroes and up to twenty other heroes try to protect a variety of valuables from a sneaky thief. Battles in this mode start with only one character, who must call others to their aid and hold out until their friends get there, requiring clever placement of characters. Sometimes some of the other heroes that arrive don’t move on their own, requiring the player to get creative in using these characters to their advantage.
And lastly among the modes (for now), there is the Guild War, in which your characters can be arranged in cars. I haven’t played this mode yet, but it looks fun.
Heroes (and villains) can be upgraded in a number of ways. There are badges, badge upgrades, stars, levels and discs to think about, so upgrading all your characters can be a challenge, sort of like a prioritisation deal. First priority should be to your new heroes to catch them up to the veterans, then to the guys who are needed in Friend Campaigns (especially in the levels department) , and then to your lowest heroes so you don’t feel like they’re not living up to their potential. In this way, all your heroes are pretty strong. There is also a radical, controversial method in which you improve your characters who are already the strongest, and this method could have merit as it would allow you to progress further into the main campaign quicker. Whatever the method, just remember, the strongest hero es is your favourite one and if that isn’t your experience then you just haven’t found them the right teammates yet
*Even Mike Wazowski. I know it’s tempting to leave him as an unupgraded white joke character because it seemed funny at the time, but one day you will need him to help on the Quorra/Eve friendship mission, and then you realise that this joke was in fact one you played on yourself, and now you must live with the punchline