Heroes of Kalevala is an unusual game and a port of a game available on other platforms.  Think of it as a cross between a simulation game like Virtual Villagers combined with a match-three game like Bejeweled.  The music and graphics, as the YouTube trailer shows, are of high quality.  The coins that you earn playing the match-three game can be used to purchase items in the village-building part of the game.

At $2.99 (the iPad version is $4.99), the game consists of 8 different heroes to choose from in order to lead your village through the 140 levels.  The story line though isn’t just mission based though.  Once you complete the game, you can continue to play to build your village even further.

While the game play on the match-three part of the game was simple, I really appreciate some of the game elements that were added.  Your goal to complete a level is to match up groups so that the background of all the different matches in the game turn to the same color.  In other words, it isn’t just pieces that you are matching up, but you are also trying to make sure that the locations of all the pieces ultimately are involved in a match-up.  This is aided by bombs and other power-ups that you are awarded as you play the game.

If I could make two suggestions for the game, it would be to possibly drop the price down to the $1.99 price point, which would make it a much better bargain and better competition to the free and $1 games out there, and that the items that you match in the match-three part of the game were tied a little bit better to the other part of the game.  There were times that I thought there was a disconnect between the graphics used on the two different parts of the game that made it seem more like two different games than two components of the same game.  This is a small thing, but I also wish the text on the story screens appeared immediately on each screen and not half-way through the voice-over that was reading the story lines.