Heroes of the Dark
About the game
Heroes of the Dark is Gameloft's strategy-RPG hero collector, set in Tenebris—a gothic, Victorian-flavored world where the Moon has been destroyed and order has collapsed. Vampires, werewolves and humans, enemies for centuries, must set their feuds aside to face the High Council and Albus, the Vampire Emperor. Its hook isn't only combat, it's rebuilding. You can get to know it on Gameloft's official site.
The mansion and your squads
The core of the game is a mansion you reclaim and expand room by room: each room unlocks resource production, upgrades or new features, so there's a constant management layer beneath the fighting. Alongside it you recruit heroes from three races—vampires, lycans and humans—across six classes, level them up and build squads of five for real-time 5v5 battles. The trick is combining classes and race synergies, not just stacking your strongest units.
Campaign, PvP and alliance life
There's a PvE campaign that threads the story of Tenebris together, plus higher-difficulty modes for the endgame, and PvP where you take on other players' squads. On top of that sits the social layer: you join alliances and guilds to coordinate dungeon raids and fight over resources and territory. It's in that coordination—who hits what, how the loot gets split—that the game asks for more thinking than reflexes.
Business model: what you pay for and what you don't
It's free-to-play, with no upfront price or subscription: you download and play it for free on mobile (App Store, Google Play, Microsoft and Samsung Store) and on PC via Steam, with the same purchase model across platforms. Progression revolves around gacha-style hero summons, alongside resource packs, premium currencies and event passes. Spending is optional, but it's worth knowing what you're signing up for: pull rates for the best heroes are low, and without paying the pace is slow. Plenty of reviews call it a hard paywall outright.
Current state: alive and updated
The game is live and actively operated. It launched on mobile on October 28, 2021 and reached Steam on April 6, 2022, and it's still supported in 2026 (active help center and store presence). Gameloft keeps it going with frequent updates, roughly every two weeks, adding new heroes (like Edison Markoni in Update 10), modes—hard-difficulty campaign, for one—events and balance tweaks. This isn't a finished game left to sit: content keeps coming.
Who it's for (and who it isn't)
It'll click with anyone who enjoys long-haul collecting and management: building up the mansion, hunting class and race synergies, and living the alliance life. The gothic setting and presentation were what critics praised most. On the other side, if grind or aggressive monetization puts you off, this isn't your game: on Steam it sits around 57% positive reviews, and those complaints almost always point to the same things—how slowly you progress without paying and how harsh the gacha rates are. As a dark-fantasy free-to-play collector it has a real identity of its own; as a time investment, go in knowing that patience (or your wallet) is part of the deal.