Reviewer's Choice: Partial Recommendation
Rating: 4/5 stars
To be honest, it's difficult to tell exactly what Hearthstone is really like as a game. The basic idea is that it's a virtual version of a Trading Card Game where players collect cards and use the cards to play games. You select one of 9 character classes (you start with Jaina Proudmoore, the Mage, but unlock new classes when you beat them) and fight a battle using cards, like Battlecry cards that do something when you play them, Minions that fight for you, and your Hero Power specific to your character class.
The game is branded as a "strategy" game and fortunately, unlike Clash of Clans or Dungeon Keeper, it actually has quite a bit of strategy in it, like what cards you place and how you save up your mana crystals (you need a certain amount to play each card). The game is quite fast-paced and actually FUN. You can play on your own against an NPC called the Innkeeper to practice your skills and play the different classes, or you can play in multiplayer against other players in either Casual or Ranked mode.
As I mentioned before, quite a lot of cards are called Minions and they do the fighting for you. Each minion has a set amount of health and damage, and you can either use your minions to directly attack the other hero, depleting their health, or attack their minions to limit the amount of damage they can do to you. The majority of minions cannot attack the turn they're played (with the exception of "Charge" minions that can attack immediately) so you have to wait a turn before you can use them so you have to time the right moment to deploy your minions.
The whole concept of the game is quite simple: deplete all your opponent's health before he depletes all of yours. However the game can get much more complicated than "3 damage. 2 damage. I win. I lose 2 health. You hit for 2 damage. You lose." There are "Taunt" minions that have to be attacked first, minions that increase the strength of your other minions, special powers that allow you to damage your hero directly without using minions, and all that kind of stuff.
As to my first sentence, the reason why it's difficult to tell what it's like is because it's a fun game, but it still has in-app purchases.
If you want to get new cards (apart from your starter deck and a few bonus cards you get when you unlock a new class) you have to either complete quests to earn gold to buy packs, or pay real money. It isn't really a MASSIVE problem at first glance, especially in single player, but players can still buy their way to the top with enough money.
Personally, I think in this game skill can usually get you more or less as far as money. There are people who spend a moderate amount of money on in-app purchases, like £6.99, but there are some crazy "whales" who are really big losers who are bad at strategy, but they pay ridiculous amounts of money (we're talking the thousands, tens of thousands of pounds) on a game that was FREE in the first place. Those whales pay their 5000-odd pounds to get to the top of the leaderboard to make themselves feel like winners when they are actually big losers who have nothing better to spend their money on than to stop looking like a loser at first glance, only for the £5000 to buy them even worse resentment as fake winners. If there's one thing worse than a real loser, it's a fake winner who basically cheated for an extremely unfair advantage to win.
Overall, I think this game would be better without the unfair advantages to the massive whales, but the game's concept is still quite good in itself so I'm giving it 4 stars.