Hero Wars is a browser-based (and mobile though it works really well on browser with low overhead) free to play fantasy game. You collect heroes and upgrade them, go through a 15-chapter campaign, and have lots of other activities to do. Pretty cartoon graphics and a combat system that pretty much runs itself.

There are lots of heroes and multiple areas to improve each:

• Level up with experience
• Evolve when you collect enough shards
• Equip six items then promote
• Four skills to unlock and improve
• Different skins: each with a special bonus that you can level up
• Glyphs - not sure what that is as it requires guild membership
• Gift of the Elements - like Glyphs these bonuses come from guild membership
• Artifacts: special items you find, equip, level up

Every category has its own currency and often its own mini-game to get that currency.

The main tasks are done with a group of five heroes. Heroes are categorized by front line, mid line, back line and their role (tank, healer, mage, support, warrior, and others). In general pick a balanced team and you can do everything. Some quests require specific heroes or are tricky and you'll need a combination of heroes. And there's an Arena where you might need specific combinations to beat some teams. (One feature this game lacks is preset teams)

During combats your heroes fight automatically. They slowly generate energy for their ultimate and when full you click to activate that ultimate. But other than activating an ultimate you have no control.

As I mentioned lots of different activities besides the Campaign quests:

• Airship - Expeditions: send a team of five heroes on a timed adventure (a few minutes to a few hours), these heroes can still be used elsewhere. Expeditions are where you get Artifact materials.
• Soul Atrium: summon new heroes
• Outland: Harder quests that require specific heroes.
• Tower: Resets daily, travel up the tower defeating enemies, select tower powerups, getting tower rewards.
• Arena: PvP combat

Like any other free-to-play game they will constantly entice you to spend money. The costs seem less than other games or maybe they start out lower to hook you in. But even basic things have costs: x5 combat speed (you can do x1.5 for free) or instant win for 3-star completed quests. It means that playing this for free it's a fair slog doing quests until you run out of energy (you get a lot of energy in dailies and their promo page).

Overall I think it's a typical game for this genre with nothing that makes it significantly better than others (for example, Raid: Shadow Legends). They do advertise this game heavily everywhere and the ads do show this puzzle bit of gameplay that you only do at the end of each chapter so fifteen puzzles.