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Single player fantasy arena combat. Except not as fun or exciting as that sounds.

Call for Heroes: Pompolic Wars is a third-person fantasy-themed action game consisting of a series of contained levels, or arenas of sorts. Your job, playing as either the Warrior or the Amazon, is to defeat the titular demon Pompolic by... collecting Dark Souls. Which are just sitting around, waiting to be collected. When you find them all it activates the teleporter, which you use to warp to the next level. And so on. In between you and the Dark Souls are an assortment of baddies, dispatchable using one of eight weapons (which you must find and collect to use), or magic (one spell cast allowed per corresponding 'icon' collected). Oh, and nabbing 50 coins allows you to activate God Mode. Whu?

Quotix is apparently trying to compete with the big boys when it comes to eye candy. At least, that's what the plethora of graphics options and corresponding performance hits suggest. With a GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, I had to set everything to the minimum to get acceptable (30) fps with more than a couple enemies on screen. An ATI Radeon X1800 XT delivered good performance with most settings cranked up, but I doubt the average gamer is going to buy a $200+ video card to play a $20 budget title.

Besides, I'm not exactly sure where all that computing power is going. The visible difference between minimum and maximum visual settings is not that big, in my opinion. It's certainly not going to AI, because Quotix stuck with a basic "spawn and swarm" strategy. When you get close enough to a particular area, enemies appear out of thin air and make a beeline right for you. My first few attempts were using the Warrior, but with no idea what number or bar represented my health, death was frequent.