We have long lamented the fact that one of our all-time favorite Xbox Live Arcade games, Castle Crashers, has absolutely no presence in the iTunes App Store. While Battleheart has completely different developers, and some significant gameplay differences to boot, it does an excellent job of capturing much of what made Castle Crashers great.

Immediately upon seeing the graphics in Battleheart, the similarity to Castle Crashers is obvious, with four big-headed fantasy characters fighting orcs, magicians, ogres and anything else you might have read about in a fantasy novel. Unlike Castle Crashers, however, which is a multiplayer brawler, Battleheart is a single player game, in which users control all four units simultaneously.

Though this sounds complicated, and often is in other action/real-time-strategy hybrids, Battleheart handles the job extremely well. Every unit has an auto-attack function, or in the case of the Cleric, an auto-heal. Using the touchscreen, gamers simply drag from one unit to the desired target, which will cause them to attack repeatedly until the unit is defeated. With this intuitive gameplay mechanic, users can quickly and easily give independent orders to each of their units.

To keep things interesting, each unit type has their own special abilities, including special attacks, stat-boosts and even mass heals. With the built-in class differences, including varying speeds, attack and defense values, as well as the special attacks, it pays to build a party of varying unit types, or even cater your group to a specific level that's giving you trouble.

Like many fantasy-based action games, Battleheart includes some light roleplaying elements, with experience gained in battle being used to level up individual units. Every five levels, units can learn a new special ability, including passive abilities, which give constant benefit to your units. Additionally, gamers can spend their plunder on new weapons, armor and items, or pay to upgrade their existing gear.

While the roleplaying elements listed above are welcome, and go a long way toward keeping gameplay varied and exciting, they unfortunately just don't go far enough. Things like weapons with varying abilities and armor that guards against certain types of attacks are RPG standards, but they are missing from Battleheart. And while the special abilities in the game are great to unlock and use, five levels is a long time to go without being able to upgrade a character in any significant way.

While the actual melees in Battleheart are a blast to play through, and necessitate increasingly deep strategies to win, outside of the battles, the game could use some work. For starters, the store from which you can buy new gear and items stocks itself randomly after every battle. So, if you see something that you want but don't have enough money, there's no telling when it will pop up again and give you the opportunity to buy it. Making things even worse is that the shops frequently stock duplicates of the same item, frustrating when you do not even want one of them.

Battleheart gives users the ability to recruit new units at the Tavern, and swap them in and out for existing ones at the Keep. This is a great idea, and a fun way to keep gameplay fresh, but there is a serious problem in the execution. Unlike the game's store, the units stocked in the Tavern remain after each battle, and once it is full, no new units are added unless you purchase one. This means that if you are waiting for, say, an additional Barbarian to pop up, you need to buy units you don't even want to get access to one. Even worse, is that if you leave the same units in the Tavern they end up being of far too low a level to be of any real help, necessitating that you go back and grind through earlier levels to get them up to speed.

While the above are the main issues with Battleheart, the game also suffers from a few other problems. First is the lack of any multiplayer capabilities, either cooperative or head-to-head. This does not kill the game dead in the water, but it would have been a nice feature to incorporate. Second is the difficulty that comes with selecting one of many small units cramped into a tiny place. While this is not an uncommon problem with iPhone games, here it could have been simply rectified with a series of four buttons along the side of the screen, which would select one of your active characters when pressed.

While Battleheart certainly has its problems, none of them are serious failures, and all of them could be repaired in future updates of the game. If you are a fan of games like Castle Crashers or other brawlers, Battleheart does an excellent job of bringing that experience to the iPhone, and is certainly worth your $2.99.

Final Score: B-