What Heroll is, and why I have reviewed it twice
Heroll fuses a regular dice board game with a dungeon crawler. You roll, you move around a loop of tiles, you fight whatever happens to be standing on the one you landed on, and eventually you reach the boss sitting at the end of the board. I covered it back in July and thought it was one of the better things on mobile that month. At the end of August I made a second video saying the ads had wrecked it.
Both videos are still up. Going by the comments, both of them are also accurate, depending on who is holding the phone.
The dice part, which is still good
Tiles come in good, bad and neutral. Step on one and it clears, and whatever buildings sit next to it get upgraded, so when you loop back round to that spot later it pays out more. That compounding is what kept me going. The rest will be familiar if you have played any RPG at all: kill things, pick up gear, spend money in shops, get stronger, then go and lose to the boss on the final wave a few times before you finally don’t.
The bosses really are hard, which I appreciated. The one comment I got on that first video was somebody saying the shopkeeper was what hooked them, which was not the reaction I expected to a game about dice, but having gone back to it I sort of see it.
Randomness runs through all of it. The board, the encounters, the gear that drops, whatever the shop happens to have in stock that run. Sometimes everything falls apart because of one roll and there was nothing you could have done about it. Normally that sort of thing annoys me more than it did here, probably because a run is short enough that starting another one costs you nothing much.
Heroll screenshots
The ads that turned up in August
In that first video I said I had not seen a single ad in the whole session. There were optional ones, watch this and get more loot, but nothing was ever pushed on me. For a free mobile game that was the best thing I could say about it.
Coming back to it later I got something else. Tap to start a stage, sit through an ad, then play. Finish the match, sit through another one. Runs being as short as they are, the ratio goes bad fast, and I was spending more time looking at advertising than at the actual board. Underneath all that the game seemed completely untouched, which somehow made it more irritating rather than less.
Then I read the comments
I went through all 28 comments on that second video expecting people to agree with me. Most of them did not.
“I’ve never got an ad and I play for hours at a time” was the top one, sitting at 74 likes. Under that, someone who had been playing over two weeks and nearly finished the campaign without a single forced ad. Someone else still playing in March 2026 and still not getting any. Plenty of people pointing out that the only ads they ever see are the optional ones for bonuses.
A few did back me up. One said the ads showed up with an update. Another said theirs started on day three. Two mentioned buying a one-time VIP unlock, about ten dollars, which got rid of them completely.
A couple of people went past disagreeing. One reply was just the word “Liar”. Someone else called the channel incompetent for not getting its main argument right, which stung a bit even though I get it, because if your Heroll has never once forced an ad on you then my video does look like nonsense.
I do not think anyone in that thread is making things up, though. Their game is behaving differently to mine.
Nobody knows what sets it off, including me
Honestly, I have no idea what the trigger is.
My best guess is playtime. The ads never appeared on a fresh start for me, only after I had put a fair few hours in, and that commenter whose ads began on day three points the same way. Leaving new players alone until the game has its hooks in properly is exactly what I would do if I were the one trying to make money from it.
Region would explain it just as well, though. Ad fill rates are wildly different from country to country, and a game with something to show you in one market might have nothing to serve in another. Could be an A/B test. Could be the update rolling out unevenly and some people still sitting on an older build. I would not want to bet money on any of them.
What I can point at is the Google Play listing, which says “Contains ads” in black and white, and puts in-app purchases anywhere from $0.99 to $119.99 an item.
Should you install it?
Probably, though with more hesitation than I would normally have.
Left alone, the ad policy would not be an issue at all and this would be a straight recommendation, because the dice loop is good and there is not much else on mobile doing this particular mix. The trouble is I have no way of knowing which version you are going to end up with. Nobody in that comment thread does either, and I doubt anyone outside the studio does. So it sits at maybe.
It is free, so you can find out for yourself in about ten minutes. Best case, the ads never bother you and you have got one of the better mobile roguelikes going. Worst case they start turning up before every match, and at least then you know it is not your phone playing up. The VIP unlock seems to be the only thing anyone has found that reliably switches them off, which is not much of an answer, but it is the one that exists.
The original review, before any of this
Here is the July video, for the version of Heroll that nobody was complaining about yet.
