The upcoming mobile game Champs: Battlegrounds wants to challenge the idea that "mobile" is a dirty word to hardcore gamers. The free-to-play title by Quark Games hopes to attract gaming audiences traditionally turned off by mobile games with its competitive, real-time battle system.

Champs: Battlegrounds, which is coming this month to both iOS and Android, represents a hybrid of several real-time strategy game features. Each player must manage an army of characters (a.k.a. "champs") to take down either an AI army or an online opponent.

Champs fight on a map with a grid overlay, and players assign each champ movements, attacks or spells. Each champ has an energy meter that limits the number of actions taken at once, so players must manage their entire armies carefully to allow meters to refill.

Champs: Battlegrounds features dynamic maps that offer advantages to players based on terrain elevation and power tiles, which boost a champ's ability to cast spells.

Champs come in several classes, including melee-fighters, spellcasters and support characters; they all pull from the game's fantasy setting. Players can unlock characters as they progress through the game and earn in-game currency or buy them outright. While many of the champs are more traditional human characters, players can also opt to play as some unique critters, like the Wilders, which look like the cartoon cousins of rabbits. Players can upgrade their champs to new classes as they advance in experience.

Character-purchase models have been successful for some PC-based free-to-play games, though Shawn Foust, vice president of game design at Quark Games, said the company is taking a risk bringing this model to mobile.

"Hardcore gamers are wary of mobile, and don't seem convinced there are good games there," Foust said. "And there aren't a lot of games there that satisfy what they want, because designers assume there isn't an audience."

Foust hopes the challenging aspects of Champs: Battlegrounds will attract those gamers to a mobile platform. Its big feature to help it compete with PC or console gaming will be a matchmaking system that can accurately pair players based on skill and army build, which Foust said is key to getting people to come back.

He described the gameplay as easy to pick up, but said the campaign mode will quickly toss in new challenges to test a player's skill.

"It definitely is for players who like a challenge," Foust said. "The last levels of the campaign can be pretty brutal."

Image courtesy of Quark Games