The game definitely manages to emulate a comic book feel. Play is fast, streamlined and lots of fun. The rules evoke the games of the 80's (Golden Heroes, V&V, Champions, TSR's Marvel FASERIP) but are easy to learn and work really well. There is no padding. The layout is logical, easy to read and well-organised. Artwork is good.

The game allows you to play characters of power levels roughly equal to the X-Men, Marvel and DC's best street-level heroes, the Avengers and the Fantastic Four. The main level appears to be around X-Men level / Teen Titans level, unsurprisingly, as this is an 80's Supers game.

The random character generation is one of the best random generators I've seen, which allows you 'flip-flop' rolls, (e.g. a roll of 71 can also be taken as 17), and you can also choose what table of powers/skills to use after the rolls are made, if you wish. This allows truly random characters but with your own influence in the process, if you want it. It's so flexible, you can choose to play a Brick, Vigilante, Blaster etc. before you roll, and know you have enough wiggle-room to mold those random rolls to your liking. It's the first random character generator Ive seen to allow you to play the type of character you want.

You begin the game with a starting character at level 1 (or a higher one if you want), and you take your hero on a journey during which they increase in ability, training and experience. The lowest level is 1: New Face and the highest is 10: Living Legend. These levels also affect how well you are recognised and can also influence certain rolls elsewhere. Experience is gained with Victory Points, which accumulate and level-up your characters, allowing them extra points of abilities, skills or improved powers.

There is a Luck mechanic, that the GM (Editor) can use to simulate the whims of fate, which reminds me of the Marvel Saga 'Aura' reading. For example, if you are escaping a collapsing building and it's quite likely it's going to fall down at any second, the GM (Editor) rolls on the Luck table to see what happens. It's a great tool for general use and opens up more creative options. Any character with Probability powers can also influence this table, which is a neat mechanic.

Apart from the default genre setting of the 80's, other genre rules are included for Four-Colour or Gritty campaigns. Altogether, this is a wonderfully playable and fun supers game, which echoes the classic games of the 80s, but plays with an uncluttered and modern sensibility. A keeper. Five stars.

Amazing Heroes is a deceptively powerful and deep RPG that on first look, appears simple (and it is) but in fact it has a lot more to offer beneath its surface.

The game is a rules-light narrative RPG that is easy to play and takes very little setting up.

This game is a lot of fun, quick to learn, fast character generation and a perfect toolbox/sandbox to expand upon with your own custom rules or added depth if you want it – and if you don't, it's a perfect quick pick-me-up for your Supers roleplaying fun.

Character generation is very light and simple. There are no lists of powers, but you don't need them as you'll see. This in fact offers unlimited freedom in creating any character you want. If you want a power like 'Master of The Seven Seas', or 'World's Greatest Marksman', you can have it. Assign a die to it, explain what it does and away you go.

The game uses a D6, D8, D10 and D12. Each die represents a level of power or skill, all of which are determined by the players and the GM. The players in collaboration with the GM, discuss the scale of play and assign values to those dice to create their own benchmarks. You can in effect, run any kind of campaign with these rules (not just supers) since you and your players decide the scope and scale of what those die ratings mean. 'Occupations' are similar - these represent skill sets or specific skills - it's up to you. Assign a D6 to D12 and you're done.

For my Supers campaign I referenced the benchmarks from the Marvel Heroic RPG (the Cortex-based Marvel RPG) and then fine-tuned it. In fact, if you are familiar with Cortex Prime, you can adapt it into Amazing Heroes for a light and streamlined alternative.

The core mechanic is a simple but powerful narrative tool.

You roll the relevant die against a difficulty, whether a task or against an adversary. If you roll a 1 or a 2 you suffer a 'Condition'. Conditions are similar to FATE Aspects. They can be literally anything. If you suffer the exact same Condition again, it gains the 'Really' prefix and you gain a -1 penalty to all further rolls. If you suffer that same condition a third time you become 'Hurt'. If you suffer three 'Hurt' conditions, you are taken out of play, K.O. humiliated, dead etc. It's possible to have multiple Conditions at once, like Exhausted, Really Scorched, Really Bruised, Confused, Humilated, and so on.

If you roll and fail the check, you can fail normally but the GM can also 'Escalate' things with added events or twists happening in the scene. There is world of narrative possiblity here and Escalations add to the drama and action enormously.

Failing a roll with a 1 or 2 means that that the Condition can be literally anything, but it affects you: You suffer a counter-attack, you are shaken, disturbed, become humiliated, uncertain, unfocused, distracted and so on. Characters can also suffer conditions like 'Reckless', 'Crude, Unfeeling' etc, that will impact them socially or on the media etc. Literally, anything is possible.

Failing a roll that is not a 1 or 2 but a fail, means the situation can Escalate and something as a result of the scene, gets worse or more interesting: you stop the fuel truck but it tears, leaks fuel and catches fire.

The way that things develop and escalate from rolling a 1 or 2 or failing the roll will keep any scene dynamic with evolving options and developments.

The system is so adaptable and light, I literally created an afternoon's worth of play just by bullet-pointing some scenario ideas and statting the adversaries, which is an incredibly easy and rewarding experience. There are rules for mobs and mooks which work great.

If something isn't in the book, you can easily stat it up, make a rule etc. and it works great within the game. If you want more depth of crunch, I think it's a true RPG Sandbox, and any GM will easily be able to expand it in many ways beyond its default state - which is a great streamlined, fast RPG that's a lot of fun to play.

ERRATA : In the PDF version there are a couple of errors - a line of text is repeated on page 21 ('If a hero gains the same condition a second time it') and also there is broken text stretched across an image on page 76 near the character's head. Update please Martin !

Five stars without hesitation. An amazing game.

Example of Play:

In a game I ran with Iron Man fighting an armed gang of bank robbers in mid-town Manhattan, the player fired his Repulsors D8 into the robbers (difficulty 4+) as they fled the bank and rolled a 1 which gave Iron Man a Condition. Not only did he miss, he destroyed part of the bank's entrance. This gave him a 'Reckless' Condition.

He then fired rockets at them just as they ran behind cover and rolled a 2. This blew out more public property and he got the 'Really Reckless' Condition. Bystanders were filming him on their phones and it was across social media in minutes. The player then decided to use fists, and knocked out the robbers easily in two rounds. The player then stated he'd use fists in future, when fighting in built-up areas, and leave the weapons systems for open areas.

The 'Really Reckless' condition wasn't removed after the scene, and the story of 'Stark's Recklessness' ran on media through the day. The player decided to have Tony Stark go on TV and offer to repair all the damage and reimburse anyone affected. He rolled his Billionaire Playboy D8 Occupation and got a 6 against a difficulty of 4+, succeeding. This reduced it to 'Reckless', The media then ran the story for a few more days until Stark did a brief PR campaign to clean things up.

All this from failing two combat rolls.

EDIT: Hi Martin, - I just downloaded the PDF and those errors haven't been fixed.

Simply the best mid-crunch Supers RPG I've ever seen in 37 years of roleplaying

As said in other reviews, it does hit a sweet spot between ICONS and Champions. It's got as much depth and detail as Mutants & Masterminds and the detail of deep character creation but without being bogged-down by number-crunching.

The narrative style is deep, creative and easy, but if you want a more traditional system of determining success in rolls, it has that option too.

Speaking of options, it also has gritty realism rules if you want a darker setting than that of it's default four-colour world.

The layout, graphics, design, writing and art is first-class and upon thorough reading, there are no apparent typos or errors.

It's also a testament to how robust and well-designed this game is, that when I converted DC and Marvel characters from other game systems, they exactly fell within the appropriate Power Levels (Street, Low Level, Standard. High Level, Legendary or Iconic) with Superman at 226 points (Iconic) Wonder Woman at 175 points (Legendary ) and Spider-Man at 107 points (Low Level)

A thoroughly top-class, beautiful and deep super hero roleplaying game.

In my opinion, this is the best supporting supplement for any games system I’ve seen this year. The production qualities on this book are outstanding, from the writing, to the new game mechanics and the content. There is nothing in this book that is expendable or useless. It’s a feast.

It has all the material you could ever want from the new and classic series about Time Travel, Temporal Physics, Gallifrey and Time Lords. It’s packed with detailed rules, new traits and info for dealing with regeneration, Time Travel and creating Timelords, TARDISes and more. The new rules will greatly please those who wanted more crunch and while they expand the usual lighter rules, they don’t add any unnecessary complexity.

With this book you can: -Create Time Lords (Pre and Post Time War) from any of the chapters (Prydonians, Arcalians, Patrexes, etc.). Any Time Lords seen on the series (new and classic) can be created as well as other classes like the Shobogans or plebeians.

-Create a TARDIS. New traits and all sorts of TARDIS goodies are covered along with very detailed sheets for TARDIS operation. These will satisfy the most fervent of TARDIS fans who want to pilot one in the game. All TARDIS systems are covered with game mechanics for operation and damage.

Some really nice touches: It includes stats for Renegade Timelords such as The War Chief (The War Games), Morbius, Omega and two versions of the Master (dying 13th incarnation and the insane John Simm version). Even if you won’t be using these characters, they give excellent examples and benchmarks as a starting point for your own villains and supporting characters.

The Time War and the whole of Gallifreyan history is covered and there’s a section for creating Time War weapons of cosmic-levels of nastiness. These are suitably huge enough to provide seeds for epic adventures or campaigns.

The parts on Time Travel and Temporal physics also provide tons of campaign or plot seeds in themselves. Most (if not all) of the stuff and devices from the classic and new series are covered in great detail with game mechanics for Time Loops, Chronic Hysteresis and lots more. ‘Expert Cards’ are also provided for a GM to give to Time Lord players with all the pertinent info on them. If you want to put someone or some thing in a Time Loop on the fly, this will tell you how to do it, the difficulty, how many Story Points it will cost and so on. In short, this section will let you do Time Lord magic.

This book is going to greatly expand your creative powers as a GM, as a player of a Time Lord and really enhance your game and inspire you with tons of plot ideas.

An essential buy.

A great supplemental product. I said I'd give it a four if it had better fonts and sure enough, the devs have improved it so top marks.