Has Been Heroes works just fine with a gamepad or mouse. I prefer being able to mouse around the screen, but the gamepad works just fine because this is essentially a turn-based game. There’s never* any hurry to click on something.
-Tom
* almost never
I bought the game close to release, and only played 20 minutes or so. My experience was, that I had to click all the time, to move people and to attack the monsters?? Its what soured me competely on it.
I mean it was designed with a gamepad in mind, so it’s perfectly playable with one. I’d argue preferable in most cases.
Who knew the element interactions were so involved? Very nice!
Nice find. I discovered a lot of these, but didn’t know all of them. Cool! I think not using these sorts of found tricks has a lot to do with the perceived difficulty of HBH.
I still think this one is a fine little side scrolling rogue like time burner which is exceptionally well suited to the Switch.
As a bonus shoutout to Switch owners, check out Ironcast on the eShop (also available all over the place for other mediums, but Switch seems like a great fit). It is a sort of puzzle quest meets FTL with rogue-lite progression.
I’m just starting this, and I’m hella-confused by something: What are all these numbers/symbols by the boss, and why can’t I hover over them to find out? Is the x3 his stamina (is it 3 bars, or is it 6x3=18 bars, or…) And what are those 4 colored symbols?
I’m pretty sure I can answer this one! He has 24 stamina! Once you take care of the six showing, six more pop up. The x3 is a reserve after you take care of what’s currently showing. The symbols are immunities, I think. He’s immune to, uh, vampirism or bleeding (?), poison, cold, and charm.
I meant to make a tutorial video for this game, because when I played it, it did a horrible job of explaining the stuff you need to know to play it. I don’t know if that’s been addressed, but keep asking questions like these. You’ll find a totally awesome game down in there.
-Tom
To beat him, I’d want to him him 6 times to stun him? Then does it reduce his base stamina by 1, or take it from the reserve pool? IE: is it 6-6-6-6…5-4-3-2-1- or 6-5-4-3-2-1-6-5-4?
I just like…hit him a lot, and eventually won, but would have liked to understand more.
The wiki says (but who wants to read the wiki? You should be able to deciper the symbols via mouse-over…)
Oh, you’re that early in the learning process? Yeah, you’re in the situation where the dumbass game isn’t explaining itself to you, so you’re just as liable to assume it’s crazyhard and go play something else.
I think I Tomsplained it in one of my streams, but in case you don’t want to sit through a video explaining what the game should already tell you, here’s how it works:
Stamina is armor. Calling it stamina is dumb. Really dumb. It’s armor, plain and simple. You can pound away and eventually kill something just by dribbling damage through the armor, but that’s not going to get you far. So you have to strip away the armor by counting up the exact multiples of hits. The amount of damage doesn’t matter. Just the number of blows. Which is why you have a x1, a x2, and a x3 in your party.
The 6 means he needs to take six hits to get him to drop his armor. He needs to take six hits before you can move in and do effective damage. For instance, six times with a x1; two times with a x3; one time with a x1 and one time with a x2 and one time with a x3. Anything that tallies up to exactly six. Once you do that, he’s stripped of armor and the next hit will apply full damage. Hit him hard!
EDIT: I think the following part is wrong, as Chaplin explains below!
You will have to do this multiple times against this guy, because his stamina/armor will replenish with each x at the bottom of the bar. Although I don’t think there’s a x0, so I might be wrong about him having a total of 24 stamina. It might just be 18. Anyway, the point to remember is that it’s all about equaling six, and that’s why you have the x1, x2, and x3 character in your party. Math. Anti-armor math.
-Tom
Tom is pretty on point. The symbols are immunities and the stamina is functionally armor. You always want to aim to hit exactly that number, then once the stamina squares are down to zero, the next hit is full damage (make it count) and then the monster moves to the end of the lane with -1 total stamina next time (i.e. 5 after the first exact to 6 armor math). You can still do damage and over hit a monster by going over the exact stamina number, but that means the monster only moves back a little bit, the total armor won’t do down by one, and the damage is penalized by a percentage.
If I recall correct, x3 number is for attacking. If the monster gets to the front, it will hit 3 times.
Oops, I think you’re right! The stamina is also the multiplier, isn’t it? From 6, to 5, to 4, and so one.
-Tom
Yes, each successful combo (landing hits equaling stamina) followed by a full damage hit will knock the monster back and drop its total stamina by one. So yes, 6,5,4, etc.
I’m pretty sure I’ll play this eventually, but what you guys are describing seems like one of those instances where they needed more testers to explain to them that how they were interpreting that stuff during development as the designers was not at all how players would understand it. They seem to have gotten too comfortable with their own oddball mechanics?
They just need…freaking mouse-overs for all their icons. Icons are useless without a legend to read them.
It’s more of a modern user meets old genre clash. Has Been Heroes is meant to be a rogue-like in the very traditional sense. This means progress through the game is through trial & error, discovery, and experimentation rather than UI pop ups and an ever increasing pile of gear/ stats. Like the rogue-likes of yore, if you find a purple fizzing potion, you need to drink it blind to see what it does then remember. What do you do with this weird gear, is there crafting? Same deal. The same is true in HBH, but it’s about discovering elemental combos, enemy behavior, and nuances of the combat mechanics. Does it work or is it under documented? That is in the eye of the modern gaming beholder.
My best advice when considering the game is to think about Binding of Isacc, but a mathy zen of side scrolling conveyor belts of monsters rather than top down Zelda bullet hell. Check out a helper video if need be (like playing a rogue-like with a wiki open). If you like that sort of idea, I strongly recommend HBH. If that sort of blind discovery with progress measured in seed data and knowledge sounds daunting, it may not be a good experience.
OK, that makes more sense, although it seems like icons and health bars should be documented at least…? I do like that sort of roguelike game. Does it have a potion of instant death? Every roguelike should have a potion of instant death. ;)
The thing is, the tutorial kind of tries to explain the basic combat mechanics to you, it’s just really bad at it. It tells you to do a bunch of stuff that will make you successful at the example encounters but won’t do a good job of explaining to you why you wanted to do that.
Not telling you what a spell/item does until the first time you’ve purchased it and it’s now stuck on a character seems like a purposeful rogue-like mechanic that works fine. Doing a terrible job of explaining how combat works and doing a terrible job of giving reasonable feedback to make those combat mechanics discoverable is not fine.
An unexpected free expansion just dropped!
The expansion adds tons of new content for players to discover and includes the Trine heroes – Amadeus the Wizard, Pontius the Knight, and Zoya the Thief – as playable characters once you have unlocked the Epic Quest mode. The Epic Quest mode will be a true test of skill for the most veteran players as the heroes have no starting spells! Complete with custom animations (Amadeus attacks with a box!) and beautiful 2D visuals in the style of Has-Been Heroes, the Trine heroes definitely need to perform some heroic deeds to complete this quest from another universe!
The expansion also adds a new region to the main game called the Sky Temple. Each Sky Temple run will include unique twists, new enemies and new bosses!
Updates to the main game include:
- 8 Young Heroes to unlock
- New “Sky Temple” region
- 120+ new spells
- 150+ new items
For players looking for another challenge, the expansion also brings two new game modes: “Challenge Mode” and “Seed Mode”. Challenge mode is a single difficult battle with pre-set loadout of characters, items, and spells. By completing a Challenge players unlock a new Young Hero. Seed mode allows players to share a seed number with friends and play the exact same game/run with a timer upon completion. Use this to host a competition between you and your friends and compare strategy.
Such a nice surprise and very much appreciated!
Well hot damn! I saw there was an update pushed to my Switch, but was not sure if it was consequential or not. It looks like it definitely is! Thanks for the heads up.
This is £10 on the eshop at present and I’m tempted. I loved Darkest Dungeon but the grind killed it for me, is this comparable otherwise?
