It’s not even early access yet, and a year away from 1.0, but this looked interesting:
Looks artistically pleasing. Nookrium played a demo (available soon) and my main worry was the level of player agency. You seem to be exploring, but are you really on rails, just moving from battle to battle? (Which might not bother others, but I am sick of.) However, it is only a demo of level one, so there may be a lot more depth here. There is definitely some breeding of goblin characters.
(I tried to link Steam above, but cannot see that, once posted, at least on Firefox. I guess the issue already being discussed. But if you cannot see the link, the Steam blurb reads: “Overadventuring has wiped out 90% of the goblins in the wild. Lead these goblins in a desperate struggle to reverse their fate through this turn-based RPG crafted in charming hand-drawn 2D style.”)
Hero’s Hour looks to be pretty much a clone of early HOMM, with rather primitive graphics and one twist – continuous action battles. It’s free to try, so I aim to take it for a test drive.
I was so very close to being the video editor for the Goblin Stone trailer!
Having played some of the beta (what I believe will be the demo), there is a little branching on some of the proc. gen. levels and some broader choice on the map. I don’t think the demo will include any of the lair management or goblin breeding unless they were able to get all that into the latest build.
It’s a very pretty game and the combat has potential but I found the UI a bit clunky in places (likely because it’s still in active development) and, like you, wondered how satisfying the exploring/adventuring itself would be on a 2D plane. I really like the idea of playing goblins, orcs and trolls who have been driven to the brink of extinction by adventurers. One I’ll be keeping an eye on.
Nookrium is great for discovering games I otherwise would have completely missed, but I get actively frustrated trying to actually watch his videos just due to the way he plays things.
Yeah, Nookrium is one of the ones I routinely watch for new videos, but I only occasionally watch one all the way through. I just want to get a sense of the kind of game it is.
Occasionally, I will watch a full video of a game I am seriously interested in but can get little other information about. (Goblin Stone was that rare exception.) But more often to cure insomnia.
I spent some time today with Hero’s Hour. It has the overall shape of HOMM – the map, the resources, etc. But at least to this point, it plays significantly differently, and so far it seems like the AI opponents put up a very good fight.
Tried the demo for Empires in Ruins. It’s a neat idea but the execution is way too rough for me to consider buying it. The UI is especially difficult. The early tower defense bits go on too long and there is way too little for you to do with most towers and resource generation locked behind lots of research on the overworld.
Except that the battles are not turn based which is a huge departure from all the HOMM games. Since I’m not a fan of real time tactical battles, I’m not sure if I’ll give it a look.
Yeah, I played Hero’s Hour for several hours, and I am still unsure what I think of it. And that’s a part of the question.
It’s true that HOMM fell down a bit when it came to repetitive, relatively easy battles, which you could automate, but the key to victory was losing as close to zero troops as possible, so automation was a questionable choice.
Here, the battles are continuous action, and I do not yet understand all the nuances. Once you have a lot of units, some of them enter as reinforcements, and you have only limited control over which troops start on the battlefield, and which enter later. But you do get to cast spells, which stops the action, and it looks to me as though these spells are at least as important as in HOMM.
But… gone is the “gotta get to zero casualties” obsession, because you can build buildings that bring lost troops back to life, after a delay. (Infirmary, later on hospital) But you have to hire them again. The effect is to make gold more important, but casualties less of a perfectionist thing. And unless my memory is wrong, there are more separate building upgrades which increase the number of troops you can hire, also putting emphasis on gold.
So far, I have found the game brutally difficult. But I think it is because I have not adapted my thinking from HOMM.
Anyway, I remain uncertain whether to recommend it or not, but I am not finding that I mind the continuous action aspect of the game particularly, even though I much prefer turn based games in general.
A BIG thumbs up for Rogue State Revolution. I am insanely addicted to this game. And I LOVE the terrible Red Alert-esque FMV cutscenes. There’s just enough stuff to do. You have 3 neighbors, not 30. Five things to make and probably 4 ingredients to do it. Only a few actions, so the turns go swiftly. 48 turns and you either win or lose the game. Devs active on Discord. What can I say, I’m a fan.
I’ve been playing Rogue State Revolution the past couple days, and I am conflicted.
There’s a lot to like here. Lots of competing pressures, and multiple ways to react, including rational and crazy options. Atmosphere and humor. Military without that being the core game. And, as you say, turn based.
On the other hand, in practice, “rogue” so often means “aggravating” in my dictionary. Would you want a chess game where you don’t get to have a queen or use the left hand row until you lost a few times? Would you want an RPG where you can only be a sword and board fighter until you had played the entire game once? Here, so much of the game centers on choosing ministers, a choice that would be a lot more interesting if most of the ministers weren’t gated behind a bunch of playthroughs. Grrr.
I read on the forum they are fixing my second gripe, the tedium of moving the character who fights corruption. But they still have some weird stuff, like apparently there’s one disaster that can only be addressed if you have made some pretty offbeat decisions along the way. Which shakes my confidence a bit as to what their vision for the game is. (I would hope that the craziness is atmosphere to show it’s a crazy world, but that game mechanics would reward rational decision-making.)
My overall sense is that although this game is released, they are still working some things out.
