August 26, 2023 - Day 238 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 258

Game: Hero's Hour

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Mar 2, 2022
Library Date: Apr 2, 2023
Unplayed: 16d
Playtime: 17m

Hero's Hour bills itself as "A fast turn-based strategy RPG with real-time combat."

It was included in the Humble Choice March 2023 bundle.

I've repeatedly said that nostalgia does nothing for me, and it turns out I was wrong about that. Nostalgia can piss me off.

One of the growing trends at the moment in gaming is to remake old games. The most important thing about taking a game someone loved and remaking it for "modern" gaming, is to understand what made the game tick, then update the things that were limited by technology of the time, while keeping the elements that made the game tick intact.

For instance: The Quake II RTX "reimagining" took the first three levels of Quake II and made them pretty. Ho-hum.

The Quake II re-release updated the game itself and pretty much nailed bringing an ancient game into the modern era, without losing the character of the game.

I didn't know what to expect going into Hero's Hour, other than the pixel-art that featured in the header graphic, but within a couple of minutes of starting the tutorial, I realised I didn't need the tutorial, because I knew exactly how to play the game.

Describing Hero's Hour as "A fast turn-based strategy RPG with real-time combat." sounds better than "A pixel-art knock-off of Heroes of Might & Magic III".

I sank countless hours into Heroes of Might & Magic III. It might even have been the first "one more turn" game for me.

If you want to create a knock-off of a classic like HOMM3, you need to understand what makes it tick, what gives it that "one more turn" element, and the devs of Hero's Hour clearly don''t.

Desktop Dungeons demonstrated that a great gameplay loop overcomes the limitations of pixel art.

Hero's Hour made the art worse, and breaks the gameplay loop.

In HOMM3, your pixelated hero explores the pixelated map, but when entering a town, each kind of town has a character all its own, that grows as you expand the town.

Hero's Hour has almost-identical little boxes for each building.

HOMM3 battles were a carefully managed hextile-based strategy affair that could leave you elated or exasperated.

Hero's Hour replaces that with chaotic real-time battles that leans into the exasperation, and adds frustration. You can speed them up to 2x, but that still feels like an eternity.

Heck, some of the sound effects during map exploration feel like a straight rip from HOMM3.

Ultimately, Hero's Hour feels like the Temu version of HOMM3, and if I wanted to play a game that felt like HOMM3 without understanding HOMM3, I'd play HOMM VI.

Hero's Hour is an unsurprising:

1: Nope

#HerosHour #TurnBased #Strategy #RPG #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay