Long Card Road Home: Hero Siege

Over the last few months in spite of giving up on buying new games for a year, other than bundles, my badges page has continued to bloat over with a seemingly endless sea of games with cards just waiting to be dropped. So, for the month of June as we all await the summer sale, I'm going to work on my card back log. My cacklog. My ... wait, that sounds ...

I acquired Hero Siege from the ShinyLoot roguelikes bundle on Groupees a couple weeks ago. In retrospect, I probably should have taken them up on more of the games available in the bundle, but Hero Siege and TOME looked about the best of the lot. I haven't picked up TOME yet, since it doesn't have cards, but Hero Siege looked like an interesting game to give a shot after enjoying fellow 'roguelikes'. I don't think Hero Siege is, by any means, much of a roguelike. It does have some pretty random elements, and I have to admit there is a certain charm to the whole "id potions by jamming them down your throat" school of thought.

My first experience in Hero Siege was - and I'm not making this up - playing for what steam records as two minutes. I think about half that was puzzling at the weird you can buy gems menus (Is this a phone game?) and what not, then playing maybe thirty seconds. A prompt flashed up on screen to start the next wave, maybe, and then while I was figuring it out my character fell over dead. I have no idea why.

It is possible I stood on a trap or something, but it feels strange just how much stuff in this game one-shots you right from the get-go. The game actively doesn't really feel like it wants you to play it. Unsurprisingly this actually frames a great deal of my experience with the game!


Anyway, to get into the more specific ifs and whys of Hero Siege, the game is what I believe is referred to as a "three quarters top down perspective" hack and slash. The novelty, besides the oddities of its "roguelike" design elements, lies in the control system, which is more or less a twin stick shooter but with melee characters as well. You spend most of the game basically kiting enemies around, and there's a wealth of content to break up the essentially endless blasting or slicing of foes. It feels like a mix of shmup, twin stink, a gauntlet era ARPG and so forth, owing a little less to the system and more what is going on, on screen.

I really like the artwork, or spritework, for Hero Siege. It really comes off looking like a super nintendo game, in sort of the same vein Rogue Legacy does, but obviously more towards LTTP instead of a generic platformer. It's quite nice looking in motion, but I find some of it completely baffling. You romp around hitting things and they bleed profusely, which is sort of weird, then you hit a box and the box sprays you with a shower of gore? I'm a touch confused on that one. It just looks really awful the more you see it. The game is surprisingly visceral for its attempted visual style, but some of the gore is actually life-threatening! I'm not sure if the blood is the explosion, or the explosion is just churning the blood, but you need to stay away from a good bit of the gore before it gores you too. Things blow up real good in this game.

I don't know what any of this does

The blood and gore is weird, and this is sort of where the shmup feeling comes in. There's not many bullets or arrows on screen, but between the corpses, the gore, the blood and the terrain you end up needing to really watch where those sort of things are. There are also traps, which will hit you, but you can and will kite enemies over top them, which is delightful. All in all, the basic combat is pretty intense and boring in loops as waves arrive. Bosses are usually pretty intense, so that's good, although I could seriously do without the c'thun lasers.

The game also has dungeons and crypts that appear between waves of baddies in the main map, which you can hop into. These are some combat centric, but some have puzzles or boss fights in tighter quarters, which is sort of interesting.

The voice acting in Hero Siege is pretty obviously amateur hour, and man, when it works it works. The pyromancer might very well by the programmer's friend acting crazy on skype, and he just nails it. Dude sounds totally nuts and actually sort of intimidating in a teenager gone mad sort of way. The nomad is well done as well, but the marksman is one long gay joke and I could do without that. Maybe it is professionally done, I'm not sure. It doesn't seem like it but it amuses more than the voice acting in lots of games so maybe it is. The pyromancer screaming out 'My barbeque ... NEVER ENDS!' is just good stuff. More voice acting should have fun with itself.

Music is nothing special most of the time but pretty good in places, and the level design is weirdly random. Each arena is essentially a square with four entrances at cardinal points, and within that space random things appear in - zelda style weeds, chest, pots, dungeons and statues, pretty much everything. Actually I think you can even spawn a volcano that shoots flaming sausages. The dungeons, on the other hand, which are zoomed in further and seemed to be hand made, are consistently pretty cool except a couple of them just kill you outright which is ... Less cool.

In many way Hero Siege sort of suffers a contradictory game design split right down the middle. The game allows you to save and exit, something other games I've played lately are not so generous about, and really favors just picking up and playing. Hit your guy, off you go. You can start playing, enjoy a couple waves, stop playing and the game closes quite quickly. I know that seems like an odd feature to complain about but I grow tired of alt-f4ing games because I have to march through four hierarchies of menus to actually reach the 'actually fucking quit, no really' button. So in that sense, Hero Siege is an ideal budget title - you play ten minutes, you have fun, you go do something else.

On the other hand, the game will kill you at a moment's notice, and there's a couple things you learn pretty quickly not to do after a while. Doing dungeons once you've passed a level or two is too risky, since a couple of them are just death traps (figuratively and literally) and various enemy death animations can randomly one shot or nearly full bar you out of nowhere. The game wants you to play through quite a few waves, I think something like four or five bosses + 5 waves leading up to them, to pass an act. That's quite a bit of battling to get to a point where you can actually "save" your progress - you can save your stats gained, but stats are pretty pultry in worth compared to relics and even gold is quite useful. You also get huge stat bonus potions and altars, so the levels don't do all that much.

Actually, as an aside, the implementation of gold in this game is rather strange. You get piles of money constantly (Get the gold! Money!) but gold can only as far as I can tell be spent in a shop screen you can bring up at any time, which you mostly just put into buying healing potions that full heal you instantly. It's an odd system, but the game doesn't pause when you're in the buy screen, so you usually try to squeeze it in during downtime. As odd as that whole idea sounds, it works pretty well. You can only carry one potion at a time, but most of the potions are permanent stat changes, so you basically just have a full heal on you all the time.

So Hero Siege is pretty good, but as I said, I got kinda fed up with getting instantly killed or very quickly slaughtered out of nowhere. The game is pretty easy, and pretty relaxing, and if I found the gameplay just a little better I'd probably played it for twenty hours instead of six. Still, six hours out of fifty cents is pretty incredible, as the summer sale rolls in if a topdown smashTV arpg sounds good to you, might not be a bad title to pick up on sale. It's juvenile and silly, and doesn't take itself too seriously with the bloody and the hammy voice acting, but sometimes you want to play an ARPG where giant skeletons explode into blood that shoots more explosions.

They should have named it BLOOD SIEGE:THE BLEEDENING though.