Hero's Hour (PC) Review

Having a staggering number of units and things to explore, the fact that Hero's Hour was made by one guy is pretty impressive. There are some really great things here, but it suffers from one or two killer flaws that hold it back from an incredible experience.

Once upon a time in the 90s there was a core group of games that any strategy gamer probably played at least one of. One of those was the Heroes of Might and Magic series. Gameplay involved an over world of exploration, expansion and adventure, building up different factions of kingdoms to eventually do battle. Battles were turn based tactical affairs, that were incredibly fun and replayable.

Hero's Hour captures a lot of this nostalgia with almost a carbon copy of the gameplay. Anyone who enjoyed the older games will immediately feel at home with the general flow of how things work here. Move around the map, capture mines and other buildings, build up a castle to get more guys, then go fight the enemy. It all flows very well, and it is fun to go back in time to this style of game that isn't around much anymore.

Combat is where things start to go a little wrong. It is an automatic real time system. There are some minor things that can be done, such as directing groups to certain locations but largely does not do anything. Players can cast some spells that range from useless to completely overpowered, so in that regard it's similar to the source material. One of the big problems, other than not being able to control things, is the very simple graphics. That makes it difficult to determine what's going on. Oftentimes simply selecting a spell to highlight enemies or allies is more useful than the actual effects of the spell.

The main problem of the game is that the user interface has some problems, there is some issue where the boxes are centred right for where you are clicking, and as a result almost every box has to be clicked to the right which is annoying with a bunch of tightly packed options. Furthermore, the text doesn't scale right without very precise options, so a majority of it is next to impossible to read.

It is unfortunate these problems are so major, because they should be pretty easy to fix. Other than that, the game is very cool as far as levelling the hero up through various skills and builds goes. Exploring around, levelling up, and gaining new guys are all cool elements and the developer obviously put their heart into it. Ultimately, if the game had a slight redesign of clearer graphics, and the UI issues were fixed, with maybe something more interesting in combat rather than just watching it, this would make the game an easy recommendation. As it is now, it's held back by these ultimately simple issues.