Be My Horde Preview

Be My Horde may look like another Vampire Survivors clone, but the game that Polished Games has developed is actually way different. You play as Moriana, a necromancer who brings fallen soldiers back to life to fight for her. She uses these undead minions to fight against the enemies constantly attacking her on the map. Since she has the ability to resurrect the dead, she will bring their corpses back to life to join her growing undead army.

Unlike other games in this genre, you aren’t constantly levelling up and earning new weapons to use against your foes during your run. Instead, you collect souls to redeem at the start of your next run at your dominion. Some of the things you can spend souls on include increasing the amount of health Moriana has, how many fallen soldiers you can resurrect at once, or how large your army is when you start. It will take a lot of playthroughs and deaths to collect enough souls to purchase anything, so be prepared to die a lot!

When you start Be My Horde, you will see that the game doesn’t give you any direction at all other than at the beginning when you are standing on the pentagram platform to “Hold to Necromance,” aka bring the chunks of meat back to life. That sounds pretty disgusting, but it accurately describes what is happening here. Once they are back, you have a small army of six undead soldiers that follow you wherever you go. These minions will attack any foe that approaches, ranging from weak peasants to knights, vikings, and even exploding sheep.

In the beginning, I was very lost as to how I could make my run last longer than 90 seconds. It felt like I was constantly getting attacked by huge clusters of foes and easily taken out, I didn’t have a chance. After a few brutal runs, I realised that Be My Horde requires a lot of strategy to ensure that your attempt lasts longer than a minute; you need to know when is the right time to attack. When you have a small army, you need to target the enemies running around solo or in tiny groups. It’s a lot easier to take out a couple, recruit to make your horde larger, and then focus on bigger clusters of foes. If you let yourself be swarmed early on, there is a good chance that you will die. The bonus is that you can take all the souls you have collected and purchase some upgrades.

The world that you traverse is full of depressing weather, it is always raining, and as you walk past trees and plants, they wilt and die; Moriana is the bringer of death to everything around her. The world gets more nasty the longer your run goes, making this environment brutal and deadly. Resurrecting enemies isn’t the only way that you can acquire souls; as you explore the map, you will find vases and urns that, when broken, will also give you extra points to spend when you return to the base.

Be My Horde has a 2D pixelated look, Moriana being substantially larger than all the minions that surround her, which makes sense as her death means the end of your run. There is blood and a bit of gore, but since it’s pixelated, it’s not very graphic. The music that plays during your run is alright, but our evil heroine talks a lot. So much so that I found it quite annoying, fortunately, in the settings, you do have the option to turn the voice volume down. You don’t have to worry about missing anything important that Moriana says, as it is captioned on the screen.

Be My Horde is an interesting take on the Vampire Survivors, bullet-hell type game. Personally, I found it quite difficult in the beginning, as I was dying a lot. With no real tutorial, I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing until I started playing and failed multiple times. It would also be nice if there was a way to arrange the formation of your horde so that you could strategise and place your stronger minions at the front so that they can deal more damage before they are destroyed. I think it’s definitely worth your time to try out the demo and see what you think, as it’s not very often that you get to play an evil character with the power to raise the dead!