Herolike Review

I stand in the middle of a forest, surrounded by hordes of monsters slowly closing in. The sun shines above through an overcast sky as my bow lets arrows loose with unerring precision at the dozens of enemies surrounding my position. Slowly, relentlessly, the abominations creep closer to me through the bodies of their fallen brethren, and I’m suddenly unable to move, watching in horror as dozens of creatures swarm upon my elf and slaughter him in a second. The movement controls became inexplicably unresponsive, taking his life away along with an hour of progress. That is Herolike, in a nutshell.

This closed gate is a metaphorical representation of the game's halted ambitions and the hurdles your journey faces. Also, that is not a gate; it's the border of the level. It therefore never opens. That's a really damn good metaphor.

Herolike’s premise has some potential, with you playing a burgeoning hero aspiring to save the world of an Evil Lord bound on destroying the Earth Stone, a magic stone that holds the game’s dimension together. Unfortunately, the story is as hastily fleshed out as the rest of the game, which is to say “barely”. We never see the aforementioned Evil Lord, and the story has absolutely no development from the beginning to end -- it is impossible to spoil what happens, as the game is devoid of plot, or indeed of a story per se; it just has a basic premise that leads to a cheap, unearned cliffhanger. Once you kill enough monsters, the game comes to a close and you start it all over again.

And start over again you will, either by beating the game or dying halfway through it. As your character levels up and acquires fame and fortune, you are able to upgrade the buildings of a small town in order to acquire better weapons, better trinkets that give you an armour bonus - you cannot buy proper armour sets nor change your character appearance - or an altar that gives you a second chance in case your character dies. If your character does die permanently, you start from scratch with a new one with nothing carried over but the town upgrades. Some of those upgrades give extra levels and currency to new starting characters, but the progress itself is reset completely between deaths.

That progress manifests itself in the game via randomly generated encounters on a branching linear path world map, allowing you to pick one out of a couple of options before moving to the next encounter. Those encounters are divided into four categories, namely “Hostile”, “Friendly”, “Defense”, or “Gamble” (which is just a random toss between the other three categories).

“Hostile” is a repetitive battle mode that tasks you with killing all enemies on one of four maps, with an occasional side objective such as picking up a set number of items that the enemies drop upon death. “Friendly” features an old-school RPG choice approach, with a paragraph of exposition before letting you click on the description of an action. The number of scenarios is staggering low, and I often came upon the exact same conversation multiple times in the same playthrough. Some of them are interesting, such as the story of a drying well in a desert town that turns out to be a Frost Golem cursed to burn from the inside out, generating the city’s water for centuries. Weirdly, those stories all take place solely in written form a la No Man’s Sky “events”, so you never get to see, fight, or experience it’s happenings in any way whatsoever. As for “Defense”, it is a bit weird: you either fight waves of enemies in a dungeon/wall, or you run through a uncomfortably long trap-filled corridor with lava hot on your heels. This was hands-down the most frustrating level outside of the final one, since the lava starts flowing barely a second after the level loads and you don’t have time to catch your bearings, let alone read the objective that tells you to “escape the lava”.

But with fake wings like that, I could totally have just surfed the lava out.

On the technical side, the game runs fine. It is riddled with bugs such as non-opening menus or unresponsive attacks and movements, but the performance was stable and the game only crashed once. Graphics are below average for today’s standards while the music and sound effects are absolutely ordinary. The control scheme is deplorable, abandoning time-proven templates such as Diablo’s two-click system and using one unifying mouse button for attack AND movement, leading to painfully preventable situations such as a ranged character closing into melee range of an enemy instead of shooting him. I wound up using the second control style, where I moved with WASD keys and clicked with the mouse to attack. It didn’t really helped; for some unfathomable reason, the mouse only served for clicking and did none of the aiming, which caused a quite noticeable delay and very undue fussing when trying to cast abilities.

The game feels cobbled together from two different visions instead of a unified product. The cartoony art style on loading screens can be sometimes charming, but most of the game’s models and effects forgo the cutesy cartoon style and make it videogame-y, with low fidelity rendering, choppy animation, and remarkably unreadable battles. But the worst offender of such incohesive effort is the balance. I started dozens of characters, testing each of the six classes at least twice, and then some. My favourite, the bow-wielding Elf Hunter, has a range of about eight metres -- ranged enemies have at least twice that, and some of them could shoot me from across the screen. Some enemy types do 10 points of damage, and then another type in the same level hits you four times harder and kills you with one blow. Throughout 49 levels I dealt about 209 damage to monsters, but on the 50th level every hit on the final bosses only dealt 80 damage. There is no rhyme or reason for the balance and enemy progression, and the game frequently seems at odds with itself.

This map is also at odds with the game, as the position of its missions never matches the levels's locations.

Roguelike games are per definition punishing and challenging affairs, but Herolike goes one step further by making it unbearably frustrating. Death often comes from bad game design decisions and technical bugs as opposed to challenging situations, and you can easily die to a game breaking bug on a level you were comfortably coasting five seconds earlier. Enemy imbalances and mouse-click detection issues abound, and none of those are helped by the absolutely abysmal movement system implemented in the game. The game’s potential for a charming and promising adventure ends the moment it is launched.

And by the moment it is launched, I mean it -- on my first run, the game immediately crashed to desktop as soon as I pressed “Play”. On the second run, I managed to play for about an hour until the movement bug at the opening of this article happened, and I died to enemies I was killing with a single arrow seconds earlier. Losing your progress can be disheartening, but deaths that happen exclusively due to technical bugs are downright infuriating. Such things are unacceptable in any genre, let alone one that severely punishes you and strips your progress clean like roguelikes.

With a forgettable combat, low production values, and unexisting storyline, I find hard to recommend Herolike to anyone. Although it recently shed its Early Access tag, it still carries all of those characteristics and, especially, its faults.