Pixel Heroes: Byte & Magic Review

Click this button. OK, now click this button. Your party has done damage to the enemy. Hit that button again. Congrats you killed the ogre. That doesn’t sound very satisfying, does it? This was my experience with Pixel Heroes: Byte & Magic, a retro style RPG game that uses many elements of old school RPG games, however it fails to bring any creativity to the table.

You start off by forming your three person party from a variety of classes and races. After selecting your party members you set out to town in order to grab your first quest, which can range from finding a ring from someone’s husband to finding someone’s lost dog. Upon accepting the quest, you will travel across the map about as fast as a slug moving through tar. Instead of using the movement keys to progress through the game, you hit a “go” button, which is as boring as it sounds.

The game puts you up against a myriad of standard RPG monsters that are all just so plain and overused that you feel as if you are replaying a childhood game that you found under your bed last week. Everything that can be found in this game has been done before and often times have been done in a far more interesting manner.

I had high hopes that the lack of a unique plot or party mechanics would mean that the studio had put all of their love and devotion into the combat mechanics; however I was sorely disappointed. The combat is your typical turn-based fighting in which one character from each side fires an arrow, casts a spell, or whacks someone with a sword, all depending on what type of character it is. Each character has a weapon, a tome, and two unique abilities that look like they would add a twist to the combat, but unfortunately these abilities aren’t even capable of being upgraded. While some games attempt to have you plan out your parties attacks by combining different attacks from each party member, Pixel Heroes takes the boring approach and instead has only one member of your party attack per turn. This means that the combat moves fairly slowly and leaves very little room for creative gameplay. Rather than have a different character face the brunt of my enemies’ attacks, I instead found myself putting the same character at the front of my party to take all of the damage. Overall, the combat system took no skill at all, and while your characters gear can be upgraded in abundance, it feels as if these traits were thrown in to merely appease loot goblins.

The game also tries to throw random events in that are more of a gimmick than a feature. These random events involve fighting a slightly more challenging enemy, and the rest of the quest involves seven different battles. On top of seven repetitive battles per quest the game has a very anticlimactic boss fight when the seven battles have been completed. Much to my disappointment the game gave no feeling of progression after finishing each quest, as I literally grabbed a new one and did the exact same thing over and over again.

While I believe the game devs had good intentions behind trying to use a retro soundtrack, I found myself going mad from the 8-bit music that was extremely repetitive and wore my patience down quickly. If you are going to have gameplay that is repetitive and does not provoke any creativity, then you had best make sure you have a good soundtrack at the very least, else you risk driving your players insane.

The graphics for the game are a retro style much like the soundtrack, however even this becomes infuriating as you feel no connection to the characters in any way whatsoever. On top of this, their choice in font for the bottom of the screen was so poorly done that at points I had to look very closely in order to decipher what the Hell NPCs were trying to say to me.

While I may sound bitter and very cynical towards this game, it is not without just cause. If you are going to try to create a RPG game that brings out nostalgia with its players, you should at least create something that is original. While Pixel Heroes is a functional game, it is one that has been so overdone you would have to create something truly unique.