

2 people found this review funny 5 158 people found this review helpful2 people found this review funny

Recommended 25.7 hrs on record

This is a tough one to write. I know it says “Recommended” up there, but bear with me, it gets a bit more complicated than that.



First things first: this game is a sort-of sequel to the Quest for Glory series of point-and-click/RPG hybrids from the 80s and 90s, and if you haven’t played those, then I can only recommend skipping Hero-U for now and playing the QfGs instead. They are wonderful, timeless games which, while they have their own quirks and their ups and downs, are some of the finest retro gaming experiences you can have – and twenty years later, there still isn’t anything quite like them out there. I love them dearly.



And this brings us to Hero-U: a kickstarted game intended from the start to bring back the unique blend of gameplay styles and charm that the QfGs were so famous for. And if you’ve played the QfGs, you’ll feel immediately at home here. The elusive spark that the Coles’ earlier games had is very much present and accounted for. If you haven’t played the QfGs, though, it’s going to be quite a different story, I’m afraid.



The basic idea is fairly simple and best described as QfG2 meets Harry Potter. You’re a student at a fancy fantasy school in a large mysterious castle and the game story develops over the course of two terms during which you have to constantly split your attention between your everyday studies, relationships with your classmates and the occasional scripted emergency that you need to handle. It’s an elegant structure and it works… up to a point. But we’ll get to that in a bit.



It’s immediately clear that we’re looking at a low-budget production here, but the budget wasn’t wasted. I’m not terribly fond of the 2D art style, but the 3D looks quite nice and works well. Confining the entire game to a single location is a logical choice and there are more pathways in the castle than it seems at first glance, and while the number of characters was obviously kept to the absolute bare minimum, no one can complain there aren’t enough words on offer and the characters are often an interesting bunch (the major exception being the Draco Malfoy substitute who is entirely one-dimensional and surprisingly irrelevant to the story).



And this is also where I will happily call the game a success – just like the QfGs were ultimately about friendship and about people getting together to make the world a better place, Hero-U remains profoundly cheerful, optimistic and warm. It’s often silly and very fond of its endless bad puns, but even when it gets slightly more serious, it never loses its charm. I love that about it.



And finally, while we’re talking about successes, the idea of a school game with gameplay wrapped around a strict schedule and a constantly ticking clock as well as the trademark combination of RPG-light and point-and-clicker are both solid and lead to interesting situations and decisions. Good! That’s all good!



So why was the first paragraph so hesitant, I hear you ask? Well, here comes the unpleasant bit:



Hero-U has two major problems, both impossible to ignore. The first? The game is long. Very long. Far, far, far longer than it had any right to be. And while it can be very enjoyable at the start, when you’re still learning the ropes and figuring out when is the best time in your schedule to sneak in some extracurricular activity, this soon gives way to routine and routine quickly becomes mind-numbing tedium. The game is spread into an incredible 50 days, which I’d argue is about twice as much than it should have been, particularly considering that most of the interesting stuff happens in the first term and the second is mostly dedicated to dungeon crawling. Lots and lots of dungeon crawling.



And speaking about dungeon crawling, let’s talk about combat – it’s not like the turn-based combat system is bad, it’s not (though it seems to me that it would work a lot better with a party than a single character; giving you various options and tools is nice, but at the end of the day, a turn in which you’re not dealing damage does not bring you any closer to victory), but it’s also not terribly interesting. And there’s just so much combat, so much more than you’d expect and so much more than would be reasonable, that it’s bound to get annoying sooner or later. Probably sooner. (You can, in theory, bypass all combat by sneaking. This would be nice if sneaking wasn’t so excruciatingly slow, making even milquetoast combat far preferable.)



And then there’s the second big problem – the school terms are heavily scripted. If something is to happen on day 36, it will happen on day 36, no matter what you do. Unfortunately, being a Rogue is often about breaking rules, something that you’re very much encouraged to do, leading to a constant tension between which rules can be broken within the game world and which are actually absolute commandments of the game designer and as such unbreakable.



To give an example – one of the first major events is spread over several nights in which Stuff Happens. You are told you need to stop this Stuff, repeatedly, and it’s the kind of Stuff that you’d very much expect to be able to stop, so you explore and you talk to people and you try everything you can think of and keep reloading and wondering what is it you’re doing wrong, until you give up and proceed with the game and eventually learn that it's literally impossible to stop said Stuff from happening until you reach a specific day and the game designer gives you the go-ahead. Options that never existed suddenly spring to life and there you go; the task was actually perfectly trivial. The very worst case of this is a task that you receive, with some urgency, quite early on, to break into a location that you just know you’ll have to break into eventually, but you can’t… until day 49 out of 50 when the solution to the conundrum is handed to you on a silver platter. It’s pretty much the last thing you do in the game. And all your earlier attempts were a complete waste of time.



But, on the other side of the spectrum, there are also tasks that have a very narrow window of opportunity and if you miss them, they’re gone forever – one of them with some pretty major consequences. And how can you tell which of these two types of tasks you’re looking at? Well, you can’t. (It seems to me the rule of thumb is that if something doesn’t appear in your journal’s “To Do” list, it’s not actually doable yet, but it took me almost until the end of the game to figure this out.) So a lot of the game is spent in a state of confusion – is this a puzzle I can’t seem to crack or is it not even a puzzle at all? Am I wasting my valuable in-game time by trying to solve this puzzle or am I wasting my valuable in-game time by ignoring it? Is this decision going to haunt me ten hours of gameplay later? (In fairness, it probably isn’t, but the feeling is very hard to shake off.)



This isn’t helped by the game’s extremely uneven pacing, again largely dictated by the ridiculous 50-day length. There are periods that are far too intense and where every minute counts, and periods where there’s nothing to do – such as the very last week which, instead of building to a crescendo, is spent just idly roaming about and wondering whether you’re missing something very obvious or whether there really isn’t anything else and the game might have easily ended hours ago. And at the end of it all is a rather deus ex machina ending that wraps up things quickly and unsatisfactorily. And all that’s left is a sad conviction that if this game were half or even third the size, it probably wouldn’t have taken so long to develop and it would have been so much better.



Hero-U amused me and delighted me and bored me to tears and annoyed me almost in equal measure. It’s definitely not a failure, but it’s not quite a success. Recommended? I honestly don’t know.



I still do recommend the Quest for Glory games, though. So much.