So a warrior, a monk, and a rogue walk onto a battlefield and then... they die. A lot. And then they have to start all over. That's been the punchline of so many of my attempts with Has Been Heroes

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“ It's not a bad premise, and in the right hands it could even have been funny.

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In theory, at least, this makes for a fun setup that holds up well in the first couple of hours. Almost all the enemies marching leftward have stamina bars that must be whittled down before the heroes can knock down their health bars, and the characters usually need to change who occupies which lane in order to take turns whittling them down. You can only switch out while one character is attacking, though, and this is so crucial that Has Been Heroes rightfully pauses the action after each attack. You then switch another hero into the lane to (hopefully) finish them off. In practice, this means I might knock a few stamina points off with the monk, send in the rogue to knock the stamina bar all the way down, and then, once the health bar is exposed, send the warrior rushing in to knock off the majority of the enemy's health.

After an hour or so I became familiar enough with this little dance to sometimes ignore the oh-so-helpful option to pause before making a move. There is a bit of a learning curve, though, and the spartan tutorial does little to explain moderately helpful strategies like switching a hero currently in play to a lane with enemies that are "behind" him or her while he's attacking so as to hit them on the way back to the left. Figuring that out for myself took a while, and some simple instruction would’ve made my opening hours much more fun.

“ But here's the main bummer of Has Been Heroes: gosh, it's hard.

It doesn't help that the controls never really became second nature. On an Xbox controller you use the X,Y, and A buttons to select and swap the lanes, B to attack, the left bumper to pause, and the right to cast spells. Even hours in, I still found myself taking annoying amounts of time to get the heroes in the proper lanes I wanted them in.

That’s especially time-consuming because taking the most direct route through a level is the wrong way to play Has Been Heroes – or most other roguelikes, for that matter. Instead, you should explore the various nodes on the randomized maps, buying spells from vendors that appear or opening chests, thereby having an arsenal of potentially devastating spells and items when you arrive at the boss, such as one that shoots out lightning when a hero lands a melee hit. Do that, and you might have a chance. The problem is that, despite my best efforts and best collections, I still often found myself on maps where there were just too many enemies with massive stamina pools to handle properly. And then I had to start over.

“ Next to something like Darkest Dungeon, it becomes monotonous too quickly.

Making things worse is the fact that Has Been Heroes doesn't even give you information about the items that drop while using a controller – the only way I could find out how to decide which character should pick up an item was by using a mouse while playing on PC. Hardly ideal.I want to like Has Been Heroes. It brings some good ideas to both roguelikes and lane-based games. I even had fun for several hours before the appeal wore off. But after suffering through failure after failure even with my best efforts, I'm fine with these heroes hanging up their swords for good.