Has-Been Heroes and The Analog Equivalent

Of all the video games I currently enjoy, I would never have guessed that Has-Been Heroes would be the one taking over most of my limited game time. Not one to keep up with new releases (and there was no fanfare or even ad on the Xbox when it hit the digital shelves), it came out of nowhere has been my biggest gaming surprise in quite some time.

It's also firmly set my belief that the only reviewer I trust anymore these days is myself, as the critics have been anything but kind to this game. If you're the type to be easily dissuaded by a yellow metacritic score and quickly move on, let me try and convince you otherwise. And if either you already enjoy it, or think you might but don't play video games, let me tell you what board game to pick up.

You'll spend 90% of your time with HBH in combat. Everything else around those fights is simply in support of the combat (like gearing up) or a secondary concern (like map exploration). Not to say that those things aren't important, mechanically interesting, or require strategy, but the combat is what you're here for.

The player is in control of 3 heroes. They all hang out on the left of your screen; one at the top, one in the middle, and one at the bottom. These are the three lanes that guide all the combat.

Enemies march in from the right side of your screen in those same three lanes. They move at different speeds, but they will inevitably reach your heroes on the left, doing significant damage. Take more than a hit or two and a hero dies, restarting your game.

Enemies have two types of health, hit points and stamina. Hit points are what you'd expect: an amount of health (say 150) that when attacked (for, let's say 40) depletes how you'd expect (to 110, keep up). Hit zero and die. Typical stuff. Stamina, on the other hand, is measured in hits. It doesn't matter how much damage those hits do, one hit is one hit.

To round this out, your three heroes do different numbers of hits, and for different amounts of damage. Your starting warrior hits once, but for bucketloads of hit points. Your starting rogue hits 3 times, but for less. Your monk hits twice with a feather duster. When a hero attacks, they charge forward in their lane and hit whatever's in front. After they attack, the game pauses while they're out in front and allows you to swap around the lanes your heroes are in; unpause and the attacking hero rubberbands back to the left, but in whatever lane you placed them in.

And now you have a puzzle. And make no mistake, combat in HBH is a puzzle. If you take an enemy's stamina to exactly zero, they are left stunned and stop moving. They take full damage from the next attack, and when hit they are pushed all the way to the right of the lane. But their stamina is filled back up, though to one less than it was.

Confused? Let's example:

[W1] 3S
[M2] 3S
[R3] 1S

Here your warrior (with 1 hit) is at the top, your monk (with 2) is mid, and your rogue (yes, 3) is hanging at the bottom. Enemies with different amounts of stamina are heading towards you. That's your puzzle, take them out.

None of your attacks are good right now, none of them would take the enemy stamina to zero. So you need to do some lane-swapping, but you can't until someone attacks. The monk does the least damage and his lane's enemy is far back, so we start with him.

While he's out front we can swap lanes around. We put the rogue up top and then immediately attack with her. She stuns the enemy up top. Then we swap her with the warrior, who charges into the stunned enemy for full damage, sending him flying off to the right. Its stamina resets, but this time to 2.

While the warrior is out we need to think ahead. We can swap lanes around, putting the monk in the top lane to get ready to stun that two, and we put the warrior at the bottom to stun the 1 as soon as his melee is recharged. Once he does that, the rogue can swap in for damage and we'll leave the warrior in the middle, remember that 3-stamina guy is down to one, so the warrior will be able to stun him.

And so forth and on and on. The game can be paused at any time, and it auto-pauses each time you attack. This isn't a twitch game, you can sit and stare at this puzzle and work it out.

You have to juggle the position of the enemies horizontally, the position of your heroes vertically. You have to match hits with stamina in order to stun, and you want to use your heavy-hitters when you have an opening to damage hit points (the warrior will do 200 damage in his one hit to a health bar, the monk might do 10 over his two hits). Add in that each hero has passive abilities and a spell, and the tools you have to solve this puzzle widen. And the difficulty ratchets up to compensate, expecting you to fully utilize every combo and trick up your sleeves.

Oh, and did I mention that if you send out a hero to attack, then swap their lane, and bring them back through enemies in that lane, they will do damage and reset the stun timers of anything in that lane? Oh and did I mention that status effects have different interactions, such as fire and water creating steam that slows enemies down? Oh and did I mention that each run will see you finding more items and spells, allowing you to build up your heroes in specific ways and giving you more options and combos to deal with things like a 50-stamina boss?

The game is hard for a few reasons:
1) It's a hard game. It's supposed to be hard, even if you know what you're doing. It's expects you to die and restart often, and it expects you to learn by doing, to experiment and pay attention. You have to play multiple games to grind out unlocks that'll help you.

2) If you've read this far, then you know more about how to play the game than you would if you played the tutorial. It has some serious training issues.

3) You haven't played anything else like it, and it's probably not what you expect. It's a difficult game to explain (see above), and you can't just watch it and get a sense of what it's like.

The reviews are miserable. Probably for these same three reasons.

But I can't put it down.

The puzzle is a fascinating one. The combat feels visceral, the combos are interesting, and pulling out a win against a boss is incredibly satisfying. The map and item system layered on top gives replayability to each game, and fun and different builds to your characters to experiment with. The unlocks are nigh-endless, so there's always something to look forward to even when you lose. And pulling out every trick you've learned, thinking multiple moves ahead, and using every item and spell and combo you can to win an incredibly difficult fight is an addictively rewarding experience.

So what board game is difficult, rewarding, failed to set up expectations, and released to a slew of negative (and wrong) reviews?

Shadowrun: Crossfire

SC is plagued by the exact same problems as HBH:

1) It's a hard game. It's supposed to be hard. It's co-op, so difficulty is expected. It expects you to abort and restart. You have to play multiple games to earn the XP to gain the new skills that will help you.

2) It has some (less serious) issues with player introduction. It dumps players directly into a very difficult game, and expects that they'll figure it out. There was no onboarding scenario in the base game, and this left a bad taste in players' mouth, because:

3) It's unlike any other game you've played. It's billed as a deckbuilder but I think that's a misclassification, really. It requires a very different type of tactical thinking that deckbuilders generally do not.

These combined into a game that was already difficult, but was made even more difficult by the fact that players' assumptions about how to play were wrong, expectations were not met, and winning strategies would take time and effort to suss out. And getting mercilessly destroyed in their first game didn't invite future plays. I'll admit that even my first play put me off the game for a while.

And, like HBH now, critics were unkind. And, like HBH now, they were not to be trusted. Shadowrun is one of the best co-op or solo games in my collection, where the tactical puzzle to be solved is a difficult one, and solving it is immensely rewarding.

Views on Shadowrun have warmed over time, it seems. Or maybe it's just that the vocal detractors abandoned early, leaving only us lovers of the game discussing it.

I can hope that HBH gets the same love in the long run.

If you need a unique puzzle game; something challenging to solve and overcome; something new you haven't seen done before; something that can keep your interest over many plays, unlocks, and level ups, then you can't go wrong with either of these games. Just pick your preferred medium, flex your brain muscles, stoke your patience, and get to losin'.