I’ve been playing this on a lark lately. I must have gotten it during a Steam sale or a Humble Bundle. At the core, Hero Siege is kind of a SmashTV meets Zelda-styled art rogue-like, with a side of Diablo. It is quite fun, if not the most sophisticated rogue-like I have played.
The game has 10 or so classes of heroes to choose from, and then you enter the world and face waves of enemies until you die. You gain experience towards levels. At each level you gain a skill point for the basic skill tree each hero posses, and a few attribute points. Think Diablo-light attributes and a single four tier skill tree. After death skills, attributes, and one item carry forward. Every 6 waves you fight a boss then move on to a new map. During play, various events like dungeons, statues, random potions and monster spawners appear. Play sessions start out brutally short, and become progressively longer as your skills and attributes increase.
The fun of the game comes from the quirky classes and odd events that combine in non sequitur fashion to amuse, kill, or empower you. The classes include a sand flinging nomad, tower spawning archer, chainsaw wielding redneck, and a few more. Each has a variety of silly abilities. The redneck has a chainsaw that spews flaming oil, and the nomad has all sorts of dirty auto attack substitutions. Each class has a handful of cringe-inducing flavor dialogue quotes that pop up far too often, but are oddly entertaining.
The enemies are a host of random fantasy trope baddies, with randomly generated abilities such as spiked balls, electric shocks, ranged immunity, and other rogue-like/Diablo tropes. The enemies are not particularly balanced, leading to situations where the game abruptly ends because a mini-boss fills the screen with flowers shooting laser beams which one-shot your character. The classes are not particularly balanced. For example, the necromancer and archer can far outpace the melee classes early on by kiting foes into defensive towers, traps or minions. But the game is just fun.
You might find a statue that increases you attack speed, then find a portion that boosts your damage, and then pick up a cactus that randomly pops up out of the ground into your enemies whenever they get close. Your super build might get crippled by a potion that reduces your armor to almost nothing. You can kite mobs through the environmental trap and dangers and watch them explode. Or you might run into one of those traps and die horribly, all while avoiding a electrified minion and his pack of friendly werewolves and maggots.
Giving a voice commentary of the game I was playing had a few of my Eve corp mates laughing continuously. “Hmm, I just found a cactus, that’s great I guess? And there is an electrified enraged dune rat the size of a house running at me. Oh. The cactus killed it. Huh, this boss just ran into a trap behind a wall and killed himself, and he dropped smelly socks. Now I have a skull following me around shooting things. I found a chest behind a guillotine. A bleeding tree just killed me with a cloud of skulls.”
Hero Siege may not be game of the year fodder, but it is great fun to play when you want to zone out for a few minutes.