Quick Review: Three Heroes

No thanks, I stopped at two heroes. I just… I just couldn’t.

Boars, wolves, bandits... the usual, really.

A creation from Cats Who Play released on September 17th, 2015, Three Heroes (often known as Fairy Tales: Three Heroes) is the story of Alesha, Dobrynya and Ilya, the titular characters. After their original years of heroism, the three grew apart. Alesha is one day assaulted by bandits at home. After he kills all of them but one, the last opens up about thievery having grown completely rampant in the area. There are more troubles further, there’s even talk of some sort of sea monster attacking people in the east! And Novgorod is being assaulted from two sides! …Okay, this is a very Russian game, I see. Not that a game’s geographical origins has anything to do with its quality.

Get yourself ready, 'cause you're gonna fight a lot of
enemies.

You start with Alesha, the archer. You later gain Dobrynya, who wields the handle of a spear to beat down enemies with; and, at last, Ilya, who has the classic sword and shield getup. Characters move with WASD, can turn with Q and E, attack with the left mouse button, and use special moves with the right button. You can switch to a different hero at will once they’re unlocked (pressing F1 for Ilya, F2 for Dobrynya, F3 for Alesha). The characters you don’t control will follow the one you play as, but you can ask them to stay in one place by pressing C, or make them run back to your hero with Z. You can focus on a specific opponent with the tab key. Need help? Open the advice menu with G! Finally, you can use items by pressing Enter and move between items with the [ and ] keys.

Okay, okay... shooting multiple arrows at once? Sure.
We can also steal stronger bows from enemies, that's cool.

You can open the special moves menu with T, and switch between special moves with the number keys (1 to 7). The game includes an EXP and level-up system, and each level grants a skill point to be used to unlock a new move or upgrade one that was already unlocked. All moves can be upgraded to up to three stars, which boosts their attack power, efficiency, and often reduces their cost in Heroic resolve points (a gauge that takes a moment to refill). Some moves can be practical outside of battle, like Dobrynya’s pole vault, which lets him jump over water.

Pole vault! And no horizontal bar to smash against!

Do I even need a spear? Just the stick beats down everything
in Dobrynya's way!

Now, onto gameplay proper! The game is split into maps. Like a long stage, each map has story quests that must be completed to progress, and side-quests that can yield rewards. On the first map, Alesha helps a traveling merchant whose guards ran off in fear after they were attacked, first by retrieving said guards, and then attacking the bandits’ camp as a team. Then he meets Dobrynya, and on the second map, they rescue villagers taken as captives by more bandits. This ploy involves poisoning the thieves’ well to weaken them, and using their own traps against them. It's a decent idea to make each hero’s unique skills necessary for progression, and strategizing can be useful against hordes of enemies.

Yeah, we aren't playing Hawkere or Greeen Arrow here.

But here’s where things go downhill. For starters, combat could have been refined. Alesha’s archery fucking sucks, and the further away an opponent is, the more his so-called skill comes down to sheer dumb luck and hoping you hit. Aiming is for losera, apparently. You can focus on that enemy alright; doesn’t help the aim, though! The first skill you unlock for him does allow you to aim for a specific spot, but the game’s hitboxes are so screwed up that even with that crosshair, you can still miss.

The crosshair does help. But still.

Okay, fine. Seeing bandits get tossed around can be
satisfying. They deserve it, anyway.

The game does NOT save automatically; you must press Esc, open the save menu, save, then come back. And if even one of your three heroes dies, it’s Game Over; go back to the last save point. I started saving obsessively to ensure I wouldn't lose the smallest bit of progress. And I was right to do this, because on several occasions, I got a Game Over for no apparent reason! This was fun, especially when it made me lose ten minutes of progress because I wasn’t yet saving at every hundred feet walked! And, oh yeah – if you don’t carefully follow the plot as it is requested (ex. If you go someplace you weren’t supposed to, or fail to execute a specific action), that can ALSO trigger a sudden Game Over.

I can't show you a screenshot of when the game crashed, since
I had to log out to undo it. Instead, have this memory of me
doing a side-quest and then dying due to failing to jump
over water on bthe way back, having to restart the previous
10 minutes. Fun. /s

But the death blow was the game working fine for an hour at a time, and then crashing afterwards. Badly, at that, superimposing its final frame over my entire computer screen, impossible to dislodge even with the task manager, and forcing me to literally log out and back into my session to make the damn thing disappear. Good freaking thing that OBS saved my playthroughs even when it had to get turned off by force like this! I quit trying to give this one a chance before I even met the third hero, Ilya.

Honestly? Don’t play this one. It had decent ideas, gameplay-wise, and felt overall promising. I like the possibility of following three heroes and switching between them, even if the plot is weak and the characters speak like their lines were shoddily translated from Russian to English. I could have taken that. But the saving issues, the sudden deaths, the constant bothers, the utter jank of controls and aiming, and of course the crashing… yep. I REALLY don’t recommend this one.

…But hey, if you want to risk it anyway, it’s cheap. Three Heroes is available on Steam for 3.99$ USD.

Quick Review: Storm of Spears

Time for the mandatory RPG Maker game of the year! And, uh, I have thoughts.

The first of many major fights.

Developed by Warfare Studios, published by Senpai Industrial Studios (which publishes a lot of RPG Maker games), and released on June 17th, 2016, Storm of Spears is set the fantasy world of Gallagar, led by a tyrannical queen. Rebellion is usually squashed fast. We follow a group of four mercenaries known as the Night Swords, led by Sura. When talks of plans of a true, widespread rebellion comes to them, they are thrown into action, at great cost. Sura’s younger brother is mortally wounded during the liberation of their home town, which leaves her determined to see this to the end, no matter what it takes.

This RPG is simple, with- whoooooah there! Okay, I must address this before everything else.

...These both look uncomfortable.

For some reason, the "serious, complex story" and
"boobs out portraits" combo makes me REALLY
uncomfortable. Like those elements are so
diametrically opposite, they shouldn't be mixed.

Compared to NPCs who get just a headshot next to their text, we get full-body art of the four main characters: Sura, Edryan, Valeese and Gyorg. Fine for Gyorg, he’s an older man; Edryan has his six-pack abs uncovered, not very practical for action. Sura and Valeese, the two women of the team, are wearing stuff you’d expect on strippers, not action heroines! I know the chainmail bikini trope has been mocked to Hell and back already – these outfits don’t even count, they're not chainmail! My issue isn’t so much about the outfits themselves, it’s how gratuitous and out-of-place this near-nudity feels, ESPECIALLY with everything else in the game. The main character’s younger brother just died? Let’s have a body shot of her with her breasts practically bursting from her top!

Okay. Bad first impression. How’s the rest of the game? Well, combat itself is about as basic as it gets for an RPG, with everything you have come to expect; physical attacks, special spells to cast, characters with different classes (which means specific types of armor and weapons for each), and a level-up system with new attacks or spells learned periodically. It’s almost cookie-cutter in that way.

I love that the environments have plenty of detail.
And I realize I only say that 'cause I saw many RPG Maker
games that didn't bother putting in the extra effort.

They're two, we're four. I like these odds.

One difference with other RPG Maker games is that the game opens with a difficulty selection screen. Casual, Normal or Hard. I’m playing on Normal difficulty, and the game is way too easy. Very few battles proved troublesome. Most enemies go down in two hits. Even the bosses were laughable, with just two maybe putting on a fight. Most random encounters only have two enemies, so you can often finish them before they even have time to strike. You’re warned at the start of the game that some side-quests may be too hard when you receive them and you may need to come back to them later – but I never ran into that issue! On the contrary, everything was too easy!

Also, I kept thinking spells would work with typing
advantages and weaknesses, but Holy Light never did
anything against ghosts, demons, and monsters.

Another issue I noticed was that all four characters could get equipped with the best gear, which made them strong in battle; however, it meant that I rarely, if ever, needed to use any magic spells. The team wizard’s offensive spells paled compared to the damage he dealt by attacking physically, which turned all fights into spamming the attack button for all characters, knowing it would work better than creating a strategy.

The world’s design is good; lots of detail, lots of creative map-building with variety and set-dressing. You can easily tell when the work was put in based on the look of the maps. It's much nicer than some RPG Maker games I've played where the maps were large, but empty, barren, and boring. In all fairness, all the dungeon areas are a bit lacking in enemies; there are no random encounters with invisible opponents here, only roaming ones. An enemy battle is engaged when you make contact with those.

Setting up a Quests section in RPG Maker isn't
simple, so I appreciate this game doing it.

Beyond the story, there’s plenty to do. The pause menu includes a section tracking your ongoing quests; this includes the main plotline (where you can kepe track of what to do next to progress the plot), but also a decent quantity of side-quests to find across the world map. Two quests are larger; the first involves defeating eight elemental lords imprisoned in spires (those bosses have a lot of fanfare but have mostly turned out easy). The second is all about finding fifteen Frozen Tears, hidden all over the kingdom; finding them all unlocks the fight against the final elemental lord. Four more bosses can be encountered, the Golath Souls.

Sure, the big bosses look cool and impressive. But they
fold like marginally-stronger enemies.

As for the story itself? I was surprised at how much it pulled me in. This plot is well-written, with unexpected twists and turns. There are plenty of little scenes for worldbuilding and stuff to read about. There’s never too much backtracking necessary, aside from a few moments related to story events. The characters are well-rounded and interesting, and we often explore their deeper motivations.

In short: A better game than I would have expected from just the first impression, with those full-body portraits. Great story, but the difficulty could have been kicked up several notches, and some specific elements related to combat, like magic spells, could have been fine-tuned so that they’re worth using. Maybe someday I’ll try the hard mode to see if it makes a significant difference…

Storm of Spears is available on Steam for 1.99$ USD.