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.