Heroes Trials is a Zelda-lite game. It’s not really RPG as there’s no real level up mechanics or stats but that’s the closest thing I could call it besides a Zelda-lite. You play as 2 heroes in training, a knightly boy and a mage girl. Today is their last set of trials to become full-fledged heroes to their kingdom. There’s another group that is vying for this as apparently only one team can be a hero, I guess the other becomes just really really good janitors? Regardless the other team is made of cunts, first they cast a sleep spell on your characters, then they steal your money and knock you down to next to not health, then they steal your magic and try and kill you. All cause they wanna be the heroes of the land, cause you know their actions are totally heroic.
There’s not much of a story to speak of; it’s your trials, the above is the FULL story. Well minus the end since they kept killing me after stealing my magic. I couldn’t win any fight to save my life or rather theirs. So it’s very story light. You get a couple upgrades like some boots that you can buy to move faster, and you get an upgraded shield which is part of the story progression, same with a few spells for the mage girl. Beyond that you have no upgrades it seems unless there’s more items you acquire later, but chances are they’re all story progression items. Hence I call it Zelda-lite instead of RPG.
When the combat is good it’s really good, but it’s not good very often. The mage, her magic is weaker than the sword, well most of it anyways. However it’s hard to angle her to actually HIT any goddamn thing, It’s ranged but that doesn’t help if you can’t get her to shoot in the direction you want. This is crap cause she shoots straight forward you can’t aim her without moving her and the problem is they don’t move quite right which throws off the aim just enough to miss fucking everything. The sword guy attacks in an arch which is decently strong. Problem is he’s medium strength and typically slower than enemies. They can hit you a bunch while you get A, as in fucking ONE, attack in. As such you’re very likely to die using him in comparison to using mage girl as you can keep your distance and occasionally hit enemies. When you hit though it feels good, there’s some knock back and stunning done to enemies, all enemies except for mini bosses and bosses take either 1 attack or 3 attacks to kill with the swordsman. So the combat needs tweaking to be really good, if you could have the mage stand still and aim or move and aim 360 degrees somehow that would be fantastic and make the game feel so much better since she would be more viable and you need her to be more viable.
The biggest drawback for me is a personal think that I think most people will agree with, everything, every fucking single thing, is timed. It’s a test, a trial; if you don’t do what you’re supposed to in time you fail the exam and it’s an immediate game over. If you die it’s a game over, which will happen a lot. The timer issue drives me nuts; it’s why I and most others hated Final Fantasy 13-3. No one likes being timed, we like enjoying our game and exploring and shit. They give you typically plenty of time if you’re just trying to get to point A to point B but fighting things or trying to make money in the game to buy items ends up taking time. You’re always in a task, which is what they call the trails, the moment you finish one it immediately hands another and you can’t decline them, so you’re always going against a clock. Each task has three stars you can make, it’s purely based on how much time it took you to finish the task. I’m not sure if this changes the ending or not since again I’m stuck on a fight with a thieving cunt. Otherwise there’s no achievement tied to it thankfully but we’re gamers we see stars we want the stars ALL THE STARS!!!! Ummm… anyways so yeah timed at all times, sucks ass and never hasn’t sucked ass. But a timer is strapped to your forehead, ticking down the entire time for the WHOLE game.
The game has a lot of potential but it was squandered between poor controls, easy deaths, and a fucking evil garbage timer of heinous EVIL. I’m conflicted, when the mage was hitting things it was good, there was a puzzle I really liked too, and the swordsman generally works just fine. The timer can be an annoyance but it’s not super bad, it’s not hard to do things in time at least most of the time. So I did have plenty of fun with the game, but the timer while not much of a big deal it annoyed the fuck out of me cause it was bad sometimes and it prevents me from just going about things at my own pace. And combat, which is the main part of the game, was finicky as hell. So much potential, but it needs a bunch more work to polish it then I think I’d be generally fairly happy with it. If they make it easier to aim the mage, give more time to get three stars, give us more time in general so we can explore more, or in place of the previous two allow us to have time between tasks where we can explore instead of going from one task immediately to the next. With these few changes I could really get into this.
Heroes Trials was developed by: Shinyuden and ported by Ratalaika Games
Point of Sale: X1, PS4, Vita, Steam, Switch
$6
A review copy was provided by the porter/dev.
darkmikasonfire doesn’t award Hereos Trials anything.
Indie Gamer Team 