Burninating the Countryside: my Hoard review

Hoard:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca2-riOgdO0
It is a time of myth, when fierce dragons roam the countryside. From their mountain redoubts, they rain fire and terror upon the countryside. Entire towns are leveled, farmland is turned to ash, and princesses are kidnapped from the royal roads.

But there is hope for the populace; brave knights ride the countryside to challenge the dragons. It is your job to eat these knights.

Because you are the dragon, and your purpose is to burn.

Hoard is a single and multiplayer indie game where you play as a dragon who goes around burning the countryside. It’s a top down view, and you control movement with WASD and fire with your mouse. Burning buildings and people destroys them, and their ash turns to gold, which you pick up and take back to your eponymous hoard for points, gathering as much as possible in 10 minutes.

It’s simple to learn, and not difficult to master. Towns are farms are connected – they send carts worth gold to each other. Let the carts reach their destination and the towns grow, and they’ll send out bigger carts worth more gold. Castles pop up over time, and they spawn knights and princesses you can ransom for gold, by taking them back to your hoard and stopping any knights from rescuing them for 10-20 seconds.

Powerful wizard towers also appear, which shoot very damaging bolts of magic at you. When these are destroyed they drop valuable gems. There are giants that cross the countryside, destroying towns and worth a lot of gold.

There’s also a score multiplier that increases up to x3, rising every 30 seconds. It resets when a thief steals from your hoard or when your dragon goes to 0 hp (in which case your dragon returns to your hoard where it heals quickly).

The music choice, a light, almost bubbly elevator music, certainly doesn’t add to the atmosphere.

Singleplayer was no challenge for me. I played several games and never came close to losing. You want to let towns build up some so they send more gold in carts (buildings being worth a fraction of high value carts), but crush castles, and especially long-range, high damage wizard towers ASAP.

Multiplayer is poorly implemented. You can choose to play multiplayer, and which gametype, but you can’t see a list of games or other players. If there’s no matches to be found the game just dumps you back into the main multiplayer menu without explanation.

Also, I couldn’t find any way to chat during the game. And that’s because there isn’t any.

No way to chat during the lobby period. No way to chat during the game. It’s hard to believe such a thing is possible in the year 2011. Also, no implementation of the steam community – like showing who you just played with like left4dead – beyond inviting friends.

The gameplay is pretty solid, and MP matches can be tense, but there’s not a whole lot of depth to the strategy. There are some tricks you can pull, but you can know pretty much all there is to know in an hour or so. Implementing it is just a test of hand-eye coordination.

Right now it’s $9 on steam, though it’ll rise to $10 soon. I can’t recommend it for more than $5. It’s an original game that runs smooth and MP is fun, but the lack of chat is a huge detriment, both in strategic and social terms.

CR

And so we've come full cycle! This game reminds me of a few arcade classics on the SNES i played when i was just a mini-monk. ~D

I like the overview CR, but the lack of any kind of community support is troubling. Knowing steam i'm sure Hoard will go on sale sooner or later, I'll be sure to grab it then for some cheap mindless fun.

I saw it on the Yogscast. It didn't really appeal to me much for the price it's going for.