Hero’s Hour review (Steam)

by Jim Smale · March 9, 2022

This Hero’s Hour review has us playing a fast turn-based strategy RPG with real-time combat. Develop your cities and armies, level up your heroes to gain new, powerful spells and skills, and explore the wonders and dangers of the procedurally generated maps as you aim to conquer your enemies before they do the same to you.

Hero’s Hour Review Pros:

Pixel art graphics.
Download size.
Steam achievements.
Graphics – fullscreen, autoscale, mini-map size, town screen, smooth text, unit color, and UI scale slider.
Can rebind controls.
Optional tutorial.
You get a set amount of steps you can do a day to travel, resting at night will return your steps, and doing things like visiting fires will add extra steps.
Combat is automatic but you can drag and drop your troops around before and during the combat.
Take over buildings to gain resources or new troops. It’s all optional but it’s highly advantageous.
Earn EXP to get a point to put into the skill tree to unlock new abilities and rewards.
Collect resources from the world and buildings.
The Town menu allows you to build new attachments to places, add new structures, and more. There is a handy map to show placements.
Combat can be sped up or skipped.
Anything you mouse over will bring up the text or an enemy’s difficulty rating.
A lot going on from base building to exploration and combat.
The tutorial does a good job of breaking it all up.
Combat units can be split into smaller units with a simple button press.
Map uncovers as you play.
Each run is randomly generated.
Two-player hot seat mode.
Five difficulties – Easy, normal, challenging, hardcore, and hardcore plus.
You need to defend your base from attacks.
Advanced game settings allow you to tweak every part of the game from attack strength to timers and enemies.
The game is split into turns which are days, at the end of your turn your moves replenish but the enemy almost move.
You can only build one item a day in your Garrison.
Zoom in and out of the map with the mouse wheel.
Random events throughout the map.
Play how you want.
The Town has its own build tree to help.
You can create many groups of armies and have them roaming around.
Huge map to explore.

Hero’s Hour Review Cons:

No controller support.
A lot to take in.
The general game flow is fine but the action/progress is so broken up and varied it makes for a mixed bag experience.
Relies on RNG so much that it really unbalances the game.
Constant difficulty spikes.
The overall pace is stuttered.
Doesn’t compel or drag you in enough to keep coming back.
Get a bad world roll and you will never recover.
You don’t get good feedback on performance or progression.

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