A Year Later | Has-Been Heroes | Is It Worth The Money?

Has-Been Heroes is a rather hit-and-miss game. If you've played it, you likely either fell in love with the deep amount of strategy it has or you got bored of it before your third victory and didn't bother to see what the game's like with more heroes to choose from. For me personally, I went through both of those experiences. I quite liked the game the first time I played it, but the more I lost, the less interested in unlocking more heroes I became. I played it off and on for some time, and I eventually dropped the game for some time. However, once I picked it back up, I eventually got the victories I needed to unlock several heroes and fully open up the game's depth. At this point, I fell in love with the game. I already appreciated the game for its sense of humor, fantasy setting, and gameplay which vaguely reminded me of Child of Light, but I fell in love with it for the brilliance of its design.

Imagine my delight when I found out that Has-Been Heroes was getting an expansion, or rather, when it suddenly got an expansion. You see, when you win a run for the first six times, you unlock an element each time, which is conveyed by its respective symbol showing up on wheel. One day, the developers of the game, Frozenbyte, teased an update by sharing an image on the game's Subreddit (at least, that's where I saw it) that showed the element wheel with extra spaces on it. Not long after, they announced that they've released a quite sizable expansion that adds tons of new content for free - which made it clear that the extra spaces on the element wheel were for the new heroes. Essentially, fans of the game went from thinking a major update might happen soon to being told a major update was available in a matter of days, with no confirmation that a major update was coming until it was available.

This update is nothing to scoff at, both for how much it adds and how difficult the new content is. First of all, the update adds nine new characters in the form of the "Young" versions of the main heroes - I say "Young" in quotes because as far as I knew, Tam was already considered the "young hero," yet she has a "Young" form. Each Young hero is more than just a reskin: they each have new starting spells and stats that distinguish them from their not-so-young counterparts. Kedi, for example, gains more melee damage, immunity to fire, and +20 melee damage after each skill.

In the main game, unlocking all of the heroes was a matter of getting to the end with every character at least once. To unlock the Young heroes, the newly added Challenges in Challenge Mode must be completed. These Challenges play with the conventions of the game and start you off with specific starting items and spells, with the goal simply being to kill all enemies in the oncoming wave. Unlike the main game, though, these encounters will be exactly the same every time, so if you fail a challenge, you can keep trying and learning from your past mistakes. Unfortunately, Challenges will be locked if the player hasn't unlocked the heroes that are used in the scenarios. At the time of the update's release, I was missing two heroes who were required, and only recently unlocked them both. Each challenge rewards a specific hero, and once all eight are complete, you will be rewarded with Young Tam.

In addition to these nine new heroes, each Young Hero also has three alternate weapons to unlock, which change their stats and starting spells. This effectively means that the big update added not nine heroes, but thirty six - doubling the amount of playable characters. I'll remind you that this update was completely free for all who own a copy of Has-Been Heroes. To unlock a new weapon, one must enter a portal with a party of Young Heroes, make their way through the new Sky Temple area, and defeat the boss at the end. The part I'm not fond of with this process is the portal part; each portal is in a specific area of the game and only opens with a particular hero in the party. What makes this unpleasant is that you have no way of determining what area you'll go to, so getting the right area is a 50-50 shot for half of them. This isn't much of a problem for Zakwas and Kedi's portals, since you can have them both in the party at once, but you can't for Favian and Khar, so you just have to hope that you'll go to the right area when you attempt to get either of their weapons.

Once through the portal, you'll be placed in the Sky Temple, which plays out like the game's final area (which I won't spoil here), with the hero's respective Hell boss waiting at the end. These bosses aren't completely new, but rather are "Hell" versions of previously existing bosses. The "Hell" title is well-earned, as these bosses are not to be taken lightly; they are much tougher than their normal counterparts, and not just for having higher stats. Admittedly, though, I've only fought two Hell bosses at the time of writing this, so I don't have very much experience with them and can't account for every little detail that distinguished them from their other versions.

Defeating a Hell boss won't just unlock a new weapon for the respective Young hero, but will also unlock completely new spells and items to be found on future runs. The expansion added lots of crazy new items and spells, and they are by no means "fluff;" they are genuinely new items that bring new effects along with them, such as the Vital Drain and Bruised effects. Vital Drain deals damage equal to 4% of the target's health and heals the attacker, while Bruised deals damage equal to the active combo on that target. Some items even change the foundation of the game, such as one that doubles a hero's health and attack power after each kill, and one that makes spells no long recharge but also vastly decreases the amount of souls required to fill the Soul Orbs. I'm sure that this game expansion is meant more for players who've already 100% the main game, but this stuff can definitely help out if you have yet to do so.

Once every one of the Young Hero's weapons have been acquired, the Epic Quest mode unlocks. In this mode, the player takes command of the three heroes from Trine, who play very differently than the normal heroes. I've heard that this mode is incredibly difficult, but also very short in comparison to the normal game. I'll reiterate that I don't have much experience with the expansion content, so I can't comment on this new mode, but it's cool that it exists, at least. I look forward to being able to play it myself.

In my time with the game since my review, I've come to realize a few things about that I think are worth mentioning. The first thing I noticed is the interesting way that the developers balanced heroes. For example, the harder-hitting one-hitters deal damage in a wider ratio than others; for example, 100-200 damage. If these heroes dealt high damage more consistently - like 190-200 - they'd make the weaker-hitting heroes less valuable. This also ties into the game's interesting difficulty curve; after a certain point, the game stops getting harder directly and in some ways actually gets easier thanks to the new heroes you unlock after each successive victory. However, at this point the challenge becomes unlocking every hero, which means learning to use every hero. For example, I'm not particularly fond of Roho, so part of the challenge of the game for me would be learning to use Roho effectively to unlock more heroes with him.

I've also noticed that once you understand the game, it's hard to play it "wrong." Some players recommend putting every critical hit chance increasing item to your three-hitter, but there's nothing wrong with putting some of those items on your one-hitter. Sure, they don't start with any critical hit chance to build on, but that doesn't mean it's wrong to build it on them anyway. Critical hits with a one-hitter are rarer as a result of this, but they deal much more damage than a three-hitter critical hit, which leads to one-strike deaths that might not have happened otherwise; I can't even describe how satisfying it is killing an enemy through their stamina with a one-hitter critical hit. Plus, inventory space is limited, so if you put absolutely every critical hit chance item on your three-hitter, their inventory will fill up quickly and leave less room for items that are truly more effective on them than anyone else. The same goes with +hit items; you might think that giving them to your three-hitter would be great, since they already depend on hitting multiple times and more hits means more chances for critical hits, but they can also go to your one-hitter and help them deal more damage per melee combo as well and bolster their already powerful melee combos.

Young Favian

Young Crux

Mid-Lane Spawn

Willy Wonka Skeleton

Now to address the two complaints I had in my review of Has-Been Heroes. First, my biggest complaint: mid-lane enemy spawns. This mechanic used to be a huge pain in my side, but I've realized that they aren't actually that bad. In essence, they are enemies who spawn with less time for you to deal with. The fact that you can't predict them is irrelevant because you can't predict normal enemy spawns either. This is why they occur more and more frequently in later areas; they're meant to increase the difficulty of the encounter by giving you enemies who start off further down the lane. Sure, they're can still be a frustrating curve-ball, but they're not any less fair than any other enemy mechanic. In fact, I would say that mid-lane spawns give me less trouble than enemies who speed up when you melee them (which can unfortunately also spawn mid-lane). Thankfully, though, only skeleton enemies can spawn mid-lane, so you'll never have a tanky Zombie or tricky-to-deal-with Ghost pop up out of nowhere. In other words, this mechanic could've been a lot worse than it actually is.

The other complaint I had was how the game handles progression for the first six wins. Starting off, you don't have access to all of the spell elements or many of the heroes, so you don't get as good of a feel for the game's amounts of strategy when you first play it. It isn't until you unlock all of the elements and the basic set of heroes that the game really opens up and you start to have options to play around with. While I still feel that this maybe isn't the best way to handle the game's progression, I can see that it's meant to ease the player into the game and help them understand the core mechanics before giving them new things to think about.

The progression of element unlocks does make sense when you apply this train of thought to it: you start off with none - again, to help you focus on learning the game's basic mechanics - before first unlocking Water. While not a spectacular element, Water synergizes with every other element and is great as a utility. Next you unlock Lightning, which is one of the more immediately powerful elements that deals twice as much damage to wet targets. Next is Fire, which can be great for crowd-control, especially when combined with Water or Lightning. Then it's Ice, which is more of a strong-on-its-own type of element, but can still double damage from Fire and Lightning attacks and benefit from targets being wet from Water attacks. Then it's Poison, which is another good crowd-control element that meshes well with Lightning. Then last is Wind, which is great for pushing back enemies, spreading Fire and Poison, and freezing wet enemies (for double the normal freeze duration, to boot).

If you got all of these elements right away, there would be a lot more to learn right off the bat than just the main mechanics, which would overwhelm players with information that needs learning and the more important details risk being lost in the flood. As things are, new players can focus on a few things at a time per victory; first it's the learning the main mechanics, the first three heroes, and the first few bosses; then it's how to use Favian, how to deal with the new enemies and bosses, and what uses Water has; then it's how to use Florencio, how to deal with another new set of enemies and bosses, and what Lighting can do; and so on. If you started with or unlocked more than this right away, it would be harder for new players to see where they went wrong when they die, since there is so much that could've been done wrong.

Ultimately, I'm changing my score from a 4 out of 5 to a perfect 5 out of 5. I absolutely love Has-Been Heroes and I highly recommend it if it looks even remotely interesting to you. I can assure you that the game is deeper than it might seem to be, and once you get the hang of things, it can be very satisfying. I've played Has-Been Heroes for over 160 hours and I still get a good laugh when I kick a boss's butt, and I get absolutely stoked when I have a successful run. The big update that the developers release doubled the amount of content the game has to offer, so if the game wasn't worth twenty bucks before, it most definitely is now.

(Screenshots were capture in the Switch's Handheld mode and thus may not represent the quality of the game's graphics while Docked.)

Box Art Source - Unofficial Nintendo Wiki: http://nintendo.wikia.com/wiki/Has-Been_Heroes