One of the summer’s most anticipated titles, Bungie’s Destiny, just recently started its beta testing earlier this week for the Playstation consoles. Destiny has been on the lips of everyone ever since it was announced as people were drawn to the studio’s next big hit since the Halo series. Needless to say, Destiny has drummed up a lot of hype; so much hype, however, that many other games and sales went by the wayside.
Once I hit the low ceiling of level 8 on my first beta character, I decided to power down the Playstation 4, stand up, stretch, and see what was happening on the wonderful world of Steam. To my inevitable delight, I found a number of games on sale (as Steam’s user base is accustomed to) and among those games, one title stood out to me in particular: Hero Siege. With an original price tag of $6.00 being knocked down to $1.50 until July 21st, I found it hard to resist Panic Art Studio’s first release on Steam. After all, who doesn’t love a top-down RPG rouge-like for under the price of a cheeseburger?
I immediately installed Hero Siege and began plowing my way through wave after wave of zombies, skeletons, spiders, and everything in between. When I purchase indie games, especially ones this cheap, I often expect the game to lose steam quickly, either because of a lack of a challenge or content. To my furthered delight, I found Hero Siege to be lacking in neither of these fields. As I created my first character, a fierce viking, and dove into the first map, I found that this game would quickly punish me for jumping into the fray without taking into account my surroundings on the map and which enemies I was fighting.
One of the first things you see when you load into a map in Hero Siege are the randomly generated traps which play a huge part in trying to bring about the demise of both you and your enemies. The traps can range anywhere from simple ballistas to horned statues which fire homing balls of energy at you to large spiked stones which travel back and forth mindlessly crushing whatever stands in its way. Each trap presents a different way to die or, if your skilled at maneuvering the WASD keys on your keyboard, murdering your own foes. If the traps don’t kill you, then the wealth of enemies will.
Just like the traps in each map, the enemies are also randomly generated. If you’re like me and are a fan of games like Diablo and Torchlight, then you’ll feel right at home with the mobs in Hero Siege. Each wave of enemies consist of monsters ranging from your standard white-named creature with no special abilities to elites and champions with unique properties such as added buffs and magical explosions upon death. Even as I leveled my viking to level 8, I still found myself sweating on the first map as more and more powerful creatures descended upon me giving me the challenge which I desire in indie games to keep me interested.
There are many other positive things to talk about with Hero Siege: the wide variety of classes, the numerous relics with a huge range of differing abilities, the skill trees for each class, but I want to leave some of the discovery up to those who want to buy the game. As I said above, Hero Siege is on sale through July 21st at a 75% discount on Steam. You can also find mobile versions of Hero Siege for the iPhone and Android on the appropriate app stores. Let’s take a moment to remember that, while big studio name triple-A games definitely deserve the attention they receive, we should also remember the small, indie games which bring us off-the-wall, unexpected, genre-mixing entertainment lest they fall into the shadow to never be seen again.
