Hoard

The Short


Pros
- Arcade style action where you play as a dragon
- Burninate the countryside, burninate the peasants, burninate all the people in their thatched roof cottages
- Four player multiplayer is actually pretty fun
- Easy to grasp a hold of, core concepts are solid and fun for a few games

Cons
- Graphics look pretty bad
- Doesn't mix stuff up enough; once you've played the tutorial you pretty much know how the rest of the game goes
- Keyboard and mouse controls are totally broken; better get a controller here
- Single player is not fun at all; AI is stupid
- Multiplayer is awesome, but nobody is playing it
- You aren't really getting much value for your $10 here ($15 on PSN)

It's gonna be really hard to not make Trogdor jokes this whole review. 

The Long

Hoard is an interesting little game where its big promotional push is you "PLAY AS THE DRAGON!" Essentially an arcade game (that reminded me a little too much of the free Dash of Destruction Doritos game on XBLA), your goal is simple: burn stuff, get money, return it to your cave before the other dragons beat you to it. By getting gold you can get upgrades like speed, damage, life, and carrying capacity, until you are the biggest and baddest dragon of them all, razing countrysides, stealing princesses and holding them for ransom, and putting Smaug to shame. 

It's a cool idea. Too bad that's about all this game has. 

If it burns, we can kill it. 

All matches typically play out the same. You have two to four dragons who all want fat loot. It starts slow, burning farms and small settlements as you grow in power (or burning each other, if your friends are jerks). As time passes things ramp up: thieves show up to snitch your gold and you have to defend it. Princesses, escorted by knights, can be kidnapped and if you can hold them for long enough they'll pay out a hefty ransom. Cities keep popping up and growing stronger, making your adventures more and more treacherous, and all the while your friends are getting more powerful (and are still jerks) so they burn you to steal your precious gold. Some friends. 

TROGDOOOOOOR! Ok, that was it. I promise. 

With a handful of maps, if you have four players together (online, in Steam's case) this game is actually pretty hilariously fun, at least for a few maps. You can all act like jerks as you fight to get the most gold (the game is time based, so whoever has the most at the end wins), and since matches are usually only 10 minutes you can easily jump into the next one before the losers get all whiny. It's a blast for a couple of games, especially with people you know.

And then you realize something: that's all there is to this game.

Repetition sets in quick. 

Killing guys, getting gold, going home; you'll be doing this over and over. And while it's tolerable when with friends (and for the initial few runs), after a few games you'll all probably be done with it forever. Single player is a horrible experience; playing against AI dragons just doesn't have the same fun and thrill factor as stealing from friends would. It gets bland extremely quickly, which is a shame. 

Run away!

It also hurts that this game looks ugly. The "board game" aesthetic was a little endearing for a while, but the lack of variety between maps (hope you like green or brown fields) means they all look kind of the same. The sprites are really small and lack detail, and the effects are bland. Again, the fact that I filed this under "board game" helped, but I still can't shake the impression this game just doesn't look very good, even for an indie title. Sound is also poor and gets extremely irritating very quickly. 

It's also worth nothing that (for me, at least, playing the Mac version) the keyboard and mouse controls were straight up broken. It plays fine on an Xbox 360 controller (using duel sticks to move and shoot fire), but on my regular computer stuff I could hardly control it at all. We are talking completely broken here. 

I got this in an indie bundle, so for that price it was worth it, I guess...

As it stands, I can't recommend Hoard. If you have four friends and everybody can get the game for super-cheap, it might be a fun diversion for a few hours (or if you pick it up in an indie bundle, which I did). But paying the full $10 on Steam (or oddly up-priced $15 on PSN) is absurd. There just isn't enough variety here, even for arcade point junkies. Again, there isn't anything fundamentally broken about Hoard (except keyboard/mouse controls), but at its core this simple game just doesn't have the carrying capacity like other simple games like Bejeweled or Royal Envoy. 

Plus, there's no Trogdor. Two out of five stars.

I almost made it this whole review...