One Way Heroics - A couple dollars to run, run for your life

[Dracos]

Coming off of a playthrough of Half Minute Hero 2 (which I should write a review for too), I was in the mood for whimsical Quirky mechanic games, so I gave a try to this.

One Way Heroics is a simplistic Rogue-like adventuring game where you must move to the right, or be crushed under the wall of darkness steadily approaching from the left.  Your hero has one life to save the world and is given the mission to defeat the demon lord by the king of the realm, who instantly teleports himself out of harms way.  And so, you rush off, swinging your weapon at monsters, humans, animals, and walls to make sure you don't get crushed, don't die, and survive long enough to kill the demon lord.  Like most rogue-likes, you have a limited inventory, fight by bumping into things, and death is permanent.

Those are usually things I really am not too keen on.  I don't tend to like permadeath, or losing progress and Stuff.  I like feeling like time spent in a game improves my situation or skill with it and not having to deal with a moment's inattention wrecking everything.  One Way Heroics has some more modern tidbits though that makes it more of a forward moving venture.  For one, you get a set of Heroic points for every run, the quantity improving based on a variety of playstyle measurements and events.  These can be used to buy optional start buffs (permanently), new character classes, or increase your vault of items.  At the end of each run, you can put as many items as you can fit in your vault, and pick them up at the start of the game (provided you can carry them). 

The average run is also short.  While you can do distance runs, and the game rewards it, on most difficulty levels, it's entirely reasonable to beat or lose the game in 30-60 minutes.  The obvious antagonist will give you 400km on easy, and start showing up somewhere in 50-150 km and then randomly past that in all other difficulty modes.

This makes a huge difference in how frustrating each 'oh, oops, well, there goes that run' that will happen.  Especially as many of the better items in the game can be kept permanently this way (no degrading).  Whether from skill or stubbornness, you can still progress.  I definitely went from struggling to get anyone to 400 km on easy to casually wandering 2000 km on very hard mode, and I don't think I would've bothered without the round to round bring overs.  It also gave something to collect aside from victory.  Gathering rare or plot special gear, or building super gear to bring repeatedly.  By the end I wandered around in top tier super-gear with piles of repair scrolls to ensure I'd never have it break.

The game is simple and silly, boasting a set of eight character classes, including special power Naked Hero.  It's easy to see that it really was a concept project rather than something fleshed out, and as that, it did a pretty good job.  There's an impressive amount of layering and playing along with the mechanics for such a simple game.  For instance, there are Buddy Tablets that will almost convert anything you throw it at to non-hostile.  Including various named enemies, allowing you to get their side of things or even recruit them.  It's got about a dozen endings, covering various characters you recruit, or victory conditions.  Nothing is particularly deep, but at the same time, there's more there than meets the eye, and for a few dollar game, perhaps that's plenty.

I had more fun with it for a longer timeframe than I expected, given really it doesn't step above middling at any point.  I did adore gathering up companions in it, and it was rewarding as Companions were generally one of the OP things in the game, able to outscale your protagonist considerably in early and midgame, as well as negate the penalty from being back or side attacked.  The Training Bracelet was another of those, making companions far more powerful, and also putting your leveling rate at a pretty enormous level, so even with the penalties, wearing it for a good chunk of the game was demi-god training.  And I'd be remiss in not saying that Force Users with the Holy Staff are just unstoppable monsters.  I'd wander into random dungeons and one-shot the entire dungeon in one spell (lightning bolt), then just pick up the loot and move on.

Generally, if you're someone that enjoys simple dungeon-crawl type fare, it's a good spend of a couple of dollars to waste time with.