Has-Been Heroes

Short version: Pros: + Very challenging + Satisfying combat + Lots of content (items, spells, playable characters, enemies, etc.) + Very replayable + Cute art-style Cons: - Very grindy towards the end (new items, new heroes) - Very steep learning curve (around 12 hours) and barely any guidance - Mostly useless passive abilities (details down below) “Long” version: [u]Has-Been Heroes[/u] is a rogue-like strategy game developed by Frozenbyte and published by GameTrust Games. You play as a group of “has-beens”, way past their prime and you must escort the princesses to school. On the way, however, you will face countless monsters and discover powerful relics. I remember watching this game get announced for the Nintendo Switch (and I thought it was an exclusive) and thinking to myself that I really wanted to try it. I watched some reviews, watched some gameplay and it was received rather favorably. I was not considering owning a Switch, however, so I forgot about it. Out of nowhere, a few months later, I found it on Steam. I purchased it immediately and gave it a try. It took me a good while to be done with it, but here is my review. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1201004474 First up, story. The story is very barebones, but for a game like this, it totally works. Your characters are old but still skilled and capable of some butt kicking. Your first main quest is to take the princesses to school, but after finishing the game a few times you will get different quests and cutscenes. None are particularly engaging but, again, it is just enough to justify its presence. The story is told through simple animations and gibberish dialogue, for the most part. Gameplay in Has-Been Heroes offers a great mix of strategic exploration and challenging combat. You'll control a classic trio – a rogue, a wizard, and a knight – each with unique attack patterns. Between battles, you'll navigate procedurally generated maps, seeking out combat encounters, merchants, altars, and treasures. Coins, keys, and candles earned along the way are crucial for purchasing items, opening chests, and revisiting areas. Items grant boosts to your characters' stats like damage, speed, and health, while spells drastically alter your playstyle. Spells harness elemental properties (water + ice = freeze, etc.), and while characters might lean towards specific elements, this specialization doesn't have a significant impact in practice. Each character has spell slots with passive buffs, but these only work if you find the right matching spell - a frustrating layer of luck. The massive pool of available spells further adds to the randomness, making it difficult to strategically target a desired build. Combat unfolds in a unique lane-based system. Enemies charge at you, and if they reach your heroes, they'll deplete your stamina first, swiftly followed by health. Stamina management is key, as breaking an enemy's stamina with precise attacks allows for a devastating stun and full damage. Critical hits provide additional tactical opportunities. My favorite combat feature is the rogue's ability to double another character's attacks, enabling potentially screen-clearing combos that feel incredibly satisfying. Characters can also switch lanes after an attack, dealing damage on their return and potentially triggering even more passive abilities, but at the risk of getting damaged by damage of time effects like poison and fire. While strategic, the game can sometimes feel overwhelming due to sheer enemy numbers. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1408990448 Graphically speaking,[u]Has-Been Heroes[/u] boasts a charming, cartoonish art style that bursts with personality. While the character models for our heroes are well-designed, the enemies could benefit from some additional variety. Most of them are bastard-skellies with different headgear, which got repetitive. That being said, it was funny to see some enemies wearing Nintendo outfits – pretty sure the company is not aware of this! Beyond the characters, the environments are serviceable, but where the game really shines is in its vibrant colors and flashy (and plentiful!) effects. Let's talk sound! Has-Been Heroes features a soundtrack that, thanks to my many hours of gameplay, ended up permanently etched into my brain. The sound effects are top-notch, especially the satisfying punch of spells and critical hits. If you manage to multiply a character's hits above 100 with the rogue's ability, the resulting cacophony of sound is so incredibly satisfying, it's beyond words! The narrator does a great job adding flavor to the action, but thankfully, he doesn't overstay his welcome. The rest of the characters stick to gibberish, which works well with the game's lighthearted tone. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1221000791 My main criticism of Has-Been Heroes centers around the sheer amount of repetition necessary to unlock everything. Unlocking the full roster of characters requires hundreds of runs, and the vast selection of spells and items means you'll likely never experience them all. Even with significant playtime, I achieved roughly 60-70% completion. Despite this, Has-Been Heroes boasts immense replay value and easily justifies its price tag – it's an absolute steal on sale! If you are willing to push through the initial learning curve, you will be rewarded with satisfying combat mechanics and a huge amount of content that stays fresh for a good while – lots of bang for your buck! This is undoubtedly an underrated hidden gem in my eyes. Final score: 8 out of 10. If you enjoyed this review, please consider following my [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/7792954-GGN-Reviews/]curator page[/url].

Has-Been Heroes is probably one of the best and most underrated roguelikes that I know of. This game is great and you should try it out. In Has-Been Heroes you play a team of legendary heroes who are however past their prime time and all they do nowadays are simple errands for the king. In this game their job is to bring the two princesses to their school. But at the same time an evil ghoul enslaves the souls of the dead to create an army of undead monsters that he unleashes on the world. Since the heroes cross paths with the ghouls army, they have no other choice to cut them down and defeat the ghoul. The story is pretty silly but the gameplay is top notch in return. The game is divided into two sections, the map and the actual battles. When not in battle you go around the map, which is designed like a maze of multiple crossroads and nodes. Each node represents a point of interest and can be either a small one or a big one. Small nodes may contain battles while big nodes contain shops, chests, gamble mini games and shrines. If you walk into a battle node that's where the main gameplay starts. Your three heroes each walk down a lane while enemies come in from the other side and run towards them. If an enemy reaches a hero he will attack him and the hero will push the enemy back at the end of the lane. You usually want to avoid this because your heroes cannot take much damage and heal very slowly and only during battles. You can send each hero out to attack the front enemy in their lane and each hero has a number attacs depending of their class. The rogue class attacks three times, the mage class two times and the warrior class one time. You always have to take these three classes in your runs even if you switch out characters. The reason for this is because both enemies and player characters have something called Stamina. Stamina is a form of shield that protects against a single attack. As long as you have enough Stamina, you don't take damage but the same applies to enemies. Your goal is to deplete the enemy stamina before you can kill them. It is important that you hit the exact number of stamina points with your attacks because if you do, the enemy gets stunned and the next attack will send it back to the end of the lane and also permanently remove a single stamina point. That way you can whittle down at the enemy until he dies. Enemies with large Stamina points usually have less HP and vice versa. Additionally you also have a small chance to crit an enemy and crit attacks will pierce stamina. Heroes that have been send out can also be swapped into other lanes (and only then), which is important to get the right attack numbers. Playing around the stamina system is the most important aspect of the game and gives Has-Been Heroes a puzzle-like nature which makes the game so much fun. However, heroes have an attack cooldown and you will eventually notice that attacks are not enough anymore to keep the sheer number of enemies away from your team. This is where spells come in. Each hero starts with a spell and has a limited amount of slots for more spells that you can purchase during your run. Spells are divided into different magic elements or may have no element at all but the ones with elements are more interesting. Spells can do various things, buff your heroes, deal damage to single or multiple enemies but depending on the lement they all may have special effects. Fire and toxic deal damage over time effects which spread on contact, water soaks enemies and removes fire and poison, ice freezes enemies solid which allows for direct damage to the HP, lightning chains to nearby enemies and wind knocks enemies back. There is also darkness which is a variation of normal spells and changed the usual sppell cooldown to HP costs which makes those spells spamable for a price. What makes the spell system so damn interesting is that each element interacts with another. This needs a bit of experimentation first because the game does not explain this to you but once you figured this out or consulted a guide you can create absurd combinations. Here are some examples: Fire and water creates steam which does remove the DoT effect but slows down enemies in the steam cloud massively. Soaked enemies also take extra lightning damage and increases the chain length. Wind spreads fire and poison to nemies behind them, even in other lanes or you can slide a frozen enemy backwards until he hits another, dealing massive damage to both. There are even more combinations and it is fun to play around them. It is clear the developers put a lot of effort into this system to give players many different ways how to approach fights so no matter what type of spells you get, you always will have some synergies. The spell system gets even better if you make good use of the characters spell slots. Each character has some spell slots that buff spells that you put into them. These usually ract to specific spell types, so they are not as flexible as the rest of the game but can make a big difference if used right. The slots can apply buffs to the entire team, hit enemies multiple times with the same spell, icnrease the AoE effect or even buff the effects of the spell elements. But this isn't the end of things the game offers. Your characters can get passive items during the run, each passive item will increase ther max HP of that character but also have an effect. Effects can be anything and going over all of them would take too much time. Some typical effects are more spell damage, faster cooldowns or adding elemental effects to normal attacks. And of course there are new unlocks to discover and there are a lot of them. You unlock new stuff in two ways, by killing enemies and by winning runs. Enemies killed release souls that your characters collect. At the end of your run these souls will add up until they unlock a chest with new items, spells and other stuff. Souls can also be used during your run to instantly cast a spell, even if it is still on cooldown. Those souls used are not removed from your meta count, they are just another gameplay mechanic. By winning runs you unlock new zones (the game gets overall longer) and a new magic element. Once you have unlocked all elements and the game has reached its final size (8 zones in total) you start unlocking new characters. These characters start with their own passive abilites and a different spell and will replace one of your other characters during your run. But the content does not stop here. You can also play special challnges which are brutaly hard and have special rules but if you beat them you unlock the young version of a specific hero. These are from the time when the heroes were in their best shape and this reflects in their powers and spells. You might have wondered for example why the mage character, who deals more spell damage, starts with a spell that does no damage. Well, it's because he is old and has lost much of his former glory but his younger version comes with a super powerful spell that deals a lot of damage. And once you start using younger heroes, you can unlock ALTERNATE heroes. Those are heroes from other timelines which are also completely different. It is sheer mindblowing how much stuff you can unlock in this game and how much time you will spend with it. Truly a masterpiece in my book. I had a lot of fun with this game and every now and then I pick it up again because it is so much fun to play.

Поставлю палец вверх, но на деле обзор нейтральный. Игра не то, чтобы плоха, но имеет немало недостатков, которые сводят на нет ее плюсы. Судите сами: игра представляет собой рогалик, в котором по мере игры вы будете открывать новые заклинания, артефакты, врагов, варианты точек на карте и событий, героев и многое другое, что дает довольно большую вариативность и неплохо разнообразит прохождения. Что касается героев, то вы открываете их за прохождения игры и победу над финальным боссом. Герои представляют определенную стихию (в плане генерации заклинаний у торговцев заклинаниями на карте), но вы сами решаете, кому из персонажей отдать полученное заклинание, то есть они определяют генерацию в рамках забега, но не привязаны к определенной стихии напрямую. Также, кроме внешнего вида, герои отличаются базовым заклинанием и бонусами слотов под заклинания, которые стоит учитывать при подборе заклинаний для большей эффективности. Сочетания заклинаний разных стихий также имеют разные эффекты типа увеличения урона от молнии по мокрым врагам. Теперь перейдем к минусам, которых тоже немало: начнем с того, что каждый персонаж имеет среди своих характеристик количество атак и урон, причем механики сделаны так, что урон играет роль только если у противника нет брони (то есть сколько бы урона персонаж не наносил, если у противника есть броня, его урон равен 0), то есть приходится сначала персонажами с большим количеством слабых атак сбивать броню с врагов и только потом бить кем-то сильным, нанося урон (причем у многих мобов на поздних этапах игры брони реально много (5-7), да еще и броня восстанавливается, если противника быстро не убить) и вот тут встает первый минус - вы можете менять персонажа на линии только во время атаки по противнику, на которую есть кд, что весьма не удобно. Кроме того, как указано в части обзоров, спрайты противников сделаны так, что при виде сбоку (а именно такой вид в игре), часть противников просто заслоняет собой других (в том числе на других линиях), лишая вас возможности атаковать нужную цель. Причем на более поздних этапах игры вас зачастую просто будут давить толпы тяжело бронированных мобов, поскольку у вас просто не будет возможности убить 2-3 параллельно идущих мобов с 5-7 единицами брони одновременно из-за того, что количество атак у ваших персонажей ограничено. Но для меня самым большим минусом стал другой - с каждым убийством финального босса, путь до него для следующего прохождения увеличивается и, если для первого убийства и прохождения игры вам понадобится около получаса или даже меньше, то уже после 3-4 побед этот путь превратится в пару часов и дальше-больше. Как итог, если вас интересуют рогалики, можете попробовать, но я бы рекомендовал дождаться скидки.

7/10 - A good rogue-like that can be a lot of fun if you're lucky with the items. I don't understand the bad reviews because of the difficult start - the game mechanics are relatively simple, easy to understand and after a few attempts you can get very far.

Fun lane-based rogue-lite with an interesting premise (playing as a band of retired heroes)

好！

I wish they would make a part two. A sequel. Something. This game is one of a kind and everything about it is unique. Sadly we will probably never see anything like it ever again.

Has-Been Heroes, developed by Frozenbyte and published by GameTrust Games, is a roguelike strategy adventure that dares to do something unusual with its genre. It blends real-time lane-based combat with a turn-based layer of planning, creating a system that demands precision, timing, and adaptability. The game follows a group of washed-up heroes tasked with a deceptively simple mission—escort twin princesses to school. What begins as a humorous premise quickly turns into a grueling test of endurance and tactical thinking. Beneath its colorful exterior and cartoonish art style lies one of the most punishing and methodical roguelikes of its kind, designed to reward mastery and punish complacency in equal measure. At the center of Has-Been Heroes is its combat system, which takes place across three lanes. Each lane corresponds to one of your heroes, and enemies approach relentlessly from the opposite side. Every time you attack, your character becomes temporarily exhausted, forcing you to rotate your heroes strategically between lanes while managing cooldowns and spell effects. Success requires understanding the rhythm of combat—knowing when to strike, when to pause, and when to swap positions. It’s a system that initially feels chaotic but soon reveals an underlying logic that becomes incredibly satisfying once mastered. There’s a real sense of accomplishment in chaining attacks perfectly, juggling enemies between heroes, and turning the tide of a seemingly unwinnable battle through pure precision. This layer of complexity is paired with the game’s roguelike structure, which ensures that no two runs are ever the same. Each attempt generates a new map filled with random encounters, merchants, spell scrolls, and boss battles. Items and abilities are distributed randomly, forcing you to adapt your strategy with whatever tools you happen to find. Every time you die—and you will die often—you unlock new spells, weapons, or heroes that can appear in future runs. This gradual expansion of your arsenal gives a sense of long-term progression despite the constant failures. The game thrives on this loop of learning, dying, and improving, transforming frustration into motivation. The first time you manage to make it past an area that previously felt impossible is a genuinely rewarding moment, the kind of payoff only a tough roguelike can deliver. The game’s tone and presentation add a welcome contrast to its difficulty. The art style is bright and cartoon-like, with expressive character animations that lend personality to each hero and enemy. Frozenbyte’s distinct visual flair gives the game a playful energy even in its most intense moments. Explosions, spell effects, and critical hits burst across the screen in satisfying cascades of color, while the music keeps the tempo high with fast-paced fantasy beats. It’s visually busy but rarely confusing; the clarity of its animations helps you track what’s happening even amid the chaos. The characters themselves embody a sense of humor that matches the absurdity of the premise—a group of washed-up legends taking on a mission that’s beneath them—but that levity often fades once you realize just how brutal the game truly is. Yet, for all its ambition, Has-Been Heroes is not an easy game to love. Its learning curve is daunting, and the first few hours can feel like punishment. The tutorial barely scratches the surface of what you need to know, leaving players to figure out much of the combat’s intricacy through trial and error. The reliance on randomness can also test your patience. Because weapon and spell drops are unpredictable, a single bad roll can derail an otherwise strong run. There’s skill involved in surviving, but there’s also luck, and when luck isn’t on your side, failure can feel unfair rather than instructive. The difficulty curve spikes dramatically, and newcomers may find themselves restarting dozens of times before making meaningful progress. For some, this challenge is part of the appeal, but for others, it may prove alienating. Despite its frustrations, there’s a compelling depth to Has-Been Heroes that keeps persistent players engaged. Once the controls and systems begin to click, the game transforms from confusing chaos into a dance of perfectly timed coordination. Each victory feels earned through deliberate strategy and quick reflexes. The way spells, melee attacks, and hero swaps interact allows for creative problem-solving that few other games replicate. Discovering a combination that devastates enemies or finding an efficient way to handle multi-enemy waves gives a sense of mastery that few modern roguelikes match. It’s the kind of satisfaction that comes from conquering a system rather than just surviving within it. The sense of progression extends beyond the immediate gameplay. The more you play, the more heroes and abilities you unlock, and the greater your strategic options become. While early runs might feel limited and repetitive, later ones open up into a complex web of possibilities. You begin to recognize enemy patterns, anticipate weaknesses, and refine your approach to maximize efficiency. It’s a slow and demanding process, but one that rewards dedication with increasingly dynamic and enjoyable runs. The game’s structure practically demands a certain mindset—patience, persistence, and a willingness to fail repeatedly for the sake of improvement. Ultimately, Has-Been Heroes is a game defined by contradiction. It’s whimsical but brutal, simple in premise but complex in execution, frustrating yet deeply rewarding. It’s a title that doesn’t compromise to meet players halfway; instead, it challenges them to rise to its level. For those who appreciate the grind of mastery and the satisfaction of overcoming steep odds, it offers a uniquely rewarding experience. For everyone else, it may feel like an uphill battle that never quite justifies its difficulty. Frozenbyte has created a game that dares to be different—one that refuses to hold your hand and instead asks you to earn every inch of progress. It’s a difficult journey, but for the right kind of player, Has-Been Heroes delivers moments of triumph that make every defeat along the way worth enduring. Rating: 7/10

A fun roguelite that plays like a puzzle. The gameplay might look confusing at first, but it's actually pretty easy to grasp in the end. Play it on a controller though.

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