Hero's Hour

I really tried to understand this game. I spent tens of hours with different factions and found it to be a shallow 'tactical' experience. For starters, the game looks great. The pixel graphics and color palette are beautiful and I'm amazed at the attention to detail with the dozens of different units. The interface is clean and easy to read and I didn't see any bugs. There are several factions and city types with mostly similar units, but with some varying abilities (all factions have a basic ranged, melee, mounted and 'large' type of unit). Now the problems. When you enter combat you CAN pick the type of units to deploy, but after some time you'll just get annoyed that there are so many units and start with whatever the game picks. Once battle begins you have no control. Units will move towards the enemy and target whatever. You can select a few and direct them in a direction, but they still just do whatever. You can cast spells, but once your mana runs out you just sit and watch as pixels smash into each other. On the higher difficulties you have to get lucky and hope your opponents keep each other busy while you build up or they swoop in and crush you. This is because unit production is restricted to a weekly total. Once you reach the limit, you can't hire more. If your army isn't strong enough to fight the npcs, you have to sit and wait for the next week. Cities are built up in mostly the same way and you always build everything. Units are always on the same tier and you can only build one building a day regardless of your income. The maps are random so you MIGHT get a node that lets you hire more units, but usually not. Finally, the army size is limitless. You can only start with x amount of units, but the reserves are endless. It comes down to who has the bigger army. If not you, you lose. tldr; There are no tactics and your production is very limited. Enemies crush you easily on higher difficulties and lower difficitulties are too easy. It's mindless.

Everything feels good until it doesn't. The quick battles or whatever you'd like to call them are cute and silly but have very little depth and the game feels like it makes sense until you randomly get destroyed by an enemy labeled "easy" and while it might make sense from some functional standpoint there isn't enough information available for you to learn and do better in the future. Was the pixel art a high level spell? Do I have a weakness to red monsters? Did they have some sort of protection from what I was doing? It's all possible but you'll never know. If you don't care about strategy and just want to laugh as you either win or lose by essentially random luck then have at it.

The experience is like a Record of Grancrest War game but watered down significantly. Less depth, more headache and hassle. It seemed cool initially but I just got annoyed as heck after 2hrs of gameplay. If you can tolerate glaring problems like "constant lack of troop issues", very very very broken tutorial that just assumes you understand the game period beyond limited explanation of how to play, then this is your game. Otherwise avoid it. I went out on a limb and bought it immediately because I thought the experience would be similar to Record of Grancrest War. It is very limited in the war aspects but much more fast paced. Not as much depth too story/world building. You need resources and money but this is not properly explained and leaves you to stay confused and learning through trial and error. The tutorial does try though. You can tell devs tried though with how smoothly the game plays. It's just, way to unfun in my opinion because of hassle mechanics (you can at least redirect deployment of units very very straight forward the logic) more hassle that just makes the game unfun overall. Also your unit ai seems to be very suicidal and doesn't work in more coordinated fashion besides wreck whatever immediately infront of their path of enemies. They don't prioritize high value targets doing more dps. Or smartly maneuver enemy attacks.

but a bug of income annihilates very quickly my experience: whatever the faction/building I do, the income is never generated. So if I have no gold to find on the map I can only sell resources to generate some. Plz correct that bug.

Long time no play HoMM-like; this rather light-4x one clicked well with me, likely because the expansion and combat parts are fast-paced.