Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption

I don't write reviews usually but I must express my absolute happiness with Hero-U Rogue to Redemption. I'm now in my 40's but I one of y first PC games was Hero's Quest : So you want to be a hero ( as it was known then ) and I love the game and all it sequels to bits. I recently discovered that this game from the Cole's and bought it straigt away and I've loved every bit of it. It reminded me of the good bitsh in Quest of Glory series, great characters, humour and most of all leveling your stats . I just think his game as absolutely brilliant from start to finnish and I whole heartetly recomend it to any 90s gamer or any one looking excellent way of combining rpgs and adventure games. I want to thank the Coles for creating so many fantastic memories and please please can we have a sequel?

Growing up I would say that the Coles as a partnership were the writers who I enjoyed the most. I played Quest for Glory 1, 2, and 4 over and over again (never got 3 til the GOG days, but it was a joy too). It was such a joy that even if you were stuck, looking at different things and exploring areas seeing the clever descriptions of everything was still entertaining. This absolutely captures that feeling. I haven't played far into the game, but exploring the environment and speaking with the characters you can see the touch of experience and professionalism from truly talented writers. They maintain an honest, pleasant, and clever voice, and have no problem using even the cheapest of pun or rhyme to keep the tone light and humorous. The music is really well-done, this is a game that's worth playing with the music on. Each scene has the mood set by high-quality instruments playing well-designed instrumentals. I've not experienced much of the combat, but it does seem to be the weak spot of this game. Hopefully it will become more interesting as time goes on, but I've also read that it's not essential to progress in the game. Nothing especially wrong with it, it just seems like a very basic turn-based situation, and I can't easily see many ways to change the tides (either you have enough skill/damage to defeat enemy or you have to run); but I'm sure as I progress I will find new items that make it more interesting. The game has a lot of 'paintings' and painted scenes that are beautifully done, and the environments of the school look quite good as well. The character models and animations are only so-so, but I didn't find them immersion-breaking. There are all these fantastic portraits for the characters when they speak or during 'cut scenes' so the 3d models aren't your primary view of characters in any case.

As a massive fan of QFG, I was surprised when I saw this game on GOG. Six years of development and I had not even heard of this game. I went in to this game fully expecting to be disappointed and ended up being pleasantly surprised. The Good. If you liked Punny Bones from QFG4 then you will love the humour otherwise it might start to wear thin pretty quickly. Graphics are unmistakably QFG style animations may stutter in places. The Bad. Set entirely inside the grounds of the hero university, there are a few nice dungeons such as the sea caves but it's disappointing that you can't visit the town which could give you opportunities to explore the difference between a thief and a rogue. Actually putting you in some of the hypothetical situations brought up in class could have been an interesting diversion for side quests. There are a few times in the game where you have a task to carry out, you have already figured out where to go and what to do but the game won't let you do it until a certain time or event have occurred. This was my main problem with the game as I would quite often think I had missed something and waste time that could have been spent on training, only to find that I was just waiting for a certain day for a character to make a remark hinting at where I had to go despite already knowing. The thief is the only playable class. For me this is a good thing as a thief with some magic is what I normally play in QFG. Through the use of electives you can still take a Thief magic user so I'm happy. From what I understand hero u will be a series of games with each focusing on a different class at the university. All in all despite a few problems I found the game enjoyable, despite missing a chunk of the story by ignoring the sea caves until too late in the story. I put in around 30 hours to become rogue of the year and will be looking forward to future hero u games.

Hero U is a pretty unique experience. It is not exactly an adventure game, not exactly an RPG but something of it's own in-between. Of course, there is obvious similarities to the Quest for Glory series but most in tone of voice - if what you liked from Quest of Glory were the delightful mix of serious and zany fantasy tropes, mixed with pop-culture references and swashbuckling adventure, then there is plenty more of that here. The actual gameplay, though, doesn't feel so much like Quest for Glory. The Hero in this game isn't saving the kingdom, he is going to school and attending class - and this drives the story in a different way. For example the games doesn't end when all the quests has been completed, it ends when the semester ends. And it does end with the end of the semester no matter what the player has accomplished along the way. This shapes the gameplay. Every day Shawn (the protagonist) will have to attend class, take notes from his lessons (yes, there will be a quiz...) and he must train his skills to be able to complete the tests. If you want to, though, there is plenty of adventure to be had along the way, dungeons to explore, interesting conversations to be had and lots of amazing lore and treasure to find. For the most part you just need to do a bit of discovering to find it. As you talk with the many characters and explore the old castle Hero U is set in, the game will slowly open up and you will always have plenty of interesting tasks at hand. It is an experience that is hard to describe, but the game grew on me constantly and at the end of it I felt I had truly accomplished something great. I found the characters in the game much deeper than I had initially expected and the setting and quests to be varied and fun. Big recommendation from here - but maybe only if you have 40 or 50 hours to spare :-)

I played a lot of adventure/Sierra games as a kid and as an adult. I played just as much if not more JRPG's and Harvest Moon/Rune Factory as a kid and as an adult. I never thought I'd get a merger of the two. I fell in love with Rune Factory because when you're done for the day tending your garden, feeding your pets and foraging for goods while doing stuff for townsfolk you got to go dungeon delving (Fighting/puzzles/quests). Aside from gardening Hero-U is the same way. It's basically Hogwarts the school sim mixed with the best kind of adventure/point and click. But you need to manage HOW much you socialize, how much you train, explore. You have almost complete freedom and it's easy to fall behind in something or have an event blind-side you and you realize "Crap, I've been skipping this thing because it seemed useless but I could've been using it here, and now I can't do X." It's a wonderful feeling because the world consistent and fair. You CAN be good at almost everything, and maybe get all your friends to like you. AND maybe do all the quests and exploring. But it requires REAL micro managing, planning, exploring, and a bit of risk. And if you miss something, it's gone. Just like in real life, and definitely an old-school move in a game that has the integrity to be self-consistent instead of every character just waiting for the hero to do something so they can see and do everything for everyone else. People solve their own problems if you don't. The combat doesn't seem deep until you get your ass kicked and need to diversify your strategies. I always hated games where you could "play however you want" and they just implemented 3 distinct systems. Like, Dishonored, you can sneak everywhere, you can kill anything. You can do both! But they aren't really "Play however you want" they just made three really powerful and mostly non-overlapping systems. This game is a bit crude and old-school but god damnit it works. I had to change my strategies alot. You will too