Hero’s Hour Gameplay Preview

Hero’s Hour brings to mind the classic game Heroes of Might & Magic, which I spent hours playing when I was a wee lad. The game is a turn based strategy game much like Heroes of Might & Magic except the combat phase is fully automatic. You take turns playing against AI factions and control hero units to explore the map, gather resources, vanquish foes, and fortify your stronghold.

The game starts each player off in their own corner of the map. You can play against AI enemies or take turns with local co-op. You start with one hero unit and some default minions you can hire in your starting city. You take your army of minions and explore the map to collect resources, fight enemies, and take over key locations.

The resources let you build up your city by building new structures or upgrading existing structures. These new structures let you hire new types of minions, hire additional heroes, and give passive buffs like increasing your defenses when an enemy player attacks your city. Upgrading buildings will give bonuses such as letting you hire more minions every week as well as increasing the damage they do.

You can collect resource deposits on the ground or take over resource producing structures such as lumber mills and mines. You need to defeat the enemy force guarding it before you can take control of it however. Here you get to see the combat in action.

The combat in the game is pretty simple. Everything happens automatically. You can manually position units before the combat starts and you can issue basic attack orders during the combat phase but you can usually just let the fight play out by itself. During the combat phase, you can pause it temporarily and pick spells to use. The spells are varied and can do things from buffing the defense of your units to summoning whirlwinds that can spawn wind elementals if you have additional skills learned. Each spell uses mana and has a cooldown so you can’t use them infinitely.

As you explore the map and gain experience, your hero gains levels which unlock abilities on a basic skill tree. The skill tree provides different bonuses depending on what class your hero is. Usually the skills unlock more spells, provide combat bonuses, and buff your units.

The game feels pretty fun to play. It reminded me a lot of playing Heroes of Might & Magic back in the day. Exploring the map, fighting enemies, and gathering resources in order to build up your city and create a strong army is satisfying when it all comes together.

Overall, Hero’s Hour is a solid game that successfully captures the magic of a bygone era of gaming.