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HOARD
PC (Steam)
Rhymes with…
3/5 stars
“HOARD” is one of those cute, little PSN Indie games that launched waaaay back in 2010 when digital games were a completely foreign concept to console gamers and the idea of paying $15 for any game seemed like an unbelievable bargain. A year after its PSN debut, “HOARD” was ported to PC via Steam, the platform that invented the idea of cute, little Indie games selling digitally… but for peanuts instead of anything resembling retail pricing. Having struck the MJ Crew’s collective radar back when it was new and we were desperately seeking co-op PSN games to play, we actually ended up grabbing it off Steam during one of our first Steam Sale experiences. We were inexperienced and naïve, but “HOARD” was incredibly cheap, and we decided to (eventually) play it as an online co-op game instead of a couch co-op game. Years later, it finally got picked from the line-up (by Chris), and we got to experience the generally unimpressive nature of early console digital games.
Presentation
“HOARD” is a top-down game built in a polygonal engine. The graphical stylings make the entire game world look like a model built on a tabletop, in the vein of such scenery-heavy wargames as Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Buildings, enemies, and dragons are all fairly small, but distinctive enough that it’s easy to tell what’s going on… unless the screen gets too cluttered, in which case enemies, projectiles, etc. cover each other up and create a confusing mess. “HOARD” is unfortunately lacking in a v-sync option, as well, which causes the game to experience massive amounts of screen tearing. Were it not for the Force V-Sync option in my SteamBox’s Nvidia control panel, the screen tearing would have made the game unplayable.
The audio is nothing to get excited about. The soundtrack is incredibly generic and understated, while the sound effects do an adequate job of letting the player know what’s happening outside of visual range.
Story
“HOARD” doesn’t have a story. It doesn’t even have a campaign! Yes, it does have a single-player mode, but there is no difference between that mode and the multi-player mode except that the other dragons in any given map are AI-controlled.
It is incredibly unfortunate that “HOARD” is so completely devoid of narrative value. It should have been fairly easy to come up with some sort of campaign narrative about dragons stealing treasure and burning the countryside… Hell, the HomeStar Runner running gag about Trogdor the Burninator – which is a joke – would have provided enough backstory and motivation for this type of game.
But “HOARD” has nothing. And do you want to know why? Sure you do! It’s because “HOARD” is a MOBA. In fact it predates every well-known MOBA except “League of Legends.” Interestingly, “HOARD” is the same general type of MOBA as “Awesomenauts,” in that it tries to mix-up the genre’s stale-upon-creation conventions which are vestigial remnants of the genre’s origin as a PvP corruption of the RTS genre. Yet MOBAs don’t care about story, they simply care about wins and losses, and at playing the same handful of maps over and over again to get better at them.
Gameplay
As an unconventional MOBA, “HOARD” still manages to squeeze in the genre’s expected mechanics. Each match lasts 10 minutes. Regardless of PvP or co-op, every dragon in the match needs to hoard as much gold as possible by collecting it in the map, then returning to their base to drop it off. Accumulating gold at the base fills a leveling meter, which allows the player to upgrade their dragon’s pertinent stats: Speed, Breath, Carrying Capacity, and Defense. These upgrades only last for the duration of the match. Each map contains a number of farms and cities which automatically produce gold carts (filling the MOBA role of creeps), and leaving these buildings alone causes them to level-up and produce more valuable carts. Other potential sources of revenue include princesses, which are produced by cathedrals (which also produce annoying, dragon-killing knights), and giants, which wander into the map from the edges and destroy everything in their path (accumulating gold value in the process). In PvP mode, it is possible to cause towns to send tribute to one of the dragons if that dragon destroys all of the town’s surrounding buildings without destroying the central building. Besides the afore-mentioned knights and giants, the other things that will quickly kill a dragon are the archers produced by towns and the wizard towers that pop-up out of nowhere.
“Winning” in a PvP match is obvious (whichever dragon has the most gold when time runs out), but in a co-op match, the win condition revolves around hitting designated scores for bronze, silver, and gold rankings. In order to hit these arbitrary numbers, it is essential to keep the hoard’s gold multiplier up. This multiplier starts at x1 and can build up to x3 over time. Getting killed resets a dragon’s multiplier to x1, and in all of the co-op maps I experienced, getting killed even once means it’s time to abort the mission and restart, as hitting the gold rank’s threshold will be impossible.
“HOARD” plays a bit like a twin-stick SHMUP, in that the player controls an airborne dragon with the left analog stick and directs the dragon’s fiery breath with the right stick. The game recommends that it be played with a gamepad instead of a typewriter, and I don’t question the dev’s decision one bit, as I can’t imagine trying to direct dragon breath using a mouse. Even a Steam controller, with its touchpad controls for breath aiming, is a sub-par substitute for a nice Xinput controller.
The biggest problem I have with “HOARD,” aside from the lack of a story-driven campaign, is the fact that there are very few maps that allow for 4-player co-op. There are just as few that allow for 3-player co-op, leaving the lion’s share of co-op maps restricted to 2 players only. Then there’s the fact that, as a MOBA, the game simply revolves around doing the same thing over and over and over but becoming more efficient at it. The gameplay gets repetitive quite quickly, and I found myself bored with the single-player mode almost instantly, while the co-op mode’s appeal lasted for a meager few hours more.
Overall
“HOARD” rhymes with BORED, which is how this game makes me feel. It’s not completely terrible, and as an early MOBA it manages to be fairly non-disgusting. But the extreme repetition and meaningless cycle of rounds on maps prevents it from having any lasting appeal. As a throw-away experience, “HOARD” can provide a momentary distraction, but I don’t recommend it to anyone seeking a great co-op experience. Not even obsessed MOBA fanatics will likely find much to like in “HOARD,” as it deviates too much from their norm for them to like it, but unfortunately not enough to become something special.
Presentation: 3/5
Story: 0.5/5
Gameplay: 3.5/5
Overall (not an average): 3/5
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