Past Glories …
Though video games, comics and movies tend to give you a romantic vision, in which time does not scratch either vigor or brilliance, even heroes age. Slowly, probably more glorious than the rest of humanity, but equally incessantly, day by day they lose the speed of reflections, the animus pugnandi, the resistance but not, fortunately, the desire to defend the weak and attack the wicked.
Two of the three heroes of Has-Been Heroes are dangerously closer to retirement than they are at their best days, and white beards and prominent claws are just two of the signs of this decline.
Nevertheless, the ruler of the realm in which the events are set decides to entrust them with a non-secondary task: to bring the two princesses healthy and safe to school.
Now, so it would seem like a little thing, but in a kingdom where living dead are on the agenda and the distance between the school buildings and the Royal Castle seems to be the same as between Malpensa Airport and the center of Rome, the goal is not to be underestimat
ed, and the player will notice it after a handful of minutes.
The wizard and the warrior, riddled with a thousand old battles and old friends, soon adds a thief, definitely younger than the two, to compose a triptych that resembles that of the Trine trilogy, which so much luster gave the team’s name development.
Despite a handful of discreetly-made cutscenes, with a cartoon style that fits perfectly with the Neon switch model on which the tests have been conducted, Has-Been Heroes , like many of its congeners, has little to tell from the narrative point of view, leaving the player at the mercy of his diabolical level of difficulty and rewarding very rarely the efforts with animated sequences or worthy characters.
The narrative minimalism that had characterized the previous works of Frozenbyte would not, in itself, be a problem then revealing, except that a more thorough story would offer a shred of reason to persevere even when the instinct of conservation (of the most expensive controller Pro) would suggest turning off the console.
… and misfortunes present
Gameplay represents the cross (most of the time) and the delight (on rare occasions) of Frozenbyte production: moving on procedurally generated maps, represented in the lower right corner of the screen, the player will have to lead his party through dozens and dozens of battles, mostly fought against various types of skeletons, by far the category of the most in-game enemies in the game world.
Combat is not so different from that of many tower defense seen in the last shine, with the enemies advancing slowly from right to left and our heroes distributed on three lanes, interchangeable with each other at the push of a button, but only to attack just happened.
