A Hero's Rest: An RPG Town Simulator Reviews

[h1][b] TLDR: While close to being an awesome management RPG sim, it falls short with a cumbersome UI and shallow mechanics that greatly impact longevity. [/b] [/h1] [h1]PROS: [/h1] ➕Music ➕Addicting management aspects ➕Create your own classes [h1]CONS: [/h1] ➖Some UI elements can be improved (lacking # of items in stock when crafting, hard to tell type of items in stock from bag) ➖Lacks explanation for some quest objectives, like “Production farms” ➖Main loop can get repetitive ➖Not enough long-term variety (repetitive) ➖UI Elements do not save when you make changes (!) [h1] [b] Content (Game world/Narrative) – [6/10] [/b] [/h1] The game world takes place in the medieval ages, from a top-down view. There are a few different areas to choose from, but each area comes down to you controlling the shops on multiple plots of land. The world itself changes seasons, but otherwise has very little direct interaction. There isn’t too much of a narrative. The basic gist if you have to build up a town for heroes at the behest of the king. The narrative doesn’t really expand too much beyond that. [h1][b] Gameplay (Mechanics/Difficulty) – [7/10] [/b] [/h1] Being a town-management simulator, you’ll spend the vast majority of your time managing the shops that the heroes use. Crafting and restocking gear, health restoration, and quests, thankfully with some automation as you progress. I would say that a good 70% of the time I spend playing was in the inn constantly making new quests. Otherwise, the gear you make is fairly quick to craft. I found the mechanics to be good. It walks a thin line between repetitive and addicting. I played on Normal mode and would consider that to be pretty forgiving. The greatest difficulty comes from timed quests that you need to complete with and the RNG associated with your heroes from taking them. Even making some quests as priority isn’t a guaranteed method. [h1] [b] Graphics (Quality/Technical) – [4/10] [/b] [/h1] I found the graphics to be good. Nothing spectacular. I’ll say that the lighting looks off when the ground is wet, which is fairly frequent. It kind of makes the entire world look like a glazed doughnut. I want to point out the UI in this section, because as a management game, a la Civilization-types, a UI is pivotal to a good experience. So is the UI here good? Kinda/not really. It does a good job at the bare necessities, but I feel like not enough thought went into the finer details that you notice when playing it a while. Things like: There’s no way to easily see slay quests in progress. This is essential if you don’t want to spawn the boss too early. No way to filter by retired classes. No way to quickly see how many of a particular item you have in stock. No way to see top sellers at a vendor. The resources are out of order between the top of the screen vs the quest craft dropdown. You can increase the message window size (“Chatbox”) and change what type of tier resources to naturally display….but [b]all of this is reset when you load back into the game[/b] which makes this kind of pointless to set up everything again. I didn’t notice too many technical issues. Auto save causes the game to freeze for a few seconds, especially when your town is more full with NPCs, and stopping time often causes graphical glitches on NPCs that appear as a very long “Trail” coming off of them, like their clothing or something. i9-13900KF | RTX 4090 | 64GB RAM | 1440p @ 240hz | Windows 11 installed on SSD [h1] [b] Audio – [7/10] [/b] [/h1] Good music. I absolutely love the inn music, and the town music was decent too. I found myself often humming along. There is no voice acting that I can remember, maybe just small one-lines, but nothing significant. [h1] [b] Replay Factor (Longevity) – [5/10] [/b] [/h1] After around the 15 hour mark, I started to feel the repetition, so I worry about the longevity. There are only 4 tier of resources and once you collect enough of them….that’s kind of the game. I could see some okay replay value here, there’s some great starting decisions to make - what classes to make, what shops to go with first, ect. Add in increased difficulty and it has some good potential, but I can also easily see the repetition. [h1] [b] Final Verdict – [7/10] [/b] [/h1] A Hero’s Rest: An RPG Town Simulator (AHR) is a town management game where you build up a cozy little town for heroes to get some R & R in between quests. For my biggest negative, it would have to be the UI and the lack of long-term variety. The UI I covered mostly above, but to summarize in a sentence - you’ll start to notice its downfalls the more you play the game and realize you can’t find something important without going through 3 button clicks and scrolling to find it or, even worse, have to go to a shop to look at their UI. For the long-term variety, there’s only 4 tiers of items, which you can hit tier 2 within a few hours of playtime, but the repetition increases drastically as you pretty much make rounds from shop to shop, and craft ad nauseum. For my positives, I would say its the gameplay mechanics and its RPG elements. I really dig the management aspect of the game. Even if it's a bit shallow and gets repetitive, I enjoy micromanagement, crafting fantasy things, and managing classes. It’s cool watching your heroes progress by leveling up and getting better gear, and it's satisfying when you craft a legendary item. Within the first 10 hours, I felt that “Just one more turn” vibe as I lost hours to playing, it was super fun at the start. Overall, AHR is a decent game, but a bit shallow. I think it could shine much more with some events that aren’t just passive increases/decreases to success change, and maybe a few more item tiers. [h1] [b] Recommend? (Price) [Y/N] [/b] [/h1] [h1]Yes[/h1] It's currently priced at $25, and I cannot recommend it at that price. I think a solid price point here is $15 or less. You can find my curator page here: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Synik_GR

I bought A Hero’s Rest during early access thinking it would be something like Majesty, I was wrong. I tried to find the fun out of the game sadly there isn't much. The gameplay loop is quite boring, shallow and repetitive. Making armors and weapons for heroes and assigning it to them feels like a chore. There's not much strategic depth or meaningful progression. Hero behavior feels more like busywork than something emergent or interesting. I find no reason the continue my torture. If you are into city building and whatever this game is this could be for you. For me it is a No