Grade: B
A unique premise about creating a full lineage of heroes.
The first game for a young game studio, Heart Shaped Games, Hero Generations, is a roguelike strategy game where each turn is one year of your hero’s life. You see a counter in the hero stat block with how many years you have left to live, and once it reaches zero, that’s the end.
With your mortality front and center, you have a chance to carry on your lineage. There is a finite amount of time to quest before ending your career, finding a match, and making a child for the next generation. If you don’t procreate and have a child to carry on the family name, or if you die during your adventuring days, well then, GAME OVER. When you create progeny and settle down, then blam, you raise your child. At 16, your child is ready to set out for fame and fortune, and you start a gameplay round.
Exploring, Building, Looting for my children
Each generation can improve their area so that your child has an easier time than you did. There’s a couple of options to do this.
Firstly, you can build up the town areas around your starting location. Each town has slots for farms, barracks, and various improvements that stick around from generation to generation. These can give you money, attack power, mates, or lifespan longevity improvements.
Second, you can end your adventuring days with enough lifespan left that you see your child grow up, and then the kid gets a big boost at the start of their life. It’s a bit of a strange concept because when you find a match, you also see the lifespan amount for the partner you’re choosing. I strategically turned down more than a few mates when the partner only had a couple of years left to live and wouldn’t be alive to see the child go off and adventure on their own.
Reset after each generation
When I was playing, I wished I could carry things forward from generation to generation. For example, the wall of fog for the area completely resets between generations. In addition, magic items and money you collect don’t pass down to your children, and it’s a bit frustrating not to have legacy objects.
I also think it would have been neat to start with one but replicate the lineage with brothers and sisters so that you have multiple heroes on the map at once. Having multiple heroes in a generation would have resolved the one square at a time plodding along with pretty limited options.
Simple combat
For combat, it’s pretty simple and is just a roll of a 1dX between the combatants, with X being your power score. Whoever rolls higher wins the combat. You can very quickly see the odds of who will win, and it takes several generations to get strong enough even to have a chance at defeating the bosses. For example, Brian, the entry-level boss, has a 60 power score. This weak kid with a power score of 1 may win, but very unlikely. For each defeat, you lose life equal to the strength of the opponent.
As you age, your power scores increase both in adulthood and in mid-life. Then, as you go past your prime, your power decreases. As you round to old age, you’re more concerned about finding a mate and continuing your line, and your not looking to fight then, so it works out ok.
End Game involves a volcano and epic child naming
The game gets more complex as you go, and you can build connections between maps and give your hero a lot of starting advantages. There’s also an overall end-game where a volcano will explode and kill everything. If you don’t stop the volcano, then eventually, that’s the outer bound of how much time you have to dilly-dally and blip-blop around the maps.
I was playing with my daughter, and she helped me with the child naming: “Y U DUM” and “Beep Beep,” and “Chickn Nugs” were my favorites. My furthest accomplishment was getting to 15 generations. But then, I ventured too far away from a town and died of old age before extending the line.
Overall, Hero Generations captured my interest for a solid 4-5 hours as I investigated these new and strange mechanics. To me, the drawbacks in the game centered around the things you couldn’t carry forward from generation to generation. It was close to being something extraordinary but didn’t quite live up to the promise in the marketing. Still, though, Hero Generations is worth a few hours just for the unique concept.
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