Developer/Publisher: The Bitfather/Headup Games
Release Date(s): Feb. 6, 2015
Genre(s): Retro RPG
Platform(s): Windows, Mac, Steam, iOS, Android
Language(s): English, German
Pricing: $9.99 / £6.99 / €9,99 (PC)
Rating: Not rated
I recently had the chance to play this retro RPG from developers The Bitfather and released by German publisher Headup Games on both PC and mobile devices. The latter was convenient, and I got to do most of my testing in the back of a car on a long trip to the beach for Memorial Day. Pixel Heroes is an extremely self-referential old-school RPG filled with all the classic RPG elements and brimming with countless allusions to other games and gamer culture in general. Since it came out in February this year (the title screen actually says "©1987 2015"), it's gotten mostly positive reviews. Keep reading for an in-depth look at the game's strengths and weaknesses and to find out if we recommend this "thrilling RPG/Roguelike experience like you have never seen before".
The End Is Nigh When the game opens, you're in a typical RPG tavern. There's a inkeeper behind the bar, and a band playing a repetitve and slightly maddening song of the kind you'd hear in games of the late 80s/early 90s. Of course, this intentional, one of the game's first self-referential jokes – when you click on them, they say "What? We should play the same song again? Ok!" milling about the bar are six different heroes, and you're expected to hire three of them for your adventure. They spout random comments about themselves like the Warmage's "I can fight AND read!", or the Bard's "Will sing for loot". My favorite is the Barbarian who shouts for the band to play "Freebird", as I've done that very thing often enough myself. In all, there are 30 unique hero classes to choose from, most of which have to be unlocked first. The catch is that there are only ever six available, and you can only have three in your party. You can "re-roll" heroes, i.e. randomize the selection again, but only three times. This random element is one of the things that gives Pixel Heroes some decent replay value, even if the gameplay itself is rather repetitive, and the story rather utilitarian.
So, once you've selected three heroes, the rest leave the tavern muttering their disappointment, sometimes making overt threats. The ones you do choose will be grateful, though. Once they're all lined up, a guy bursts in wearing a sandwich board with "The End" scrawled on it, and apparently nothing else beneath it. He delivers his message:
And that's about it. You walk of the Tavern into the Town, which consists of a few buildings Like the Bank Casino, the Temple, the Library (where you can buy spells), and of course, what fantasy RPG would be complete without the Blacksmith's Shop? There are several different characters going about their business in town, and again which ones show up on any given visit is random. There's Captain Capslock the pirate, Chester the Dwarven jester, Cooper, a nerd who thinks he's a superhero, and old lady named Serina, etc. You can talk to them all, and you can accept quests from the ones with yellow exclamation marks over their heads. The quests are typical fetch quests, and as far as I can tell, do not bear much relation to the "Sons of Dawn" storyline. While the dialogues can be pretty funny, I usually ended up just skipping through them to get started on the quests.
Pixel Heroes is extremely hard, and punishes failure severely, so I never did get to see how the main storyline plays out. The impression that I get is that the story is a mere excuse for the gameplay, which is fine in my book. No one really cared about Mario getting reuinted with the Princess, or why exactly he had to run and jump through eight worlds, but the original Super Mario Bros. is still an enjoyable, challenging, and addictive game. If the Bitfather are hearkening back to that era of video games, then I'd be surprised if Pixel Heroes did not have a wispy utilitarian plot.
Rock, Paper, Scissors,...Wyrm? Now the real meat and potoatoes of Pixel Heroes: Byte & Magic is its gameplay. While the game is advertised as having roguelike elements, I'm not sure how accurate this is. To be sure, random elements play a very importnt role in this game, but the structure of the game world itself is entirely predictable, as are the dungeons. You'll always know where you're going before you there, and after you've played through the game a bit, you'll even know what kind of enemies to expect there and what kind of weapons and armor to bring (more on this later). So what's random?
Well, here's how it goes: In town, some of the NPCs on the street will have quests to offer you. These quests will typically be fetch quests - "find my comb", "find a book for me", etc. - but the dungeon they send you to will be random. After getting a quest, you can stock up on weapons and supplies before leaving. You can only do one quest at a time, but remember that once you accept one, it's got to be completed before you can accept another one. And most importantly, once you leave town, there is no turning back. Your path is set.
Along your way to a dungeon (there are 13 in all), there will always be three random encounters. Some will be beneficial in terms of money or XP, some will trigger a fight, and others will provide important information. For example, the other day I ran into a cat on the road, and I chose the option "Scream like idiots" instead of petting it, which got my party into a fight with a pack of cats. Another enounter has you stand guard for a young Skyborn lady as she goes in the bushes to do her business. Lots of them are thinly veiled or even smack-you-over-the-head-obvious references, such as the group of Halflings, one of them "skinny and pale" that you can get an item called "The One Ring" from. You also run into a strange entity who shouts "I AM ERROR!", the famous line from 1988's Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. Which is ironic, because this game contains a few weird translation choices of its own, but more on that later.
Once you arrive at a dungeon, there are always eight rooms, the last one containing a boss enemy. Each room will either be filled with enemies (always three) to fight, or a loot chest of some type which you will need to use a certain attribute to open. When you defeat the boss, your party will head back to the Town after another three random encounters.
Combat itself is pretty straighforward. Each hero can hold two items or weapons, and each one has two special skills with cooldown times. As mentioned, there are thirty different classes, and you'll have to play a long time before you can use all of them. There's your typical Barbarian, Priest, Rogue, Enchantress, Bard, etc., but there are also some more uncommon or even unique classes, such as the Herbalist, the Brewmaster, the Plaguebringer, the Shadowmancer, and the Ronin. Each one has a name and a distinct personality, and this is where a lot of the game's humor comes from. The Barbarian is a redneck who shouts out his commentary in a Southern dialect (or at least a German developer's attempt at it), the Herbalist is a Rasta-man of sorts who goes on about "de Herb" and "Babylon" (honestly, did you expect anything different?), the Rogue a shy little Skyborn woman, etc. There are also several races, but races are bound to class, so it's hard to tell what advantages/disadvantages (if any) come from choosing between Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Skyborn, Halflings, etc.
Weapons and armor all deal or protect against a certain amount of physical or magical damage. Some items will cast some RPG status effects on your enemies, such as Bleed, Burn, Stun, Poison, or the particularly nasty Infest. Magic spells can either heal your party members or deal a particular kind of magical damage. Damage dealt is determined by a base number + a certain percentage of a particular attribute a character posseses (Life, Faith, Dexterity, Strength, Intelligence). For example, if a Barbarian with 65 Strength and 22 Dexterity finds an axe labeled "10+70%[STR], 30%[DEX]", he'll be able to deal 62 damage with that weapon, while a character who's mostly focused on Intelligence and Dexterity will deal much, much less.
The cool thing though is that most weapons and armor will be marked with one of four elements: Wyrm (earth), Griffon (air), Phoenix (fire), Leviathan (water), or Neutral. These work in a sort of rock-paper-scissors fashion, so that, for example, Leviathan beats Phoneix, which in turn beats Griffon, and so on. The hard part is trying to figure out what weapon to use against what enemy, as you cannot change in the middle of battle. If I'm fighting the mostly water-based enemies of Devil's Reef, attacks from weapons imbued with Leviathan will be absorbed, while those with Wyrm will prove especially effective. A lot of times, however, it's not to easy to determine what weapon you're supposed to be using, though there are snails on the road who will give you tips about how to defeat the enemies in a given dungeon (almost never the one you're headed to).
A number of features come together to make Pixel Heroes an especially challenging and punishing game. First and foremost, there's permadeath: if one or two heroes die, you can revive them back in town; but if all three die, you lose. There's no save state, no backtracking, just trial and error. Lots of error. But this means that getting past a certain number of dungeons is in itself a real achievement. I don't think I ever got past more than five with my most successful party, a Barbarian, an Enchantress, and a Priest. A little bit of gallows humor is always good in a game like this, so there's a graveyard where you can visit the tombstones of your dead heroes and view their stats. Another major difficulty is that unlike most RPGs, you cannot use potions in battle. This means it is absolutley essential to have a healer character in your party, especially after the first dungeon or so.
One thing I loved about Pixel Heroes is that such a simple gameplay concept, which doesn't just seem but is repetitive, can be so challenging and so much fun. With just the right amount of randomness in just the right places, the permutations are endless, and no one playthrough is the same. There's also enough structure to where, like in blackjack, you think you know what's going on, but where you can suddenly find yourself with no chips left, or in this case, six pixellated feet under in an animated graveyard.
Well, it is called Pixel Heroes... The game's graphics are what they promise to be: a crude mass of colorful pixels arranged in such a way as to resemble people, objects and environments. I have to admit that I did not like the style at first, but it grew on me, especially when I started playing it on my phone. I think it might have just looked a bit too simple for my 2015 eyes on a large screen, but the jaggedness and large splashes of a single color are not as obvious on an iPhone. This can hardly be held against The Bitfather, however, as crude graphics of the kind you'd expect on a Commodore 64 is exactly what they were aiming for, and they hit their mark.
Given the limitations the programmers over there placed on themselves, they've actually created a pretty good-looking game. Everything is very colorful, and the character animations are endearing in their own way, with their bobbing heads and jittery feet. The one thing I really didn't like were the way items looked, as they're extremely bland and monochrome-looking. Also, your hero's looks won't change with new weapons and new armor, but I think all of these complaints are explained by the fact that this game represents a different era.
That being said, players who do not enjoy crude retro graphics are not going to like the ones in Pixel Heroes. They don't even have the depth and detail of the 16-bit era, nor do they try. Older players like myself will either get a kick out of the nostalgic element here, or find it jarring after slowly becoming accustomed to more modern games over the course of the past 30 years. Younger players will either like it on its own merits or wonder how the hell people in my generation even played stuff that looked like this (and thought the graphics were awesome!).
That dills ma pickle! The sound in Pixel Heroes: Byte & Magic, like the graphics, knows how to keep things simple. Repetitive and energetic melodies typical of the 8-bit era pervade the entire game, and I don't know about other people, but I just can't listen to that stuff for hours or even minutes on end anymore. I know why adults never liked to listen to the games I played growing up. I ended up turning the music off most of the time, which is a merciful option afforded by the developers who foresaw this issue. The music is almost perfectly authentic, but unfortunately that means almost perfectly repetitive and annoying, too. Again, this is no fault of the developers, as this is what 8-bit-era music sounded like (with a few awesome expections, like the Mega Man games).
The sound effects are also typical for the era being mimicked, but not annoying because they're not on a continuous loop. There's no voice acting, of course, and all dialogue takes place via voice bubbles or text boxes. So again, everything I said about the graphics can be applied to the sound – some people are going to like it, some people are going to hate it.
One issue that I have mixed feelings about, and which doesn't have to do with sound per se, but I figured this is the best place to mention it, is that the game's dialogue sometimes comes off as a bit stilted or just plain wrong. I might see it more than others, being a translator myself, but there are a lot of things in the game that are typical translation errors from German to English, such as the "Continue Travel" option (not "Continue Traveling" or "Continue Journey"), or using idioms in the wrong context. I'm not sure how the localization was done over there, but this is a good example of why non-native speakers, no matter how good they are in English (or any other language), should not be writing or translating text and dialogue meant for native speakers. Or if a native speaker did the translation, then they really have to ask themselves if they'd really ever say things like that in English. Of course, if this was intentional, then it is a brilliant parody of the genre, which was so often localized from Japanese or another language, like German, into English and other languages. In that case, this was masterfully done.
The Barbarian was my favorite character, so I played with him a lot. He's also a perfect example of the kind of stuff I'm talking about. He often shouts "Like a bat out of hell!" when going into battle or "I'm out of kilter" when his health is low, or "what a heap of crap!" when taking damage, none of which makes sense in the context. And having lived almost my whole life in the American South, his "Southernisms" are pretty cringe-worthy: "That dills ma pickle!" apparently does exist, but just seems weird. And "root'n toot'n varmint" sounds like Yosemite Sam. Of course, maybe now that I think of it, he's supposed to be a Texan, but I'll let those of you from the Lone Star State be the judge. Again, if this was an intentional parody of how Germans imagine a Southerner (or a Texan) talks, then good job. Playing the German version, it's clear that the "Barbarer" is a Swabian, from the largely rural area in Germany's far south. A lot of the stereotypes are similar to the ones associated with American Southerners, so the choice makes sense.
Some other hiccups could be funny, like how "...is hard!" announces a certain status effect, so you get hilarious statements like "King Crab is hard!" I hope the developers at least know the kind of innuendo they are making. Or they could be annoying, like the angry nerd who you run into on the road who says "f**king piece of f**king bullf**k" and "f**kingest thing you ever heard", neither of which woud ever be uttered by even the most foul-mouthed native speaker, since the words just can't be used that way. I get that he's supposed to be a ridiculously angry social reject, but the dialogue sounds like it was written without an understanding of how cursing works in English, something I often encounter in non-native speakers. But I think I'm nit-picking here – most of the dialogue actually is pretty funny, or at the very least unremarkable for an RPG game.
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