Community College Hero: Trial by Fire

The story might be good down the road, but I cringed a few too many times at the writing (and all the choices given to me). It feels like it's trying too hard to be quirky and fun. If you like that style, you might enjoy it. Unfortunately, I don't.

Very interesting game story! Well done!

See the full review on the [url=https://forum.choiceofgames.com/t/allusives-reviews-new-review-community-college-hero-trial-by-fire/178235/48?u=allusive]Choice of Games forums here.[/url] Community College Hero combines two of the most popular Choicescript genres—the school setting and the superhero genre. You play a young freshman college student who joins a community college’s new hero training program in Nebraska. In CCH’s world, thanks to Cold War shield technology, babies and kids got bombarded with neutron particles and developed real super powers as they got older. Except not your character! Moser has made the bold choice to make you the only ‘normal’ student in the hero program. PROS: World building. Stories in the superhero genre can quickly feel silly if authors aren’t careful with the implications and ramifications. Moser neatly handles this in multiple ways—first, powers have only been around about 20-30 years, growing out of alternate history Cold War technology that went awry. So there hasn’t been time for massive divergence between our modern world and that of Community College Heroes. Second, the story acknowledges actual changes brought about in the world, including a big focus on the legal practicalities of superheroes running around blowing things up in fights against criminals and super villains. Even the legality of running up to a street thug while wearing a mask and hurting them by attacking them. One of your college classes is “Law and Liability” and you even have a “Insurance Claims Filed Against You” stat! Third, there is pretty realistic corporate and political squabbling over superheroes and powers. People protesting superheroes in their town for attracting villains or just running up insurance premiums, cities competing for lucrative hero technologies, the privatization of superhero training and the competition that arises, and the pure destruction high-power level villains can inflict on cities and the trauma and statutes that result. Moser does a great job of tying it all together into what feels like a cohesive lived-in setting. Characters. This is perhaps where Community College Hero shines the most. On joining the school in Nebraska, you are presented with 15-16 major characters and probably at least that many minor characters. Many at first seem one-note, but quickly start accumulating depth as you interact with them. Grades matter. A lot of games in the “school” genre have grades, but they usually don’t matter too much outside of maybe parental approval or if you want to achieve certain academic awards at the end of the game. In Community College Hero your grade point average directly ties in with how strong your character is—do well in a class and you may increase your stats. Maintain a 3.0 GPA and you get awarded more powerful gadgets and gear that can unlock new options in situations and fights. This creates some real drama to academics that usually isn’t present in these types of settings. In many games like this, the option to slack-off, talk during class, or skip studying is really just a personality check as to what type of character you want to be or what type of friends you want to hang out with. Here, it’s much more ruthless and feels like a real choice. Do you flirt with that cute classmate or take notes? If you take notes, you actually get real info committed to your Academic menu in the Stats you can refer to during tests. If didn’t study the info? Well, welcome back to real world academics where you get to stare at multiple choice questions on an exam and optimistically pick the ones that sound like they could be right. CONS: Limited gadget use. You have quite a few options when it comes to the gadgets your character can have or acquire, and while each has it’s uses, these are limited to one or two uses in the entire game. They DO make a big difference in the scenes where they can be used, so you never regret getting them, but when you get to the end of the game and you’ve only used your specialized gear (basically, your powers) a small number of times it does feel like a missed opportunity. However, I’m sympathetic to Moser here. This is the same issue every author who writes a Choicescript game that gives a player a selection of powers or abilities runs into—the sheer number of branching or parallel scenes you have to write can quickly become exponential in scope while trying to accommodate all the variety on offer. Still, this is an instance where limiting the scope of options and giving more frequent use of those available might have been a better way to go. Relationship stats are ambiguous. The relationships for the various characters are represented with just single digit numbers. There is no indication of what the scale or scope of the measurement is either. So you end up with some characters a 4 or a 5, maybe someone you really like a 14, maybe a friend at an 8, and just no idea whether some one might like you or be ambivalent from the stats themselves. Thankfully, the writing and story does a great job of conveying character relationships to you as the reader, but the relationship stat screen is basically useless as it is. Final verdict, I would recommend Community College Hero: Trial by Fire. It’s a superhero Choicescript game, so it’s got that going for it, but more importantly it does the school setting really well by actually making grades matter.

Easily the best Text based RPG I've ever played. Seeing so many well written character occasionally interacting at each other, Is just the best. I've been a fan of a text based games since playing "The Life of the Mercenary" and "Heroes or Villain" But this series is my most recommend.

Loved the settings, plot, characters are well fleshed out. High replayability for sure. I enjoyed the story though being CP makes action choices a big gamble. Personally, would have failed all the tests if it weren't for answers online bc i'm not that concerned with studying & would rather get to spend time w the characters but i must say learning Crook's secret made me T_T!! bc i was so enamoured by him from the get-go hahahaha why couldn't his secret be literally anything else sigh also love the slowburn trope we have going here

I'm Batman!