Hero Tale

Hero Tale is fun, engaging, and genuinely interesting during the first few playthroughs. Unfortunately, it is also unfinished, will most likely remain unfinished, and becomes painfully stretched out once you reach the later runs. During your first playthrough, it works well as an idle game. You place your hero somewhere where the income is higher than the cost of consumables, gain levels, develop skills, farm better equipment, look for ways to defeat stronger enemies, and experiment with different character builds. You only get one skill reset, so a bad build can significantly slow down your progress. Still, you can always start over and use your newly acquired knowledge to get through the difficult parts more efficiently. There is a real sense of exploration, although the gameplay is extremely slow and meditative. You can leave the game farming for several days. The story feels rushed, but it is unusual, with some interesting twists and delightfully strange characters. The visuals are pleasant and easy on the eyes. There are no sound effects, and you will probably disable the repetitive music fairly quickly and play something else in the background. Overall, the first playthrough is slow, difficult, and interesting. The second playthrough gives you a small set of starting bonuses and encourages you to finish the game as quickly as possible. You also unlock several unique abilities connected to your dark side. With your previous experience, you already know how to fight enemies more efficiently, which locations to visit first, and which mistakes to avoid. Even without particularly meaningful rewards, your second run will be several times faster. The game starts to feel competitive, and you may genuinely want to improve your completion time. By the third playthrough, you understand the builds and the less obvious mechanics. You know which skills to level first. Your dark side abilities start complementing your build. You learn how to train magic efficiently and understand what must be done, when it must be done, and how to achieve a better completion time. The fourth playthrough becomes the peak of your mastery. The game is no longer really idle. Every fight is calculated, and every spell cast moves you closer to your goal. You ignore unnecessary content and follow an optimized route. The final boss becomes a proper challenge based on precise spell timings. Your efficiency approaches 90 percent. The fifth playthrough should be the culmination of your entire journey. You know everything. You have everything. Your dark side is fully developed, and your build is nearly perfect. This is also where the content ends, while the game keeps going. You probably still will not be able to finish the game in nine hours, which is required for the final speedrun reward. By this point, however, you will have noticed that most speedrun rewards after the first few tiers are fairly useless, especially for your chosen build. New playthroughs stop giving you anything meaningful. The dark side progression is capped at 12 points. Why the developers chose 12 instead of 24 is beyond me. This does not create an interesting challenge. It simply stops progression. You will also notice that some builds are dramatically worse than others. Most equipment is useless for efficient completion. Some skills are clearly superior to the rest. Another playthrough becomes an unrewarding waste of seven or eight hours, forcing you to rebuild the same character from scratch for the sixth time just to prepare for the final battle again. Most importantly, the story does not progress at all. At this point, you can spend another one or two playthroughs cleaning up the remaining content. You can investigate the hidden achievements and farm the best equipment from the strongest monsters. This often requires spending many days training combat skills. Higher skill levels can require millions of attacks. Boss equipment appears to have a drop chance of roughly 1 or 2 percent, and many of these bosses are unlikely to be defeated reliably in automatic mode. None of this changes the fundamental problem: the content is over, but the game is not. There is no real ending. There is no continuing narrative progression like in Loop Hero, Hades, or other roguelikes. You can spend several more days playing and receive absolutely nothing meaningful in return. At the same time, you will still have a collection of unfinished and exceptionally unpleasant achievements. For example, there is an achievement for unlocking 1,000 inventory slots. The problem is not the cost. The problem is that you must click the buttons 1,000 times. You might as well use an autoclicker. This can happen naturally during the first playthrough, but later playthroughs will end long before you unlock even 100 slots. It feels like deliberate abuse of the player's fingers. There is also an achievement for completing the game ten times, even though the meaningful content ends after the fifth run. Completing the game in under seven hours is extremely difficult. The hidden achievements are not reflected in the game itself in any meaningful way. You can talk to an NPC 69 times and receive an achievement, but the NPC will repeat the exact same sentence all 69 times. After unlocking the achievement, no new dialogue appears. There is no hidden scene and no special interaction. You can defeat an enemy using a specific joke weapon and receive an achievement, but the enemy will not react or comment on it in any way. This shows a terrible lack of respect for the player's time. From a pure gameplay perspective, Hero Tale is genuinely addictive. It can easily consume several days of your life. Unfortunately, when you finally reach the end of its meaningful content, the only feeling left is emptiness. I am still marking this review as positive because Steam does not allow neutral reviews, and I want to support developers who created a mobile game without filling it with unlimited microtransactions and predatory monetization. Just keep one thing in mind before starting: this is an unfinished game.