Hellenica - Bears and Steam Robots go turn-based RPG... in ancient Greece

[Agesilaus]

In an act of solidarity, I'm going to buy Hellenica. I have decided that my dedication to the Ancient world is stronger than my disdain for JRPGs. It's important that, one day, humanity reach an era where all entertainment products are set in Ancient Greece and China, or some interesting variant of those worlds.

 

[kurtle]

No hard feelings, Jinn. It's too bad the storytelling didn't work for you. Most of the other complaints center around the lack of the more complex systems from Tactics Ogre/FF:T (items, stats, jobs), and I can understand the disappointment. I personally don't engage much with that aspect of those games, and especially dislike having to grind XP to stay competitive, so we went for a simpler experience.

If you're on the fence (and a Steam user), I'd recommend just trying the game out. You can refund up until 2 hours of play, which is plenty of time to complete 2-3 combat encounters and get a feel for the game.

We're going to patch in a tutorial and some quality of life improvements (animating water???) later this week which will hopefully please those that stuck with it. I'll drop a note back here when that goes live.

Agesilaus, thanks for the support! Let me know what you think of in-game Agesilaus...

 

[Nathaniel3W]

this game could really benefit from a demo.

Research shows that the number of buyers you get because of a demo are a tiny fraction of the sales you lose, whether the game is good or bad. And putting together a demo is development time that could be spent making the full game better. Maybe there's a way to make a demo show off only the best of your game, and tease the player into buying the full version, but I don't know of any demos that did that really well. Overall, devs lose sales by releasing demo versions.

Edit: Citation needed, huh?

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/game-demos-can-hurt-sales-suggests-research/1100-6410863/
http://kotaku.com/demos-are-great-for-gamers-not-so-great-for-game-sales-608603895
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/122056-Game-Dev-Claims-Demos-Hurt-Game-Sales

 

[Mustawd]

No hard feelings, Jinn. It's too bad the storytelling didn't work for you.

Any thiughts on patching in better writing? What Jinn described sounds pretty awful tbh.

 

[Zetor]

Alright, burned through this last week: completionist run, all hard bonus objectives, etc. (What can I say, I'm an SRPG junkie jonesing for a fix...)

TLDR: worth playing if you like puzzle-esque tactics games and don't mind the lack of RPG-ish character advancement. If you want a new Tactics Ogre or FFT, keep looking -- and realize that it's probably beyond the scope of an indie game.

Here's a stream-of-consciousness not-really-review in bulletpoint format because I'm lazy:

• Yea, the writing is what it is. I kinda rolled with it though (it's not THAT bad), and there were some amusing bits here and there, plus the crazy-ass setting and characters made up for a lot of deficiencies. But then, playing SRPGs for the story is like reading Playboy for the articles.
• I gotta cut some slack for the writing / plot though: the parallel 'story threads' concept is pretty novel - to me, at least - and it's fun to revisit the same locations from different POVs (in combat too, btw -- same map with different positioning / enemies / friendly NPCs / objectives), meet the same characters under different circumstances, etc. Also, I totally spotted the Zirekile Falls and Golgorand Execution Site homages!
• The combat UI is servicable, though some transparency could be welcome in addition to just showing character outlines. I ended up having to 90 degree rotate the battlefield a lot because character positioning can be ambiguous otherwise (is this dude standing next to my characters, or 2 levels up + left + behind them?). The Delphi map in particular was really bad for this.
• Mucho style points for the retro sprite / PSX-style 3d battlefields, plus the chippy sound effects. No complaints there.
• The GUI is a bit, uh, Spartan (har) and isn't really making good use of the keyboard -- I assume a tablet / mobile release is planned? Nevertheless, it is OK, I'd liken it to Banner Saga or SRR.
• That said, I think better damage feedback would be a good idea. You only get the base damage of an ability, then a list of modifiers like 'using attack that is strong against enemy armor type', 'above enemy', 'enemy will take collision damage', etc... but you don't see any actual numbers on those. This lead to a lot of situations where I thought I had two enemies dead, but both of them ended up living with 1-2 HP -- or conversely, having some enemies die when I was supposed to just weaken them to accomplish a bonus objective.
• I like the "plan -> execute" style, it also speeds up enemy turns a lot. However, there were many situations where I knew I had lethal damage on an enemy, but I still couldn't move past his corpse during the planning phase unless I used some kind of push / movement ability to get it out of the way. The enemy mostly abides by this restriction, but I seem to remember a few instances where they killed someone with one dude, and moved onto the corpse's square with another (no pushing involved). This can be exacerbated by conveyor belts moving after the player turn but before the enemy turn, which can lead to some nasty surprises (I couldn't see a way to see which way conveyor belts were moving, other than seeing them myself by letting a turn pass).
• There's no linear character advancement, it's all lateral -- you can also only equip 2 skills per character (and 4 on Diona), so you aren't really becoming more powerful after you have 2 skills on everyone (well ok, Scylax's starting flame wave is kinda crap). Skill balance is good for Scylax (obvious tradeoffs for damage and utility vs range, aoe, etcetera), but for the other three characters I found there was always at least one 'must have'. For Diona it's the combo of Roar (bear form AOE stun) and Artemis Arrow (human form ST stun) due to the fact that stuns work on everything including bosses, plus it's really necessary to lock down enemies for certain bonus objectives... I also never really found a use for Beardozer (I mean, it looks cool, but that's about it). Nephele's got a good spread of skills, but Expanding Barrel is just way too strong and versatile (aoe damage, knockback, create obstacle) to keep as a skill 100% of the time except for a certain bonus objective. For Brasidas, Endurance (regen 10 hp per turn) is completely bananas combined with his natural tankiness and the fact that it ticks TWICE: both at the end of the player turn and then at the end of the enemy turn (bug?). There's also a miniboss with this ability who's really painful to kill -- esp since the bonus objective requires the player to kill him with friendly NPCs only.
• Speaking of bonus objectives, this is where the game shines imo. The encounters by themselves aren't that challenging from a tacticool perspective (usually the question is not "how do I kill this dude in a turn" but rather "how do I kill as many dudes as possible in one turn") with a few exceptions - mostly involving harpies - but the bonus 'hard' objective on each map really adds to the fun factor. Sometimes it's as simple as "don't let anyone die" or "escape the series of maps in X turns" (those can get really fucking tense, btw), sometimes it's an aggravating exercise in min-maxing damage (kill miniboss by knocking him onto a steam pipe, have the civilians kill all enemies with their super weak rock throw attack) usually by stalling the enemy force as long as possible, sometimes it forces the player to set up the battlefield (do at least X damage in a single attack by character Y or environmental damage type Z, or use the boss' delayed AOE to do X friendly fire damage to enemies), and sometimes it forces usage of specific tactics (kill each pirate by throwing them off the boat). And then there's the last map, where things get really fucking crazy (in a good way).
• There are several recurring support characters (and they do play an important role in the endgame... though since I unlocked all 6 of them, those 2 maps became perhaps a bit too easy) and they have interesting / fun skillsets, plus since they only appear in a set number of battles, they don't really get stale. Good choice there, imo.
• More than anything, this game seems to be about figuring out how to surgically deal with the various threats on a map, then doing the map again after the bonus objective is unlocked and adapting the strategy/tactics to fit... it feels closer to a puzzle game than a RPG, at times, especially since there aren't too many enemy types - and each of them has a single ability.
• All in all, it was money well spent (in my view), and supporting games like this is worthwhile no matter what. Just as with any indie game, temper your expectations.

 

[Azalin]

But then, playing SRPGs for the story is like reading Playboy for the articles.

Fuck me,there were articles in Playboy?

 

[Galdred]

Out of curiosity, kurtle, did Valery Kim work on the game?

 

[duanth123]

Any thiughts on patching in better writing? What Jinn described sounds pretty awful tbh.

Methinks many indie games would be better served by having little to no writing at all.

Go the Dark Souls route, whereby you are given stimulating, tactical gameplay and in-game objectives with minimal exposition beyond the outlines of a basic quest, so as to let the player (with his sometimes infinitely more self-appealing imagination) fill in the story blanks.

 

[CryptRat]

Methinks many indie games would be better served by having little to no writing at all.

Go the Dark Souls route, whereby you are given stimulating, tactical gameplay and in-game objectives with minimal exposition beyond the outlines of a basic quest, so as to let the player (with his sometimes infinitely more self-appealing imagination) fill in the story blanks.

What you're saying is true, and not limited to indie games, but doesn't apply to this game as far as I'm concerned. Sure some dialogs especially between you characters are not really brilliant, but, even if combat obviously comes first, the dialogs and descriptions directly related with the unique setting as well as the parallel stories are part of the appeal of the game.