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| Hoard cover |
Hoard is a top-down-view sandbox game available on Steam for about $10. The game consists of playing as a dragon, trying to destroy everything, and collecting all the loot that is dropped by the things destroyed. Well that is how the game starts; Hoard offers several different viable strategies like slowing your competition, dominating towns so they pay you without any work, or just overall destruction. Hoard has no defined storyline; it’s basically a stress reliever. The game rounds in Hoard only last 10 minutes leaving me wishing there was a freeplay mode or a way to increase round length. In Hoard you control a dragon, they have four skills: speed, attack, inventory size (holding money), and armor. All of them are important and to be successful in the game you need to choose your skills quickly. A dragon that focuses only on speed will be weak and unable to carry much while a dragon that focuses entirely on inventory size will have problems killing things and getting there in a timely many. Skill points are gained by leveling up, the experience is earned when turning in princess’, gems, or money.
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| Hoard multiplayer! |
Multiplayer has three modes: a lootfest mode (earn the most points/make the most money), a capture the princess mode, and a cooperative lootfest mode. The lootfest and cooperative lootfest modes consist of burning everything down and collecting loot. Other strategies like focusing on carts and towers are viable because a developed farm and a developed town will produce valuable carts. That is the strategy that works best for me but if you just want to destroy everything, it works, and its fun as hell. All the objects you can attack have different values to them, towers range from 750-3000 in worth, farms and villages from 500-1500, knights/archers can be worth anywhere from 75-500, but the real money makers come from the hard to get and hard to kill objects. Things like giants which can be worth 5000 or more, princess’ which range from 1000-3000, and lightning towers which ranger from 3000-5000. There are a ton of different things to kill which means the maps vary greatly, some have a lot of villages but few lightning towers or castles that produce knights. There are maps with a lot of lightning towers which means you can potentially get a very high score but at an increased risk. The game isn’t just about the looting, you need to survive as well and get the most points! If you capture a princess, all the knights on the map will try and hunt you down to get their princess back. Thieves spawn periodically trying to steal from your Hoard of loot. As time progresses (at a rate of once every 30 seconds or so) you will get your multiplier improve up to x3 at the most, this means you can level up more quickly but you have to protect yourself and your loot to keep the multiplier. This means that to do better you can’t just run over everything hoping to live or leave your base undefended for extended periods of time and this is where the multiplayer takes off. Team play is hugely valuable, picking skills to work off of each other is also important and it made the game much more enjoyable for me.
While this game shines in multiplayer (my house was filled with yelling when playing this with friends, the pvp is great for producing this) the game does fall behind in the single player. To be honost, it just gets boring, the AI for the computer characters isn’t the best and there is no option to increase their difficult so it gets old fast. Without a campaign or story and having only a handful of modes (though it has some that multiplayer doesn’t) Hoard doesn’t really offer much in the form of single player.
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| Hoard single player |
Overall Hoard is a very entertaining multiplayer game but at a price of 10 dollars, because it offers so little single player potential, I think the price is too much. However if you are patient this game will be on sale on Steam again, if I remember correctly I purchased it for $2.50 during a past sale in which case I would very much so recommend the game. If you have 10 minutes to burn before you need to go to work or catch a flight then Hoard is great, but don’t expect it to consume hours without playing with friends. The best part of this game is playing with people, pvp is exciting and it is great fun thinking of ways to hurt your opponent whether it be stealing what they kill, just killing them over and over, kiting knights to their Hoard, or yourself stealing from their Hoard.
Hoard's Rating: 75/100
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