Fire and Reign- Hoard Review

Hoard is conceptually very simple: a score-attack style game where you control a dragon from an overhead perspective, with a goal to destroy farms, villages and castles and collect the gold your hoard.  The gold you collect can be used to upgrade your dragon’s speed, fire breath, carrying capacity and defense, all of which help you collect more gold. The monotony of collection for the sake of streamlining future collection is broken up by spontaneous hazards to impede your progress. Archers, knights, thieves and opposing dragons all seek to ground your dragon. The only penalty for dying is that you are forced to drop any gold you are carrying and wait at your hoard for a few seconds while you heal, but that few seconds could be thousands of points lost in a timed match.

Simple, dual-stick controls and a very simple goal mix with light strategy to make Hoard one of the more addicting games on the PlayStation Network. In addition to burning down buildings for gold, players can opt to terrorize villages until they produce regular offerings to their scaly oppressors. Once a village fears your dragon, your attention becomes split between collecting gold and defending your villages from other dragons and ogres.  Occasionally, a royal carriage will pop up, carrying a princess rather than the typical gold. Grabbing the princess will raise the attention of any knights on the map, but if you can hold onto her for long enough, you will reap serious rewards.

There are four modes of play in Hoard, each a slight variation on the basic score-attack rules.  One pits you against another dragon to see who can steal the most princesses, while another has you cooperating with other dragons to collect one massive hoard. Each minor variant calls for a completely different style of play, which keeps the game fresh. Add to that the fact that three of the four modes are available for online multiplayer, and your dragon flying days seem to stretch pretty far into the future.

If you couldn’t discern from the past few paragraphs, I really enjoy Hoard, but I would be remiss if I skipped over a few negative points. For example, the sound design is absolutely terrible. I can only imagine that Big Sandwich Games dug to the bottom of the public domain sound barrel to pick out the bland clicks and bloops that try so hard to suck the character out of the game. The sound track made me relive my weeks lost gambling real money away in casinos, rather than imagining dragons terrorizing a fantasy world for fantasy gold. Also, the game has a tendency to slow down significantly after leveling up, but regains speed after only a moment. All though these points are worth noting, since I am a consumer advocate, they are by no means game-breaking.