HOARD
By Big Sandwich Games
Genre: Top-down Action-strategy
Rated: Everyone for Fantasy Violence
Downloadable
Yet another independent title finds its way onto my computer, and like most others I’ve tried, this one is really great. You take control of a dragon! How awesome! And your goal is to amass more gold than all the other dragons. (It’s a competitive game at heart.) You do this by flying around a region of land populated by towns, windmills, fields, bell towers, wizard towers and of course the opposing dragons, and torch all you can!
From time to time various carriages will cross the map finding their ways to adjacent towns; you may torch them for additional gold, too! Not only that, but sometimes royal carriages bearing princesses appear; if you torch the carriages, you can kidnap the princesses and ransom them back at your hoard for more gold!
Be careful, though; carrying your limit in gold, or toting a magic crystal you get from the very dangerous wizard tower, will slow you way down, and make you easy prey for the opposition! Fortunately you cannot ever ‘die,’ just lose the competition; if you lose all your energy you drop everything and are sent back to your hoard to heal up.
Said opposition does not solely consist of other dragons, though: around the towns you will find archers who shoot highly damaging arrows at you. Fortunately, you can damage a town’s peripheral buildings and thus cow it into respecting you, resulting in its archers leaving you alone.
You must also watch out for knights; these heroic warriors on horseback will defend the land and any princesses you find (which may be ransomed for a bonus deposit of gold!) with a more damaging attack than the archers. More annoying but more lucrative still are the aforementioned Wizard Towers, which fire highly damaging bolts of magic at a high rate; destroying them quickly will reveal a large magic crystal!
Also stomping around your domain are giants! These can one-hit incapacitate you with their massive clubs, but again, killing one nets you massive amounts of gold!
As you can tell, there’s a whole lot of things to keep in mind about this game, but just relax, play at your own pace, and you’ll do fine. Obviously it can get a little repetitive, but that’s the nature of the game and doesn’t detract from my rating, which is five out of five! Check it out!