Folk Hero review – be like a hero

Well, good fellows, a roguelike from Russian authors, but in a Slavic fantasy setting, calls you to cleanse Mother Earth of all evil spirits. We sailed to a dangerous island, died there countless times, and came back to you with stories that we will tell in this review.

• Developer: Chudo-Yudo Games
• Publisher: Targem Games
• Platforms: PC
• Release date: October 19, 2023

The simple beginning will tell us about an island that surfaced from the ocean and sent all sorts of monsters to the lands inhabited by peaceful people. The people were annoyed and were preparing to die, but then out of nowhere a hero appeared, looking like a hero, and gave all the monsters what they deserved. After which you will immediately be offered to take into your own hands the fate of this very hero, most likely an unenviable one.

The controls here are simple, depending on the hero’s weapons. The first recruit character is armed with a blade and a bow, from which he has learned to fire a hail of arrows. The hero can dodge, aim by pointing the cursor, and run. Performing all actions except aiming and running uses up stamina.

The beach is a camp where new heroes will begin to flock over time. Someone will be armed with a two-handed sword, someone will take a shield with them, and someone will have a larger bow. Everyone will sail from the camp to the island to collect a bunch of different modifiers and strengthen their existing weapons, bypassing forests, swamps, and dungeons.

The guys from Chudo-Yudo Games did not tear up the beautiful template, and presented the levels in the form of a set of randomly generated rooms, with passages and marks displayed on the mini-map.

You will come across rooms with icons of coins, swords, vessels, hearts, and artifacts. After clearing one of these rooms of enemies, you will be able to buy runes from local residents to attach them to weapons and enhance them with the effect of bleeding or fire, so that enemies catch fire from each other and everyone takes damage.

You will buy drinks from the potion seller, drink them without leaving the counter, and enjoy the increases in stamina, speed, and crit. By drinking water from the well, the hero will restore health points, and by talking with an experienced warrior, he will improve his weapon skills. Of course, everything is not for free, but for silver coins that fall from defeated enemies.

You can buy items with specific properties from the artifact seller. Like a piece of wood that gives a barrier for killing five enemies in a row or reduces the cost of a bast dash. Among the artifacts there are also active ones, so that the hero can, for example, roar and force all the enemies around him to fight each other. Artifacts are also often found in chests scattered throughout the rooms.

There are also marks with arrows and shards on the map. As players adapted to the genre can guess, they mean transition rooms to new levels, and therefore difficult battles. The arrows will lead you to already familiar enemies of the level, enhanced by modifiers, and the shards will lead you directly to the bosses.

It is noteworthy that at levels you sometimes receive tasks, such as finding and lighting the stones of several forges or catching all the gnomes, as a reward for completing which you can receive a special currency – amber and/or reputation points, which are also gradually awarded for visiting rooms.

By combining dashes, shots, and melee attacks, you waltz with werewolves, sorcerers, Pechenegs, and other evil creatures. Opponents do not neglect the mechanics and either kite you, or aggressively press you, or they can try to shoot you or kick you in a huge crowd, slapping each other on the back of the head as well. True, unlike enemies, the player will have to constantly reckon with the stamina counter.

If defeated, the player returns to the camp and the character dies, but his reputation and knowledge remain, thanks to which the boatman will tell about any artifact found by the heroes, and the weapons master will improve the basic effectiveness of the newly arrived braves.

The textures of the obstacles are a little annoying, and I don’t agree with all the mechanics, but in general, there are no serious complaints about Folk Hero, the setting was just a little undercooked. Our guys came up with a seemingly simple, but quite good bagel, and not the most complex, but requiring concentration and especially perseverance. We recommend it to connoisseurs.