Desktop Heroes

TheAwakening
2 days ago
3 min read

Overview

In Desktop Heroes your character will automatically attack all sorts of mobs in their way, while you get to equip him and improve his abilities. All of this while the game runs at the bottom of your screen, perfect for multitasking (I wrote this review while the game was running). The game, however, falls short of being an idle game since your character requires constant attention; otherwise, it will die, and you have to revive it. That’s where the idler part stops. I would point to a fast-paced idler RPG if you don’t mind taking care of your heroes while you multitask.

Gameplay

The game starts right away with a warrior advancing through the waves of enemies, attacking everything in his path. Your job is to keep him alive for as long as possible, gearing him up and crafting potions. The gold you gain for each mob allows you to upgrade the selected hero. Weapons, armor, and rings will increase their damage, defense, and a random stat, with more stats randomly upgraded the rarer they are. Dices might drop too; using these will grant us random sellable junk or herbs that we can craft potions such as healing, defensive, or offensive ones. The dices also have a boss spawner as well, which we can summon once we are ready to face them.

If we die at any point, the idling stops, and we must revive our character (for free or with orbs or a potion of resurrection). To keep them alive, we must use potions or let our fairy use them when our health drops to a certain threshold. We can upgrade the fairy once we have the herbs required (red herbs, to be precise), increasing their efficiency. The more potent potions need uncommon herbs, which they drop by rolling the dice or loot if the wave is of a higher level.

Once we beat a boss, we get orbs, which are used to unlock skills or buy the other heroes. The unlocked heroes do not start at the same level as our main, and we must equip them with their respective class gear that will drop during the game. Unfortunately, this does nothing so far as we have to switch characters, they don’t contribute to our total progression, and we can’t share weapons and armor that are class restricted (if we get something in our warrior character, it can’t be transferred to our archer or mage); the only thing we can share is our healing potions and herbs.

The meta is fairly simple as progression goes: we slay stuff, gear up, craft potions, face bosses, and unlock skills/heroes. That’s about it; there is nothing else. The thing is, as difficult as it escalates, we can choose to let it increase automatically or leave it at level 90, as far as our character can take it. With offensive potions we can push this difficulty a bit further until we have to equip gear with higher-level stats. But we can't leave too much idling, as it will get killed too fast with little time to react.

Audio & Graphics

With simple retro graphics and music, the game runs smoothly on our screen, one of the highlights I have seen so far. We can zoom the game, change the layers of the background, or hide the game during screenshots and recordings, among other things, by displaying certain elements of the UI. It always runs at top fps even with all graphical options enabled.