Antihero

I came to Antihero expecting a gimmick with a Victorian hat on it, and I left impressed by how cleanly the whole system clicks together. The premise is pure board game logic transplanted into a gas-lit criminal underworld: you run a thieves guild, scout fog-covered city blocks with your Master Thief, and race a rival guild to earn enough Victory Points before they do. It sounds slight. It is not. The unit roster tells you most of what you need to know about where the real competition lives. Urchins infiltrate banks and churches for steady gold and lantern income, but a single Truant Officer sent by your opponent can evict all three from a building you spent turns setting up, nuking both the investment and the passive income. Thugs block movement lanes. Gangs fight and level up on kills but stay exposed between turns. Bombers plant traps that punish aggressive incursions. Assassins are single-use burst tools for clearing high-value targets or completing contracts. The upgrade tree splits into three branches, loosely labeled Sneakery, Stabbery, and Skullduggery, and you will never fully unlock all of them in a single match. That forced prioritization is the core tension: do you invest early in Urchin cost reduction to ramp income faster, or do you lock down territory with Thugs before your opponent beats you to the chokepoints? The answers shift every map, and every map randomizes its layout, which keeps the read-and-react loop feeling fresh across repeated sessions. The campaign runs roughly seven hours and doubles as an extended tutorial. It ramps reasonably, introduces one new wrinkle per mission, and has a difficulty spike or two that will slap you if you try to autopilot through it. Playable characters Lightfinger and Emma offer slightly different campaign angles, but neither pushes the narrative into must-see territory. The story is thin. What the campaign does well is build your mechanical fluency before shoving you into PvP, which is where the game earns its keep. There are two multiplayer modes: Live, where both players are online simultaneously and a per-turn timer keeps things moving, and Casual, which is fully asynchronous with email notifications on your turn. The asynchronous mode is surprisingly enjoyable as a slow-burn mind game with a friend across a few days. Skirmish lets you adjust starting gold, lanterns, win conditions, and unit availability before each match, which is a nice customization layer that can completely change how a session plays. Hotseat local multiplayer is also present, though it is the usual pass-the-mouse arrangement. Here is the honest problem: this game released in 2017 and the random online matchmaking pool has always been thin. Getting a live random match depends heavily on timing, and the community never grew to Call of Duty numbers. If you buy this and expect to queue into strangers at will, you may be waiting. Friend matches and asynchronous games with people you rope in personally are the reliable experience. The solo AI scales across difficulties and will punish you at Normal until you find a workable resource strategy, so it holds some replay value on its own. The art holds up well: thick-lined characters on a dark city grid read clearly at a glance, and the comic-panel chapter interludes give the campaign a charm that punches above its production budget. No launcher overhead, no battle pass, no live-service nonsense. It installs, it runs, and it does exactly what it says.

Fred · Scout Team

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