HOARD

I came into HOARD the way I come into most short-session games: skeptical that it had enough going on to hold attention past the first few rounds. It does, but only just, and only under the right conditions. The premise is simple to the point of being a single sentence: fly around a top-down medieval map, burn things, grab gold, deposit it before thieves or rival dragons swipe it, and end the match with the biggest pile. That loop runs on a ten-minute timer, which is either perfect or infuriating depending on your tolerance for games that end right when the tension peaks. The control scheme is the first thing to figure out. On keyboard it fights you - WASD to move and mouse to aim works on paper but the action gets hectic fast enough that you will want a gamepad. The game itself recommends an Xbox 360 controller, and that advice is correct. With a stick in hand it plays like a top-down dual-stick shooter with resource-management sprinkled on top. Your dragon levels up during a match, and you choose where to spend points across attack range, speed, armor, and carry capacity. Those upgrade decisions actually matter. Dumping everything into speed makes you a smash-and-grab specialist; stacking carry capacity and attack means you can bully rival dragons and haul heavier loads. There is a real decision tree here even if the ceiling is low. The four modes give you enough variety to not feel like you are playing the same thing on repeat. Treasure Collect is the baseline: most gold wins. Princess Rush tasks you with ransoming the most captured royals before anyone else hits the target count, and because AI dragons will literally sprint into your lair and steal your princess mid-ransom, it creates the most chaotic and entertaining matches. The survival mode named HOARD drops the competition and just throws escalating waves of towers and attackers at you until you die. Co-op lets up to four players pool a shared gold total, which changes the dynamic from cutthroat to coordinated. The map design has one mechanic worth noting: villages and towns grow dynamically from nothing, meaning you can let a settlement mature for higher payouts, but wait too long and it starts hiring archers and knights that chip away at you. That tension between patience and aggression is the smartest thing in the game. The weaknesses are real and worth knowing before you load up. The online player base is effectively dead - finding a random online match in 2025 is not happening. The game was also built with local multiplayer spirit in mind but shipped without local co-op on PC, which is a baffling omission that community threads are still annoyed about over a decade later. Solo against AI is decent for learning the maps, but the bots are not smart enough to push you past the first couple of difficulty tiers before the loop starts to feel repetitive. The visuals go for a tabletop board-game aesthetic - tiles drop onto the map at the start of each round - which is charming, though the fire breath animation looks weaker than expected. Music is forgettable at best and actively distracting at worst; turning it off is a valid play. Who is this for right now? If you have two or three friends willing to play online together and coordinate through Discord, HOARD scratches a very specific itch: low-stakes competitive chaos with short sessions and zero barrier to entry. As a solo purchase to grind through 30-plus levels against bots, the appeal shrinks significantly. It is a 2011 indie that has aged into something you enjoy for a weekend with the right group and then shelve.

Fred · Scout Team

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