Heroes of Shadow Guard

Dungeon crawlers can be very addictive under the right circumstances, especially if you enjoy classic fantasy tropes and repetitive battles in order to get the loot. On the other hand, some of them can even feature a great story and a hefty lore, which makes the experience that much more exciting. Even so, the genre is pretty poor at the moment, because there are not too many fans left.

Heroes of Shadow Guard is a dungeon crawler that sounds great in theory, especially since it features things like dungeon building and multi-platform play. However, the whole concept crumbles once you actually start to play it, mainly because everything is badly implemented and not nearly as fun as it would need to be in order to keep you engaged for more than a few minutes.

To begin with, your goal is to explore dungeons and defeat the traps and the monsters within them in order to get to the treasure. You play from a first-person perspective and you have a party of heroes under your command, heroes that can be used to cast special abilities and put the gear you find to good use. However, the whole experience is preposterously repetitive, especially since the dungeons in question are small and devoid of any personality.

The other interesting component that should keep you engaged is the one that allows you to build your own dungeons and let other players try to raid them. The editor enables you to place walls, traps, guards and special items, but there are only so many combinations you can achieve. On top of that, the simplicity is just too much to bear sometimes, which is not what you want from a multiplayer game.

The multi-platform feature allows you to enjoy the game in multiplayer with people that play it on mobile devices, and it obviously allows you to do the same thing. However, this means that everything is designed to work with a touchscreen, which looks pretty awkward on a PC. Granted, you can move using the WASD keys, but everything else feels unnatural and oversimplified.

In the end, Heroes of Shadow Guard is up to something, but it needs more work before it can impress anyone or at least entertain the players. At the moment, everything is just too repetitive and simple to be fun for more than a few minutes, even if you can build your own dungeons and invite players to raid them.