Developer: Monkey Stories
Publisher: Monkey Stories
Rrp: £6.99 (Humblebundle and Steam) and $9.99 (Itch.io)
Released: 22nd September 2016
Available on: Humblebundle, Steam and Itch.io
Played Using: Keyboard and Mouse
Approximate game length: 8 Hours
Where do I begin with this? Well here goes. This game…. Is not good, its not terrible or even particularly bad but, it must be said that its also not good either. In fact I would say its decidedly mediocre, and everything that this game does has been done better by games that predate it.
Heroes of the Monkey Tavern is a dungeon crawler similar to games such as Vaporum or The Legend of Grimrock series (you might get sick of hearing about those two in this review as I mention them quite a few times). The premise is stupid but honestly it’s not that important really. All you truly need to know is that you’re in a dungeon and the only way to escape is to work your way through and battle all the enemies.
On the whole the game performs well enough with no graphical errors that I could spot, and the mechanics are solid enough. However once you get past this you see the cracks. Lets begin with one of the most important parts of this game, the combat.
In order to fight you have to click the weapon/attack symbol under each heroes portrait to attack, it works well enough but both Legend of Grimrock games (the first of which came out four years before this) didn’t have this restriction allowing the player to cycle through the party and attack just by clicking the screen or pressing a attack key on the keyboard.
You also can’t strafe around enemies and use the tile based nature of the movement to your advantage, which again is something you can do in The Legend of Grimrock and Vaporum. Attempting to do so will hurt you as the creature gets to score an opportunity attack. I wouldn’t be so frustrated by this if it weren’t for two things, for a start the creatures get to do this attack even when they aren’t facing you. The second reason is that for some reason the traps in this dungeon don’t affect your enemies, not that they don’t go off, they
do. But the creatures will take absolutely no damage, which is hardly
fair.
The game also gives absolutely no tutorials for anything just dropping you into the first level of the dungeon. While that first level does teach you the ins and outs of the game at no point does it tell you what keys to press. Now, ordinarily if I wish to learn what keys do what, I would enter the options menu and look at what the assigned controls are. However this game doesn’t have such a feature meaning all you can do is try and learn through trial and error.
On top of that the game provides no information on what certain terms mean, for example fairly early on I unlocked ‘Axes +1’ for my barbarian. That’s great and all but what does that actually mean? Do I do more damage? Hit more accurately? Both? It would be different if we could see weapon stats but there aren’t any for me to view. Even implementing a tooltip system when hovering over a characters unlocked skill would’ve helped a lot.
At the start of the game
you get to assign classes to your four heroes, there are a total of
eight to chose from each describing their strengths and what kind of
equipment they can use. You also get to pick the characters portraits
and add a few points to their attributes. Funnily enough there are
some tooltips that appear here so why not in the rest of the game?
A map gets drawn as you explore, of course it doesn’t show as a mini-map so you have to keep using [TAB] to see it (again something that wasn’t shown in a tutorial at all). You also can’t add notes to the map which I feel is rather important in a game like this as there are many things to remember and the map doesn’t automatically show things such as levers.
I know that I sound like I’m complaining, and that’s probably because I am. I just find it inexcusable to somehow be not as good as your predecessors in every way. Honestly if you want a dungeon crawler to play look to The Legend of Grimrock series and Vaporum as they are far better examples of the genre and are only a little bit more expensive. I’d save this for if you have a hankering for a dungeon crawler and have completed those games multiple times.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
