Would also be interested to hear what you think of Has-Been Heroes. Looks interesting to me but I've heard alot of conflicting stuff.
Finally got to play "Has-Been-Heroes". The game is a rogue-like/rogue-lite/rogue-whatever. You start with 3 heroes, that have different attacks and abilties, each hero starts with a starter weapon (that defines his attack pattern/strentgh and his passive abilities) and a spell to use.
Combat is kind of strange. You have three lanes, occupied by your heroes, enemy come from the right side and sloooowly travel to the left, towards your heroes. if they reach them, the heroes get attacked and push the enemies back again. Enemies have two types of HP, Stamina and health. Stamina acts as block mechanic, if the enemy has still Stamina, he takes no damage. each attack removes one Stamina point. The different heroes have different attack patterns, the rogue deals three quick attacks while the warrior attacks with one might attack, that deals huge damage.
If you deplet the stamina of an enemy, the next hit directly goes to the hp and pushes the opponent back into the lane but also replenishes his stamina back to full. You can however decrease his max stamina in different ways, mostly if you make perfect attack combos,.
You don't have to kill all enemies during a fight, at the top of the screen you see your progress on the route to the next stop, if you reach the next stop before you killd all enemies, the remaining ones will simply flee.
As typical in rogue-likes, the map is randomly generated, enemies and encounters are randomly drawn from a pool. The map has different locations, that you can move to via the routes, that go along the whole map (think of Darkest Dungeons room system). You can see, what encounters wayit you at adjacent locations, so you don't run into the unknown like in DD. Chests, merchants and other stuff exist, that give you new items. These items can be hold by your heroes to give them new passive boosts and effects (similiar to Isaac. Actually, it's very close to Isaac in that regard). Additionally you can find spell scrolls, that your heroes can equip to learn new spells to use. I think you can have up to 5 or 6 of those. A far as I can see, every hero can use any spell, so there are no mage exclusive fireballs or anything like that but some characters are simply better in casting than others, the monk, that you start with, gets a 30% damage boost on spells for an example.
During your travel, you collect the souls of slain enemies with soul spheres, these spheres hold up to 20 souls, if they are full, you can immediatly cast a new spell without waiting for the cooldown (there is no mana, just very long cooldowns), you have two different soul spheres and I don't know what the difference between is them if any. After you die, all the collected souls, those used up for free spells, are added to your general collection, if you have enough souls, you automatically unlock new items that you can find during your game (and I think new heroes as well). YAs far as it appears you don't get any other benefit out of this just having these new items in the randomization pool during your runs, so there is no meta progression here. I could be wrong so, I'm still not very far.
Problems so far are, that it's soemtimes hard to keep track of what kills you. You suddenly die and don't actually know WHY you died. Okay, a monster hit you and you saw the monster but the HP bars on your heroes are very tiny and hard to notice.
It's a fun game but it's a simple casual rogue-like with not much complexity and the novelity of the game is simply the attack combo system, that you have to attack enemies in matching strikes, so they loose max stamina. Sicne you can only switch heroes in lanes AFTER attacking,t his isn't very easy (or well designed to be honest).
I think however I could get enough fun out of the game to make it worth my time.
