[This review of Hoard from Indie Royale's Valentine's bundle we co-run with Desura was originally written by Colin Brown on Backlog Journey.]

To paraphrase the official site, Hoard is a game about dragons. Ok, fine, I'll expand. In Hoard, you play as one of up to four dragons, all plotting to expand their hoard. As any good D&D player could tell you, dragons are notoriously territorial, and luckily Big Sandwich Games was around to capitalize on that territorial model for an arcade style video game.

While there's no particular campaign mode, there are quite a few maps packed into Hoard, with even more from the DLC (thankfully included in the Indie Royale as well). Your goal for each map is to hit the target score and earn a gold medal by any means you see fit. Each map is loaded with farms, cities, castles, trade routes and various other bits of medieval settings to do whatever you wish to. There are plenty of enemies running about as well; not only do you have to contend with your dragon rivals, but thieves, knights and archers will try to ruin your day. If you want a nice little bonus, you can intercept and capture princesses too. Ever wonder why dragons loved princesses? Apparently they convert to a hefty gold bonus after five seconds. Who knew?

Obviously burning down stuff gets you a little bit of gold, but you know what's cool? A lot of gold. There are other approaches; terrorizing a village enough will force the village under your fearful influence, which causes them to send tributes and assist you in battle. Burning down a farm right away will get you a chuck of change, but letting them send grain to towns will make them become riper targets faster. It's a very simple system to learn (burn everything) but Hoard is fairly deep for an arcade game.


There's a few little things wrong with the game, but nothing major. The main menu highly recommends using an Xbox 360 controller, and I'll second that. Like most twin stick shooters, Hoard works best with two analogue sticks and not as well on your regular keyboard mouse set-up. Secondly, the game is sadly lacking local play. You can play online, but there's no method for a split screen set-up. I'm guessing it's because some of the maps are too big to show all at once, but this game is just begging for local support. Finally, the game could have really used some kind of campaign or single player mission structure. Going for gold medals is nice and all, but a fleshed out single player component could have really improved things.

As it stands Hoard works well as a pick up and play casual title for a few rounds at a time, cause it's a great mix of arcade and strategy. There's enough different methods and tactics to keep you engaged and on your toes, and there's a fair amount of maps to sift through. I never would of thought a dragon's migratory patterns would fit in an arcade game, but I'm glad I was pleasantly proven wrong.

[Hoard, Lume, Soulcaster I/II, and Zeno Clash are available now in Indie Royale's Valentine's bundle.]