Hordes of Hunger – Preview
Over the course of these last few years, Survivors-like titles have been sprouting like weeds, some of them being amazing entries in the genre while others are rubbish, trying to bank on the success. We loved original titles such as Keeper’s Toll and Nordic Ashes, which came with original mechanics and engaging gameplay. This is also what intrigued us when looking at early gameplay footage of Hordes of Hunger. The game is currently out in Early Access and combines Survivors-like mechanics with hack-and-slash gameplay. While still rough around the edges, we enjoyed ourselves for the most part.
Hordes of Hunger strays away from the typical 2D or 3D isometric point of view and somewhat shifts more to a third-person perspective. There is the option for an isometric point of view, but said camera option feels a bit unstable at the time of writing this preview. The enemy models look creepy, and the game somewhat has the same vibes as a Dark Souls title. The sound design complements everything quite nicely, and the almost juicy hack-and-slash sounds provide great audio feedback for the onscreen action. Sadly, Mirah, the protagonist, repeats some voice lines a bit too often to our liking. The other SFX are also very decent. The soundtrack takes the backseat when playing through a run.
There is also a bit of story value already in the game, but everything feels really vague. You’ll encounter other survivors in the monster-infested areas, which you can save and bring to Sanctuary, the only safe zone in the world that we know of. The dialogues are fully voiced, which is certainly a plus. We would love to see a bit more narrative ‘dressing’ in the full version.
It’s in the gameplay aspect that Hordes of Hunger does things a bit differently than your average Survivors-like game. The early stages of a run feel a bit more like a hack-and-slash title, as you’ll have to manually target enemies to use your light and heavy attacks on. You can also dodge and parry, and there’s also a bigger and stronger charged attack that you can equip. As you kill monsters and earn experience points, you’ll level up and be presented with three upgrade choices to pick from. Some are tiny passive upgrades, while others present you with new skills. These skills can range from electrocuting your enemies while dodging through them to casting massive fissures under random enemies to deal fire damage per second. From this point onwards, you’ll be able to focus more on dishing out damage that occurs at fixed intervals as well. This does make the gameplay a bit more versatile compared to very generic Vampire Survivors clones, as you can opt to participate actively while also enjoying the benefits of automatic attacks.
While entertaining, Hordes of Hunger doesn’t offer that much content yet, and some of it is already recycled in the stages of the second chapter. Each of the levels is divided into several missions, with a small moment of safety in between some of them. Sadly, missions can become repetitive, even in the course of a single level. Sometimes you’ll have to do the same mission, such as finding the holy ground and staying within the small circle until it’s safe, which is actually a shame. It would have been a lot more fun if the same missions hadn’t repeated in the course of a single level. We hope that additional missions will be added in the future. Even so, the gameplay loop is still very entertaining, but because of the aforementioned issue and the drop rates of weapon pieces, the pacing does feel a bit off. We were able to complete what the current build had to offer without actually being able to craft more than a single new weapon, which was just a slightly stronger version of our starting sword. We hope the drop chance for weapons shards increases in future updates, allowing us to experiment more with new and stronger weapons.
Even though we personally preferred playing the game with a controller, as we are more than likely used to playing hack-and-slash titles this way, we felt that there was some input lag, and sometimes button presses proved to be rather unresponsive. This wasn’t always the case, but it happened often enough for us to notice it during hectic moments.
Conclusion
Hordes of Hunger shows a lot of promise, but the current build may be a bit too light on content for some potential buyers to pick it up already. If you do decide to take the plunge, you’ll have a few hours of fun and engaging content, with a few rough edges here and there. The game proves to be a fun spin on the typical Survivors-like experience and has an interesting world that we hope gets fleshed out in the full version. While we may already be done with the current build of this Dark Souls-esque interpretation of Vampire Survivors, we will be revisiting it with future content updates to dive back into the action.
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