Still raw in the middle.
Backpack Hero is a game that is immensely fun for the first couple of hours. Make no mistake, it’s still far from a game of the year contender even at its highest peaks, but it’s still managed to nail down an incredibly addictive gameplay loop that managed to sap about five hours of my time in what felt like one. There's an obscene amount of promise in these early stages, just as everything is starting to open up to you, and it really seemed like it was going to be solid for the entire runtime.
It’s regrettable, then, that the remaining ten hours I’ve spent with it have been little but tedious retreads, the game long having since run out of fresh things to show me. I’d estimate I’ve got at least another ten hours before I can finish the story mode, and I really don’t feel like putting too much more effort into trying for it. Backpack Hero doesn’t have long enough legs.
The two main factors I’d blame for how rapidly stale the game gets as it goes along come down to repetitious grinding and a total lack of challenge. Backpack Hero offers what would theoretically be dozens of builds — shurikens, gemstones, fish, magic wands and staves — but nothing is as anywhere near as effective as passively tanking up with shoe hats and leather caps and finding any weapon that does eight or more damage per energy. The most viable builds all share the exact same core of gaining dozens of armor on your first turn; after that, you can choose to deal a whole bunch of damage at once, or you can choose to apply statuses that deal damage over time. The best weapons can do both, and it’s exceptionally easy to forge a sword that hits for 11 and applies four poison with every swing while you’re still on the second of nine floors. There’s no incentive whatsoever to go for anything other than a tank-physical damage or tank-damage status playstyle: magic items require mana, which requires committing to manastones, which each take up a bag slot; Satchel’s lutes and triangles are such ridiculously strong status-appliers that you can throw away your starting weapons and spam your shield while passively building charm; Pochette’s minions deal damage for her, so she can just sit up front and click on her shield for the half hour it takes to complete a run.
This is probably the easiest roguelite I’ve ever played. In addition to being the most obviously powerful way to play the game, tank-physical damage (read: sword and board) builds are so easy to set up that you have to intentionally go out of your way not to play them. Passive armor and small-but-powerful shields are everywhere, mostly stepping on each others toes with incredibly minor trade-offs between them (one shield takes up two spaces and gives eight block; another takes up two spaces and gives seven, but also gives an additional passive block for every adjacent piece of armor), so you’re never going to be at a point where you’re left without obscene damage and obscene block outside of the starting one or two fights where you still have default gear. I only ever died once in fifteen hours to a starting fight that was literally impossible to win due to how bad my initial items were relative to how quickly the enemies scaled up against them. The run may as well end the second that you get to the stairs going to the second floor, because there won’t be anything further down that’ll even have a chance to kill you. The ninth-floor boss is universally easier to clear than the first floor introductory fight.
The town building mechanics between runs is almost universally reviled, and with good reason; it’s shallow, and it quickly falls out of importance in exchange for how much micro-management it asks of the player. Realistically, the best way to handle it is to just plop down houses and farms far away in the distance, and build every single shop as close as you can to the path leading back to the dungeon so that you don’t need to walk too far to get your upgrades. Resources for new unlocks are tight in the early stages of the game, but you’ll be completely overflowing with food and construction and treasure to the point that you literally won’t be able to spend it all unless you’re really dying to set up non-crate decorations around town. Putting up building-appropriate decorations increases the “efficiency” of said buildings, which seems to do nothing besides lower the resource costs for the upgrades of that particular building. Directly unlocking the upgrades without the discount requires spending the exact same resources. You’re better off skipping the extra step and just buying the unlocks at MSRP. I’m sure they look nice, but you’re not going to be spending more than a couple minutes in town for every half hour you spend in the dungeon. The decorations are barely useful mechanically, and you aren’t in town often enough to appreciate them visually. It’s a very messy, tacked-on idea that serves only to pad out an already incredibly-padded story mode.
What broke my will, though, was trying to unlock the character Tote. Tote won’t join you unless you carry her totem through six floors of the dungeon and two boss fights, and her totem takes up a slot. Hardly a problem after the first two fights, since you'll have more than enough backpack space for it by then, but it means you’ll be giving up at least one of Purse’s starting items and a bonus boon from Matthew to fit it into your 3x3 starting backpack. Regardless, I got to the bottom of the swamp, showed Tote the totem, beat the fucking tar out of her, and then finished the run. When I got back to town, there was no Tote. I went back into the dungeon, saw that her totem was still there, figured I hadn’t met some condition to unlock her yet, and went back to the swamp. No Tote. Finished the run, went back in, carried the totem to the bottom, still no Tote. I did the exact same run to the end of the swamp with my other two characters, and there still wasn’t any sign of Tote. I looked it up to see if I was missing something, and the closest thing I could find to an answer was a group of people in the Steam forums who said that Tote showing up at all was a random occurrence, and that it took one of them twenty runs before he could recruit Tote. I'd like to remind you here that the average run lasts about twenty to thirty minutes. Even so, I had already met Tote, and I had already fought Tote, and Tote had already agreed to join me, so I think the game just bugged out and didn’t give her to me when it should have. Normally I wouldn’t care about not being able to play a new character — Tote is apparently pretty bad relative to the rest of the cast, anyway — but you need to clear all nine floors with every character in order to actually beat story mode. No Tote means no ending. It seems like my best course of action would be to delete my fifteen-hour save and start from scratch in the hopes that it doesn’t happen again and she actually gets unlocked when she’s supposed to.
No thanks. I’m good.
This is one more game that’s out of early access purely by technicality.
Backpack Hero is a game that is immensely fun for the first couple of hours. Make no mistake, it’s still far from a game of the year contender even at its highest peaks, but it’s still managed to nail down an incredibly addictive gameplay loop that managed to sap about five hours of my time in what felt like one. There's an obscene amount of promise in these early stages, just as everything is starting to open up to you, and it really seemed like it was going to be solid for the entire runtime.
It’s regrettable, then, that the remaining ten hours I’ve spent with it have been little but tedious retreads, the game long having since run out of fresh things to show me. I’d estimate I’ve got at least another ten hours before I can finish the story mode, and I really don’t feel like putting too much more effort into trying for it. Backpack Hero doesn’t have long enough legs.
The two main factors I’d blame for how rapidly stale the game gets as it goes along come down to repetitious grinding and a total lack of challenge. Backpack Hero offers what would theoretically be dozens of builds — shurikens, gemstones, fish, magic wands and staves — but nothing is as anywhere near as effective as passively tanking up with shoe hats and leather caps and finding any weapon that does eight or more damage per energy. The most viable builds all share the exact same core of gaining dozens of armor on your first turn; after that, you can choose to deal a whole bunch of damage at once, or you can choose to apply statuses that deal damage over time. The best weapons can do both, and it’s exceptionally easy to forge a sword that hits for 11 and applies four poison with every swing while you’re still on the second of nine floors. There’s no incentive whatsoever to go for anything other than a tank-physical damage or tank-damage status playstyle: magic items require mana, which requires committing to manastones, which each take up a bag slot; Satchel’s lutes and triangles are such ridiculously strong status-appliers that you can throw away your starting weapons and spam your shield while passively building charm; Pochette’s minions deal damage for her, so she can just sit up front and click on her shield for the half hour it takes to complete a run.
This is probably the easiest roguelite I’ve ever played. In addition to being the most obviously powerful way to play the game, tank-physical damage (read: sword and board) builds are so easy to set up that you have to intentionally go out of your way not to play them. Passive armor and small-but-powerful shields are everywhere, mostly stepping on each others toes with incredibly minor trade-offs between them (one shield takes up two spaces and gives eight block; another takes up two spaces and gives seven, but also gives an additional passive block for every adjacent piece of armor), so you’re never going to be at a point where you’re left without obscene damage and obscene block outside of the starting one or two fights where you still have default gear. I only ever died once in fifteen hours to a starting fight that was literally impossible to win due to how bad my initial items were relative to how quickly the enemies scaled up against them. The run may as well end the second that you get to the stairs going to the second floor, because there won’t be anything further down that’ll even have a chance to kill you. The ninth-floor boss is universally easier to clear than the first floor introductory fight.
The town building mechanics between runs is almost universally reviled, and with good reason; it’s shallow, and it quickly falls out of importance in exchange for how much micro-management it asks of the player. Realistically, the best way to handle it is to just plop down houses and farms far away in the distance, and build every single shop as close as you can to the path leading back to the dungeon so that you don’t need to walk too far to get your upgrades. Resources for new unlocks are tight in the early stages of the game, but you’ll be completely overflowing with food and construction and treasure to the point that you literally won’t be able to spend it all unless you’re really dying to set up non-crate decorations around town. Putting up building-appropriate decorations increases the “efficiency” of said buildings, which seems to do nothing besides lower the resource costs for the upgrades of that particular building. Directly unlocking the upgrades without the discount requires spending the exact same resources. You’re better off skipping the extra step and just buying the unlocks at MSRP. I’m sure they look nice, but you’re not going to be spending more than a couple minutes in town for every half hour you spend in the dungeon. The decorations are barely useful mechanically, and you aren’t in town often enough to appreciate them visually. It’s a very messy, tacked-on idea that serves only to pad out an already incredibly-padded story mode.
What broke my will, though, was trying to unlock the character Tote. Tote won’t join you unless you carry her totem through six floors of the dungeon and two boss fights, and her totem takes up a slot. Hardly a problem after the first two fights, since you'll have more than enough backpack space for it by then, but it means you’ll be giving up at least one of Purse’s starting items and a bonus boon from Matthew to fit it into your 3x3 starting backpack. Regardless, I got to the bottom of the swamp, showed Tote the totem, beat the fucking tar out of her, and then finished the run. When I got back to town, there was no Tote. I went back into the dungeon, saw that her totem was still there, figured I hadn’t met some condition to unlock her yet, and went back to the swamp. No Tote. Finished the run, went back in, carried the totem to the bottom, still no Tote. I did the exact same run to the end of the swamp with my other two characters, and there still wasn’t any sign of Tote. I looked it up to see if I was missing something, and the closest thing I could find to an answer was a group of people in the Steam forums who said that Tote showing up at all was a random occurrence, and that it took one of them twenty runs before he could recruit Tote. I'd like to remind you here that the average run lasts about twenty to thirty minutes. Even so, I had already met Tote, and I had already fought Tote, and Tote had already agreed to join me, so I think the game just bugged out and didn’t give her to me when it should have. Normally I wouldn’t care about not being able to play a new character — Tote is apparently pretty bad relative to the rest of the cast, anyway — but you need to clear all nine floors with every character in order to actually beat story mode. No Tote means no ending. It seems like my best course of action would be to delete my fifteen-hour save and start from scratch in the hopes that it doesn’t happen again and she actually gets unlocked when she’s supposed to.
No thanks. I’m good.
This is one more game that’s out of early access purely by technicality.