Hiring

The gameplay in Pixel Heroes is typical of most RPG games, you start out with a low level hero who must find other to join him on his quest. After the opening scenes you choose 3 out of 8 possible candidates to be your party members who will assist you in your quest. Similar to games like Final Fantasy, each class has its own unique strengths and weaknesses. You have your basic healers, mages, tanks etc. As you progress through the game you will unlock more possible party members. But don’t get too attached now, cause once one of those characters or your self dies, they are gone forever(or till you start a new game).

 

Most of your time playing Pixel Heroes will be trial and error gameplay, where you learn from previous failed attempts and make a little more progress every time, the game isn't impossibly hard, just a little frustrating when you realize that move you made 3 turns ago will come back to bite you. Most missions will task you with going to a dungeon, clearing it out, looting whatever you can find and killing each dungeon boss. When successful you unlock a weapon or class member to join you. Level design is pretty nice for the game, you have somewhat randomly generated levels with random NPC characters. Towns are kinda small though, having less than 8 or so buildings per town. It's not too much of a problem as you will spend most time in dungeons and boss battles.

Strategy plays a big role in this game, it's not so much based off of using the right attacks and spells at the right time, but more strategic in the sense that you must thoroughly think about each piece of equipment and weapons to use. You must plan out the perfect group to reach the end goal. Sometimes it can be frustrating when you spend 5 hours setting up what you think is a perfect class only to have your party all die with one hit. It's hard to get mad though cause this is what the game is about. Perfect execution.

 

Graphics are done well for the style of game here, with a title like Pixel Heroes you obviously should expect 8bit retro style graphics. Music on the other hand was a bit annoying at times. It's because of the rinse and repeat style gameplay, when you first start the game you will be playing the same parts over and over again hearing the same music and repetitive is a understatement when it comes to the music. You do have the option of turning it off if you so choose. But after you learn the basics and stop dying at the same parts then the music won't be so much of a headache.

Achievements are no easy task as well. With a list of 55 achievements in all, the perfectionist will need to accomplish goals such as clearing 3 dungeons with out dying, beating a boss with only one party member and the most challenging achievement is for beating the entire game with out dying. After about 10 hours of gameplay I only managed to unlock 360 Gamerscore. Although I'm not the best retro gamer out there I imagine a lot of other players will have the same results.

 

Overall Pixel Heroes does what it aimed to do, and does it well. For the price of It's nice to see more challenging games on Xbox after the flood of easy "Walking Simulators" that have been invading the Xbox Marketplace. While the game tries hard to keep things fresh each play through with random generated features, you can't help but feel the repetitive nature or PermaDeath games.

 

Final Score - 7/10

 

Written by John aka YoDz

John@nastymastadaddy.com

Twitter: @akaYoDz

Xbox: YoDz

 

A code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review

 

You can purchase Pixel Heroes: Byte and Magic on the Xbox Store Here

 

Release Date - Friday‎, ‎February‎ ‎3‎, ‎2017

Price - $9.99

Download Size - 242.63 MB