Heretic Operative

Massive potential here. As noted by others, lack of a manual is deadly. Why, for example, are operatives red and unrecruitable? This seems a pretty important resource for the game to leave unexplained. Now, some have called for a tutorial but for my vote, the gaming crowd for this kind of game would prefer an actual manual which is much easier to do than a good tutorial which is actually quite hard. Or, at minimum, keep working on more useful tooltips. On a very practical note, the game opens in a very confusing way. It took me forever, for example, to figure out where my action counter was. The shame here is the number of people that might get lost instantly. The encouragement from the developers to "explore" is a bad cop out for a poor starting experience. Hoping to give this a thumbs up down the road. I want to explore this game once the core mechanics become more transparent. Let's face it... this is a flavourful board game. We need to know the rules.

I've only played it for a bit, but it has a very strong tabletop vibe to the game, but from people who are very passionate and knowledgeable about the world of TT gaming. It has some puzzle elements and there's definitely some math involved with making sure you use your movement and action points optimally, but overall a really fun game. The art style is solid and consistent, the rules are good and the mechanics are a tool-tip away. Give it a shot, it's a lot of fun.

Fun game. It basically throws challenges at you (which you can pick before the game starts), which you in turn master with a hero of your choice, and the use of spells or items. Some of these operatives are better suited to a specific challenge than others. You get to pick one of these heroes or so called operatives before the game starts, but there are many more on the playing field, waiting to be picked up by you as you play. The real fun in this game lies in figuring out a long-term plan on how to beat the challenges. Even the same scenario can play out vastly different depending on the character you pick. After picking some of the easy mode constellations (for example, one requires you to have two of the resource "lore". There is a hero that generates lore just like that, i.e. auto-win), I voluntarily chose some combinations that I knew would be hard to beat. For anyone struggling with the game initially, I recommend picking an easy scenario and travel to all the locations, memo...

Remember That Which Sleeps? Yea. This is the little brother. And unlike his deadbeat no-show older bro, Heretic Operative actually exists. But yea... buy it on sale. I re-purchased it during the Steam Summer Sale 2020. If there's still a "refunded" notice at the top of this review, it's obsolete now.

Maybe if it's on sale for <$5, but... 1) It's very much a digital single player board game - draw some cards that tell you what happens, roll some dice to see if you die (probably yes), repeat. 2) As others have mentioned, it's very RNG based. 3) It's very busy, giving the illusion of complexity, but most of it is clutter. You CAN do any of a hundred different things, but 99 are useless in the immediate sense. You only get 2 action points per turn, which, if you're VERY lucky, is enough to accomplish the exact right actions to survive to the next turn. There's no real strategic options, because any sort of long-term planning will just get you killed in the short term. 4) As others have mentioned, nothing is explained anywhere. You're just chucked into the deep end, and after drowning a few times, you figure out which buoy to swim towards and ignore the rest.

[b]tl;dr:[/b] Do not play games that do not respect your time. Honestly, it seems great at first, but the longer you play, the less thought out the whole experience seems. It starts as you unlock new "threats". One of the first, the Gates, is basically unbeatable without extreme luck. At its end, it has you fight a Cosmic Horror, which has about 60 combat to begin with, and each 1 you roll gives it an additional +5. So not only do you have to roll 60 with only three tries, but every 1 you roll increases the amount you need. As a comparison, normal enemies have 15-30 combat, but allow you the same amount of tries. How many dice you can roll is determined by your abilities. Your standard abilities let you roll 1 die... So forget about them. You get new abilities (and become stronger) only by going to places and hoping that an event fires which will give you a new item/ability/whatever. All of which is fully random - or if it isn't, lacks any explanation. That's right, there is not a sin...

Neat boardgame style of RPG with a hint of rogue-like mixed in. The combat could use either a better tutorial or clearer explanation. There's a lot of data and systems thrown at you right off the bat but it does make sense as you play more of it and get a sense of how everything links together.

I just want to write this review to give some support to a game that deserves more love and attention. A lot of the negative reviews seem to be from players who have less time in the game. And while I wouldn't say that they have a more shallow understanding of the game mechanics, I think that their assessment of the game is a little bit unfair. I'll address that in turn. Anyway, Heretic Operative is a fantasy digital board game in which you play as a group of outcast magic users (magic is outlawed in the game's setting) dedicated to stopping the advancement of a dark cult that is plotting the end of the world. There are a number of different cults to play against which change the nature of the gameplay significantly. For example, the storm cult spawns lots of cultists in the harbor district; summons a kraken; and can cause flooding at points of interest in the game. By contrast, the beast cult spawns numerous bestial hunters which try to murder your operatives. There are also multipl...

A many-layered digital board game with lots of interesting game mechanics. Quick play sessions (30 mins) make this easy to pick up and play, but I feel like there is a lot of depth to master!

Ever been drug into a game of Arkham Horror or Eldritch Horror with your "friends"? Stuck in a big 5 hour long fiddly dicefest where sixty cardboard chits are thrown across the board randomly and you only get two actions every half hour and then you have to roll the dice to see if you even succeed at those before another awful "draw cards and read them then clean up and throw out sixty more chits" phase? Heretic Operative is literally that, but good, and without your friends. It's a virtual adventure board game where you move from place to place trying to simultaneously build up a character and complete story objectives while the enemy cult continues to advance. The RNG is actually fun unlike the garbage Fantasy Flight games it apes, and the game design embraces the digital implementation, giving you a great UI full of information, dozens of abilities, units to recruit, options to get stronger all over the map, and all the cleanup crap is automated. It takes a bit of learning and y...