Hero Siege - 9/20 hours

I think I owe Hero Siege an apology. I profoundly misjudged it.

Now, you might be looking at the title of this post, seeing that it is my first post on the game, only one day after I started it, and be thinking "ah, he played the game a little bit more and discovered that he really liked it after all." But no, that's not it. When I say "profound," I mean profound.

See, I decided to try a little experiment. I would play each of the eight classes to the end of the first act, just to see if maybe the problems I had before were due to a poor choice of class. And at first, the results of this experiment seemed to confirm my earlier observations - enemies were unusually tank-y and my damage output was low enough that I had to spend a lot of time backpedaling while I kited a whole line of targets.

But then I gained a few levels and started equipping "superior" and "rare" quality weapons and I discovered something remarkable - I was actually able to advance on enemy hordes. Especially with the melee classes, I could cut through these monsters with only a token resistance.

After seeing this pattern repeat a half dozen times, I revised my theory about the game. I suspect that the trouble I was having with my first character was an unfortunate combination of multiplayer level scaling and simple bad luck in finding powerful equipment. And so, out of curiosity, I created a multiplayer game to check out my previous character's load out . . .

I had absolutely nothing equipped, in any of my equipment slots. Which is odd, because I clearly remembered finding equipment, examining and comparing its statistics, and selling off my spares to the merchant guy. But apparently, I did all of this without ever equipping any of it!

So here I am, a complete jackass, thinking this game has some kind of incredibly brutal difficulty, where monsters take forever to kill, but they only need one or two lucky shots to wipe out the player, and all the while I was trying to beat level 35 content with level 0 equipment.

And I have no idea how this could possibly have happened. I didn't have any particular difficulty in figuring out the menus on my local game. Yet I went 7 hours without even noticing on multiplayer. It's true, I had my friend carrying me that whole time. I actually just thought that he was amazingly good at the game. We'd each be fighting separate hordes and I'd kite mine away from him and subsequently die after only taking out three or four enemies and then I'd call for a revive and he'd tell me to wait a minute and I thought "oh yes, these monsters are really tough, especially with the multiplayer scaling, considering he has to fight my enemies as well." And then, when he did finally come riding to my rescue, I thought, "wow, he handled those monsters like a pro, I sure do wish I was good enough at this game to be more help."

Which isn't to take anything away from my friend or downplay his skill. He got to act 4 of the game with a completely dead-weight teammate. It's just, I played my multiplayer character by myself for all of 10 minutes before I found a level appropriate "mythic" weapon, and once I had it, I started chewing through enemies like they weren't even there. I'd barely have time to register their presence before my ranged attacks reduced them to a fine mist. If I'd been playing at full capacity, we probably would have beaten the game by now.

So there you have it - I goofed up this game as much as it is humanly possible to goof up anything. Keep this anecdote in mind when evaluating my opinions about other games that gave me difficulty.