And the Switch ports just keep rolling on! The Switch e-shop is so full of content these days that it’s hard to even sort through it all. On any given week, there are literally hundreds of titles on sale, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg! With all those games, it’s getting harder and harder to sort the wheat from the chaff however, and it’s easy to let releases slip by with nary a glance! But from out of that unfathomable morass of content rises the occasional interesting title, and today, that’s One Way Heroics Plus from Smoking Wolf and published by Playism.
One Way Heroics Plus was originally released on Steam way back in 2014, and was ported to the Playstation 4 and Playstation Vita a few years back as well. It’s been an enduring indie title and making its way to the Switch is a natural progression for a game that’s been kicking around as long as One Way Heroics has. The premise is simple. It’s an action/RPG hybrid where you can only move to the right. Dilly-dally too much and you’re consumed by a wall of oppressive darkness, the world ends and you have to start over. There’s a bit more to it than that though, of course.
One Way Heroics Plus is a neat concept taken to its logical conclusion. Make a game where you can only go one way and make it condensed enough to be playable in short bits. Then add in all the neat ideas you can come up with. A goddess that takes away your levels to save. Party members that only join if your charisma is high enough to charm them. Fruit that heals you but rots if you leave it in your inventory too long. Unidentifiable weapons that may or may not help you but raise your encumbrance. The list goes on and on. There are honestly so many neat little quirks in One Way Heroics Plus that it’s hard to even process everything that’s going on in a given playthrough. On top of that, the entire game is procedurally generated and individual quests can vary wildly in their landscape, enemies, scope, and rules, to the point where it’s almost impossible to detail every permutation!
Suffice it to say, One Way Heroics Plus manages to capture the essence of roguelike gameplay and distill it into a concise package that’s always moving and keeping things interesting. However, things aren’t all roses here. This is definitely an indie game for fans of roguelikes and RPGs. As such, one of the biggest issues casual gamers might have with the game are its graphics. One Way Heroics looks like a high school project from an aspiring game designer using an outdated RPG Maker tileset. Sure, a bit of effort has been made here or there to spruce it up, kick it into high-def, and so on, but it’s a very basic looking game and that might be a turn-off to a lot of players. The menus and pop-up information fade out quickly too, so it can easily feel like the game is getting away from you if you happen to look away for a second or two.
This effect is heavily magnified in undocked mode on the Switch. While docked, the fonts and text for One Way Heroics Plus are small but legible. Undocked, things take a bit of a turn however. Text is so small that it’s difficult to read if you don’t have eagle eyes. Text fade means that you miss a lot of what’s going on, and it’s hard to see menus and even dialogue sometimes. The key elements are fine, like notes that the Demon Lord is approaching or the mini-map, but the fine detail just doesn’t translate well to a screen that small. Changing character palettes for example is nearly pointless on the undocked Switch, as you can barely make out the pixels that form your character, or the creatures for that matter. The pixel art is minimalist, certainly, but it would have been nice to be able to actually see it.
One Way Heroics has more than its share of small irritations though. You have three bars, health, Stamina, and Endurance. Health is self-explanatory, of course. Stamina allows you to utilize special attacks and abilities, and it replenishes when you move. Endurance is the real issue in the game, however. Every time you move your endurance drops. Every time you attack, your endurance drops. It doesn’t replenish. The only way to regain endurance is to either eat food or take potions. Unfortunately, with this being a roguelike, it’s kind of random when you actually get those potions and items, meaning that you end up draining most of your stamina on some playthroughs with almost no way to replenish it. Once your gauge is empty, your attacks weaken and you’re in big trouble. Other things can be frustrating too, such as unlocking a castle expansion, only to find out that the wall of darkness moves closer every time you talk to someone in the new expansion and it’ll be several times round before you manage to get all the information out of that new character. Then there are the things like the treasure chests, which you rarely have keys for and beating them open damages the contents. Or the fact that the Dimensional Vault has a set limited number of slots and each individual key or fruit or other item counts, rather than counting groups of items. There are countless little hindrances in One Way Heroics, some of which are fun and some of which are just downright frustrating.
The good news is that One Way Heroics runs smooth as silk on the Switch with minimal load times. Mapping is great on the controller, everything in the game is intuitive, and gameplay is fast, furious, and fun, especially for an action/RPG. Beating the game for the first time gives you a chance to unlock some excellent treats, including castle additions, new character classes, of which there are quite a few, and the ability to identify all the crap you picked up along the way, saving the best in your Dimensional Vault for your next attempt. In true roguelike fashion, it takes many, many playthroughs to unlock the majority of the perks, characters, and bonuses available, and each finished playthrough seems like an accomplishment. Some of the supporting casts’ backstories were surprisingly interesting too, making a nice divergence from the main game with some fun bits of flavor and more than a little humor.
While you’re not going to spend a hundred hours digging through every potential world in One Way Heroics Plus, it’s definitely a game to while away a few hours with here and there. This is the perfect pick-up-and-play title for those quite days when you just want to relax and chill for a few hours, and at $15 on the Switch, it’s reasonably priced as well, especially for the amount of replay value here. One Way Heroics Plus is silly, it’s fun, it’s clever, and it’s a hoot to just zip through with the very real potential of being utterly obliterated at random for no reason at all by a feral pig or something. Every single time you pick it up, there’s something new and different. And while not every single playthrough is dramatic and wild, you just never know what’s off to the east! Best to go check it out!
This review was based on a digital copy of One Way Hero is Plus provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and was noticeably more difficult to play visually in undocked mode! One Way Heroics Plus is also available for Steam. All screenshots are of actual gameplay.