Big Sandwich Games introduced Hoard, a unique gaming experience, blending a board game structure with that of traditional arcade games. The game is dragon themed, and is centered on collecting literally hoards of gold that is possible in ten minute duration. Though, Hoard may seem like a common twin stick shooting game, where the dragon is controlled by one stick and fire is shot through the other. However, in place of fighting bad guys, youre are the antagonist, terrorizing and attacking whole towns. The burning down of crops, castles, and cottages will result in gold, which you store at the dragons home base.
The burned structures gradually regenerate themselves, getting larger if you leave them, and eventually produce defensive characters like knights and archers, who will attack you until you burn down the building completely. There are other impediments to your gold hunting such as spontaneous defenses being created, really dangerous giants to fend off, and even magical towers that shoot light beams at you, but winning against them results in costly gems. Moreover, princesses can be kidnapped and held for ransom.
That’s not all, you can also play against other dragons which may be online adversaries or computer controlled opponents, this adds a whole new level of game play as you can steal the other players gold or kidnap their princesses, but keep in mind if you can do that to them they can also get revenge by doing the same. Additionally, there are a couple of extra game modes that can be played for a change; the survival mode is an example, here the goal is actually not to collect gold but to survive for as long as you can. There’s another mode in which the aim is to kidnap a total of 15 princesses before the others do.
What makes the game more interesting to play is that the dragon has restrictions; it can’t just go around breathing fire and getting gold. The dragon can only carry a specified amount of gold that has to be dropped off at the home base in order to be able to hoard more treasure. In addition, its health is not constant, if your dragons health deteriorates down to a zero you’ll be sent back to home base to recuperate, and if you had some gold at that time it will have to stay there, and yes any other dragon can come and take away your gold.
Lastly the only negative point about the Hoard is that it lacks variety; the backdrops essentially remains the same at each level, and though the maps differ per stage the game play is only slightly different, however as a whole the games makes for a great multiplayer as well as single player game.