Hero's Land

Open-world survival game

Hero's Land is a free-to-play adventure game from Orienjoy. Featuring cute and colorful graphics, this multiplayer survival experience lets you play as one of the multiple heroes available, each with different skills and abilities. You can focus on exploration, or train various pets to be your partners.

While Hero's Land looks like a cross between the graphics of The Binding of Isaac and the gameplay of Vampire Survivors, it actually features an open world and roguelite gameplay mechanics, relying on its replayability value. Unfortunately, the lack of a compelling premise and its pay-to-win tendencies make it a poor alternative.

Survive in a monster-infested world

In Hero’s Land, you spawn in a fantasy world filled with monsters. Of course, it starts with small and tame ones that will allow you to save up and improve your character. Once you’ve saved up enough, you can unlock any of the dozens of heroes available, from a treant to a witch. The options vary wildly, making the game good for a couple of tries.

As a roguelite experience, a single run ends when you die or when you quit. Either way, you are rewarded based on your performance. As mentioned, there are different ways to play this game. You can farm different weapons from monsters or you can keep innocent creatures and train them to be your partners in battle. It even has a base-building aspect, such as setting up traps or obstacles.

The main problem with the game is that it doesn’t sort players by level. Leveraging the open-world access, even beginners have a fair shot of sharing a map with hardened players, leaving them to be easily targeted by griefers or smurfs. Additionally, the game heavily leans toward microtransactions. So, despite being free-to-play, it’s actually on a pay-to-win basis, with those willing to spend having a clear advantage.

Enjoyable but challenging

Overall, Hero’s Land is a fun game with a promising idea. It’s a roguelite experience set in an open world, granting you free rein on how to play the game. Throw in dozens of unlockable heroes with different skills and you have virtually limitless replayability. Unfortunately, the lack of segregation between player levels, plus its P2W emphasis, imposes a steep challenge for newcomers.