Hoard is a game that features fire, gold and glory!  With an original concept and fun, fast-paced gameplay, this title makes me want to replay for hours and hours.  It would also be excellent for LAN parties, if you’re into that sort of thing.

In Hoard you play none other than a real fire-breathing bastard (no not Bill O’Reilly): a dragon.  You are a force of nature, indiscriminate destruction and robbery are your forte.  When I started I made it a simple 1v1.  You always play against a competitor, which gives Hoard a sort of real-time board game feel.  The game is really simple, too.  Destroy everything and everyone you see and take their money. </end article>.. ok maybe it’s not that simple, but still, that is how it plays.

You start of with a distinct advantage, however.  You always start in the center of the map.  That makes it all the easier to venture to other regions and bring your booty back as fast as can be expected.  Once the game starts up, there isn’t much going on.  You have to burn some windmills and crop fields to get a start, but you build up fast.  You cannot be everywhere at once, though, even if there are 4 dragons in play, and a society quickly builds up around you.  Once a windmill has a few fields around it, carts start to wheel toward the cities, which can be burned and robbed.  The carts won’t fill your inventory up and a dragon has a golden lust of immeasurable breadth, so a few carts and maybe a mill will fill you up.  Get that booty back to your lair, too!  Other Dragons are just as hungry for treasure, and will attack you for yours.  Which is a good way to slow them.

Snow? Fuck that! My internal temperature melts titanium, mother fucker!

You are an UNSTOPPABLE MENACE! At least until someone stops you.  And fuck me do they try.  At first it’s like, “awwww, so cute, they think they can win!”  Then it’s “O, fuck me, they are winning!”  Once you are defeated (usually by another fucking dragon) you have to fly back to your hoard to recharge.  This is an unfortunate necessity, but use it to your advantage.  Attack your enemies and send them back to their hoard, you can usually get a full trip done before they recharge fully.  Once you get the gold back to your lair, you drop it off, a little slower than I image you should, too.  I was left wondering if the dragon ate the loot and regurgitated it back up in his hoard.  Or maybe he just sits on the loot chest and picks it up with his sphincter muscles.  Heh heh, I heard a hundred people groan at that one!  Either way, the more gold you get the higher your level.  Yup, you level up, and you use those levels for one of four stats. Speed, Carry, Armor and Firebreath.  All pretty self-explanatory.  There is no perfect formula, there is just what matches your technique.  Like fights? Get armor and firebreath. A little extra speed to help with those close escapes, too.  Want to loot everything in the kingdom? Get more Carry, you’ll carry everything you can hold in your.. uh.. kangaroo pouch ; ).   But that isn’t everything! Shit man!

So, as you loot and pillage and burn, the timer, which I forgot to mention, is ticking down.  The further along things get, the more loot carriers level up.  First they are wagons, then full on carts then there are the royal carriages!  Now this is where things really start getting good.  You burn the carriages, they give you loot AND your very own little princess to take back to your lair to terrorize.  Yet, it gets better!  They send knights after you to capture the princess back!  Every single one drops a respectable sum, too, and when her timer runs out, she is ransomed off!  I swear these people must shit gold.

Gives new meaning to a butt-load of loot! Ha ha!

Level up, grab as much gold as you can and when the timer runs out, the scores are tallied to see who was the biggest fire-breathing badass in all the land.  Does it matter that you can burn trees down with your fire? NO! FUCK no!  But as a dragon, isn’t burning trees going to be your first go-to on list of things to test out?  I know it was mine!  Psh, burn that leafy little bitch.  Now, you see in the right side of the picture just up there that little Stonehenge-looking thing?  Yea, that is your new best friend and worst enemy in this game.  Every so often it belches out little powerups that spin in the air like little, sexy pinwheels.  Grab that and you might move faster, spit fireballs, breathe ice or some other cool shit!  But if your enemy gets it? FUCK!  Get that shit, don’t let that miserly prick get it. Just don’t.

What did I miss? Castles, villages, windmills, crops, knights, archers: in this the Joker was right. EVERYTHING burns. O! DLC.  You don’t think all this is enough? Dynamite Roll! was the first DLC featuring bomb carts, which you light and they explode to kill things nearby.  That includes you so, mind the gap.  Sometimes cash crops will appear that give extra cash. And bell-towers in towns provide heal power-ups, and that is useful as fuuuck!  More achievements and more maps in this baby, too.  Then there is the Flame-Broiled SANDwich DLC which takes things to a whole new level, or rather, landscape.  In this one the game flies over to the mystical sands of a desert continent.  Everything looks all cool and middle-eastern, and generally speaking, it looks fucking awesome.  Buildings, castles, enemies.  Fuck, I need to buy this DLC as soon as I get some cash. And with the total package of everything being $11.49 on Steam, you best believe it is worth the dough!

With all the flying and burning, there has to be something about this game that burns my biscuits.  Well, there fucking is!  Each playthrough takes only ten minutes, so naturally, this is a game you could play once before work to get a game fix in, right? DO NOT UNDER ANY FUCKING CIRCUMSTANCES PLAY THIS SHIT BEFORE GOING SOMEWHERE IMPORTANT!  You will play through hours in this game before you realize just how much life you missed! Seriously! Don’t believe me? Play it!  Each match is just such an exhilarating whirl that you will play another, and another, then you’re 35 and still in your parents basement! Agh! Luckily, I only got to 27, so I still have some good years left, but FUCK that was close! Also, those pricks on the Meta-Critic gave this a fucking 65. A SIXTY FUCKING FIVE! This is fun, graphics are respectable and it does its job.  It’s like they focused on the one thing that this game lacks, which would be any fucking story.  But you’re a goddamned dragon! What story do you need?!  Fuck those assholes. They deserve to fester in a dragon’s asshole for a bit! Give them an idea of what shit really looks like!