Does Backpack Hero organise a fun time?
Whilst I don’t believe it to be the first, Slay the Spire brought the idea of deck building table top games to digital screens. Now you can’t move for video games involving adding cards to decks to take out monsters. Backpack Hero does something a little different though, with you adding items to your ever expanding backpack, giving you more options for attack and defence as you work through its rogue-lite dungeons. It’s fun in small bursts, but does it work in the long term?
First stop in Backpack Hero is probably the weakest in the form of the campaign. I wouldn’t normally begin with an area of weakness, but to get the most out of the game you need to play through a substantial part of the campaign first. Here, you play as Purse, a young anthropomorphic mouse who comes into possession of a magical expanding backpack. Throughout the campaign, she will delve into the dungeons under her home of Haverstack Hill and return with resources to expand the town. New buildings will allow you to unlock new items that can appear in the dungeons, allowing you to delve deeper and learn more of the story and access to even more awesome equipment.
Now, I say this is the weakest area of the game, and that’s simply because it’s very grindy, especially early on. You need resources to build structures, and items to unlock more items and quests. The thing is you don’t really get a lot of new stuff in your early runs, making the first few hours of the game a bit of a slog. You’ll want to get through this though, as unlocking items and characters here releases them for use in the much more enjoyable quick play mode.
This part of the game is a lot more fun thanks to the minute to minute gameplay being really solid. You’ll enter the dungeon with a small backpack and a handful of basic equipment, normally a weapon, shield and a consumable item. You’ll move around a node-based map, finding treasure and events as well as enemies to confront. Combat is turn-based, with that Slay the Spire influence coming through very clearly thanks to you having three energy points to spend on attacks and icons over your enemies indicating their intended move. On your turn you spend your energy to activate items in your backpack with the intent of defeating your enemies and blocking incoming damage.
As you level up within a run though, you’ll be able to expand your backpack, giving you more room to collect more and better weapons and items. Your basic sword that causes a few damage could be replaced with a bow and various arrows that can all trigger at once, armour that automatically blocks damage, and rings that will charge your magic spells. What’s particularly interesting is that item placement plays a huge part in this. A helmet will only provide you with blocking if you place it in the top row, whilst arrows will only fire from a bow if they are adjacent to it.
I really enjoyed this system as you really need to make careful choices as you work through a dungeon. Picking up new items suddenly becomes a much more tricky prospect when you need to think about where it will fit to be most effective. This is either a min-maxer’s dream or nightmare depending on your point of view. To add further wrinkles, some enemies can apply debuffs that block the part of your backpack you place them in. There are constant choices to be made both in and out of combat that entirely focus on your organisational skills. It sounds incredibly nerdy but it’s genuinely enjoyable.
With the huge variety of items you can find, you’ll consistently find different approaches to combat too. Magic items have to be connected to mana stones, but can trigger multiple times at once with clever placement. Instruments can charm enemies to the point that they’ll fight on your side. Shivs cause more damage if there are other shivs in different parts of your backpack. It’s a fun system that rewards experimenting. Having said that, some of the builds were more fun than others. I found the magic system a bit of a pain as the mana stones you need to use take up more space in your backpack that could be filled with more interesting items. The structures approach also takes up a lot of room to give you more armour but giving you fewer options for fun equipment.
Once you’re through the campaign, Backpack Hero is at its strongest, but it isn’t without its faults, most of which come in the form of irritating bugs. They’re mostly visual but they do impact the gameplay, often making item descriptions or your cursor disappear, making effective use of items harder. In the campaign I had the buildings I placed end up being of a different category altogether, and characters I’d need to speak to would be in inaccessible areas. None of this is game-breaking, but it is annoying. I also feel that the game would be a lot more fun with a mouse rather than trying to faff about moving a cursor with a controller, but this is much more of a nit-pick rather than a real problem.
With some lovely pixel art and 16-bit feeling music, Backpack Hero comes together as a very fun package. It would be nice if the quick play options were fully featured early on, but once you’re through the campaign you’ve got a really enjoyable experience to become horribly addicted to as the dreaded one-more-run mindset sets in.
Backpack Hero is available now on PC, Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo Switch.
