HOARD

HOARD...oh HOARD. My first thought was, I do not like this. This is no fun. ...but then I played all the levels, so there's that.

In HOARD, you're a dragon, and your existence is all about amassing a hoard of treasure and burning to a crisp anybody that tries to keep you from said treasure, or that takes your treasure, or that looks funny at your treasure. If it exists, burn it and get gold for it. If it exists and has ouchy pointy things, burn it without letting it touch you and get gold for it. It's fairly straight forward.

I kept playing, even though I wasn't really enjoying myself all that much at the beginning. I think part of it is that the TREASURE mode levels are in short 10 minute increments. The bite size nature didn't require much of a time commitment from me, which kept me coming back, and once I started rolling, I relented...thinking, "Okay, this is enjoyable."

Once I had a dozen or so levels under my belt, I realized that there weren't all that many single player missions. I could potentially "finish" this game. There were three modes: TREASURE, PRINCESS RUSH, and HOARD. In TREASURE mode, collect as much treasure as you can in 10 minutes; in PRINCESS RUSH, capture 15 princesses as quickly as possible, and in HOARD, just stay alive as long as possible. The princess capturing was the most fun to me (stealing them from other dragons was particularly enjoyable), straight up treasure hoarding was a close second, and not fun to me at all was HOARD mode. Too stressful.

In each level, you could get medal status depending on how well you did. It's a standard gold, silver, bronze affair, but jokes on them. I'm enjoying myself but not nearly enough to give a shit about playing until I get gold status on any of these levels. I'm setting the bar low here. Bronze? Great. Let's move on. That's clearly not the intent of the game, but whatever, I do what I want. I experienced all the levels with mild levels of success, and now I'm done.

I give it a rating of three crispy knights. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, but I wouldn't warn against it either.