Timing Hero is a classic hack and slash game that encompasses all things retro. One button attacks, skills that have a single function, a dodge system, catchy retro 8-bit music and that classic misspelled monster name (translation error obviously). Created by Buff Studio, Timing Hero gives the player an RPG feel and a small story to pick up and put down very easily.
The basic core mechanics of Timing Hero is the ability to Attack and Dodge. The first character offered is the Novice in which Timing Hero gives you the basics of these mechanics. On the screen is an arrow that shows the player how to dodge and notifies if the dodge was early, late or just on time. As the game progresses, a counter meter is added, and the skills of the character is displayed when it is available or on cooldown. The player is also awarded bonuses (via extra damage on the first hit or extra counter meter) for timing things correctly, hence Timing Hero.
After each victory, the monster level buffs up giving the player less time to dodge, or a different attack pattern. On every 5th level, a mini-boss appears, and every 10th level, is a boss fight. Players continue fighting until the character is exhausted of hit points, and the game resets back to the leveling up screen where players can level up their character with the gold earned from the fights. The game will then continue from the last floor boss completed checkpoint.
While this game does have a lot of repetition, the pro (and con) to the game is the amount of unlockable characters Timing Hero presents to the player. While these characters can only be unlocked in game (no micro purchases), obtaining them is the challenging and fun part. Once a character has beaten level 40, it unlocks the Coliseum mode, which a team of three will battle AI characters to collect cards to unlock more heroes. Furthermore, there is another mode, Raid mode, which a team of three will battle a strong boss monster to gain rare upgrades or loot for future runs.
As repetitive as it may be for some, Timing Hero does scale the difficulty very high in the Coliseum and Raid mode as you complete those fights. Enemy skills are used more often and have a high tendency to kill a character in one-shot, damage increases tremendously, and dodge timing can be awkward at times. After using a character in these fights, there is a cooldown timer before they can be used again, to prevent spamming the same team over and over.
IMO: While Timing Hero in my eyes is a keeper and love to play it here and there, the game does get very repetitive and the rewards start to dwindle once you get to higher levels. The amount of artifacts you can carry is bottlenecked on how many gems you can collect over time. The largest pro and con is the unlocking of a new hero, solely on the fact that the new character starts at level 1 and must go through everything from the beginning every time. Each character has their own skills and stat prioritization, but some characters are FAR better than others and your previous runs feel like they were there just to unlock these characters. While I have not unlocked each character, I can only imagine how much easier it can get, but it always depends on the dodging skill of each player.
