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Have You Played… Hoplite?Roguehoplite
Roguehoplite
Hoplitehas been an instant install on any new phone I buy since before I’d left university. It’s an unassuming turn-based roguelite where you play as a Hoplite deftly moving from enemy to enemy, from tiny map to tiny map, in search of a Golden Fleece. It’s also the first thing that comes to mind when I try to dredge up a list of games that pare back their chosen genre until what remains is the absolute essentials and nothing else.
The enemies are even easier to understand. If you’re in the direct line of fire of an archer at the end of your move, you’ll lose one hit point. If you are adjacent to a bomb or a footman when your move ends, you’ll lose one hit point. Within 60 seconds of picking up the game, you understand everything about how it works. Which means when you inevitably die, you only have yourself to blame, and your inability to look ahead enough turns to see the danger that was always visible and approaching.
The levels always start pitifully easy (unless you try Challenge Mode), but they quickly ramp up in difficulty as more enemies are added. It starts to feel quite like Into The Breach in that you can almost always see where every enemy will go next, because their rulesets make them so predictable. And yet, sooner or later there always arrives a tipping point where the number of enemies generates enough complexity that you can no longer trust your own precognition. It’s because of this careful balance between intuitive rules and escalating challenge that Hoplite has earned its place as one of perhaps three or four absolute gems on thePlay Store.
