Antihero review for PC

Platform: PC/Mac
Publisher: Versus Evil
Developer: Tim Conkling
Medium: Digital
Players: Multi
Online: Yes

Antihero is a game where you get to take the role as a spymaster running an organization in an old-timey city facing off against one other player or AI. Antihero is very intuitive and fun, and very easy to get the hang of. My experience with Antihero has mostly been a multiplayer one, and interestingly, there are two different ways of playing multiplayer within Antihero. Since Antihero is turn based, you can either play in real time in the ?Live? mode, or set up a match where it will email you when your turn is ready for playing with friends that you can?t make time to play with. It suggests that these matches will typically last across a few days.

I mostly played the ?Live Multiplayer? game type during my time. I decided to opt out of the usual way of playing a game, and entirely skipped the tutorial and hopped straight into a match with a friend. I must say that I don?t recommend following in my footsteps there. The game isn?t hard to understand and you can get rolling within a few turns- but you?re going to be missing out on some of the finer details you can learn from playing the tutorial. My first match was mostly a learning experience, but it was one of the most fun matches of them all in nostalgia. Looking back on that round after having played more makes everything seem a lot more funny than it was when we thought we were doing the best we could.

For actual gameplay, everything?s pretty straight-forward. The controls are all point, click, confirm. You start out with your only unit being your Spymaster. The Spymaster?s job is to scout out the area you have to work with and burglarize buildings along the way. Any units you create in the future can only travel as far as the Spymaster has ever been. Your first turn will be moving your Spymaster, and hitting finish. Finishing a turn means all non-combative units will return to your base and begin anew on your next turn. No worries, it costs nothing to move in area you?ve explored already.

Among the buildings you will be exploring, there will be a few strategic buildings that you can take over to supply you with money and research points in the form of lanterns. Winning in Antihero requires you to complete a set number of key objectives before your opponent can. There are a few angles you can take to get key objective completions. There is always an assassination target roaming the streets, a piece of blackmail research you can complete, and each map has a unique way to earn objective points.

There is a lot to Antihero, and I could never explain it all in this small wall of text, so just do yourself a favor and grab it for their extraordinarily low price of $15 (or less). It is well worth the price they?re asking, and I would recommend dragging a friend in with you on the purchase so you can enjoy what I think are some of the game?s best qualities.

Grade: A