The Hearts of Men: Throne of Deceit

The Hearts of Men: Throne of Deceit is an action game with similarities to the Gauntlet series. The motivations of the four heroes (warlock, viking, elf and warrior) are different, e.g. the viking seeks revenge for his murdered family, but the result is the same: visiting a dungeon and killing everything inside. The story is told with comic pages.

The most obvious change to the Gauntlet formula are the controls: when playing with a gamepad, it uses the twin-stick shooter style (movement and aim direction are controlled separately). The player moves through the maze-like dungeon, kills numerous enemies (most spawn from monster generators which should be destroyed to stop reinforcements) and searches for keys to open up the doors to the next section. Each enemy hits removes some of health bar and eventually leads to death. The player character then respawns at the location of death and loses a live; running out of them means the game is over. Of course there are some things which help to avoid this fate: the player can instantly warp a short distance (costs mana) and collect hearts (from fallen enemies) and meat to restore health. Between levels, collected coins are used to upgrade weapons and other abilities.

Each level ends with a boss fight and some sections use automatic scrolling. This means the player needs to constantly move forward and should avoid turns which lead to dead ends (and therefore instant death). While the campaign is designed for local co-op with up to four participants, it is also possible to play alone. Additionally there is an arcade mode available in which player(s) battle an endless horde of enemies. Here weapon upgrades have to collected from killed enemies. Online multiplayer is restricted to competitive modes like deathmatch.