Review Fix Exclusive IndieCade East Coverage: Nikita Mikros Talks ‘The Hero Trap’

Review Fix chats with Founder and CEO of SMASHWORX Nikita Mikros, who apparently makes games on his time away from making games, about the studios upcoming title “The Hero Trap,” a fast-paced cooperative dungeon crawler with a unique twist for those who wish to go at it solo, due out in 2014. A Kickstarter for the game will launch in the coming weeks.

Review Fix: What is ‘The Hero Trap?’

Nikita Mikros: It’s our take on a dungeon crawler, it has a multiplayer aspect to it and also kind of a unique single-player aspect.

RF: What do you mean by ‘our take on a dungeon crawler?’ What makes it different from your average dungeon crawler?

NM: Well you play three characters at the same time in the single-player version of [the game]. You can lose characters and then gain new characters but it’s a little bit random which guys you end up with so you constantly have to mix up your strategies.

RF: How do you control the three characters by yourself?

NM: So basically it’s the bottom three buttons on the controller, so if you hit any one of the buttons and you’re not in that character then you switch to that character and do their attack.

So in other words if I’m the Viking and I’m the X key and I hit X, X, X, X, then I switch to another character, I’ll hit let’s say [circle] and become let’s say the archer, it’ll do his attack right away.

RF: Is there an end to this game?

NM: Yeah there’s an end, the dungeons are randomly generated but there is an end. The way that we are kind of leveling it is by the difficulty, not actually hand tuned levels. One of the cool unique things about it is that you can basically start in any of the four worlds and depending on the order that you do it the difficulties are different, so if you started off in this world then  it’ll be level one to five difficulty and whatever other world you [go] to it will be 6-10.

RF: Can you tell us a little bit about the characters?

NM: So right now we have six characters and we’re hoping to have up to 12 characters. So right now we have the Pyro who is a flamethrower kind of person, then we have Ursa which is this luchador bear who does this whirlwind attack, we have a Viking who does like a very heavy, slow attack, we have the Ninja who does this super fast dash and he’s very precise, you have to basically time it perfectly so that in the middle of the dash you swing your sword, you do like a very powerful attack. What else? There’s the Necro who raises dead and I think there’s one more character right now but I’m totally blanking on it.

On top of that there’s a bunch of items, so you get fire foots and drones and all this other stuff to kind of help you play the game.

RF: How long are you planning on making this game?

NM: We’re planning on having four separate worlds and a final boss, I mean, if our Kickstarter goes well we’re going to have four separate worlds. If not, we might have one world, we’ll see. So it really depends on how much money we can raise during the Kickstarter.

We wanna release [The Hero Trap] on Vita and also on PS4, PC and Mac, possibly OUYA in the future. But that’s definitely more of a stretchy kind of goal.

RF: How much is this game going to cost?

NM: We’re thinking somewhere between $10 and $15.

RF: And it’s coming out this year?

NM: Depending on how we do, we’re definitely planning on releasing it in late 2014.