Command Vampires, Liches, Gryphons, and stranger monsters as Hooded Horse’s new turn-based strategy RPG marches into Steam Early Access.
Hero’s Hour is coming back for another round of frantic fantasy warfare. During the Find Your Next Game Winter Showcase, publisher Hooded Horse announced Hero’s Hour 2, a new turn-based strategy RPG and auto-battler sequel to the 2022 indie hit.
Built for PC and headed to Steam Early Access, it aims to expand the original’s mix of rapid-fire battles, overworld exploration, and city building with a much larger roster of factions, units, and heroes.
The first Hero’s Hour built a reputation as a fast, accessible, but surprisingly dense strategy RPG.
Players moved heroes and armies around a campaign map in classic turn-based fashion, constructing towns, grabbing resources, and poking into procedurally generated side areas before throwing hundreds of tiny troops into chaotic real-time clashes where spells and positioning decided the outcome.
It leaned heavily into pixel-art charm and Heroes of Might and Magic-style pacing, and it found an audience across PC and consoles thanks to its short turn times and high replay value. Hero’s Hour 2 keeps that foundation of fantasy, turn-based strategy, and automated mass battles, but pushes harder into faction identity and long-term progression.
Once again, players will raise cities, recruit expanding armies, and push across a contested map, but this time the roster of forces is front and center.
The sequel lets you command armies of Vampires, Liches, Gryphons, Skeletons, and stranger creatures split across multiple factions, with each group built to encourage different battlefield plans and macro strategies. Heroes act as the spine of each faction, bringing unique skill sets and carrying powerful artifacts that can tilt both economy and combat in subtle ways.
Picking a righteous host, a cadre of corrupted horrors, forest spirits, or “other mysterious monsters” isn’t just an aesthetic choice; every faction comes with its own units, buildings, and skills, which means distinct tech paths and angles of attack to exploit.
That variety is where Hero’s Hour 2 is clearly trying to earn its “endless replayability” pitch. Different heroes within the same faction can push a run toward spell-heavy control, brute-force melee stacks, or swarm tactics, while the auto-battler layer rewards experimentation with unit mixes and positioning.
In the original, small build tweaks could snowball into wildly different power curves over a campaign, and the sequel looks set to double down on that dynamic with more faction-specific mechanics, more unit types, and more artifacts feeding into hero builds.
For players, that should translate into a steady loop of testing new line-ups, discovering nasty unit synergies, and then trying to break the game a little more on the next map.
Hero’s Hour 2 is still being developed by a small cooperative group. Benjamin “ThingOnItsOwn” Hauer, the solo developer of the original Hero’s Hour, is joined by Unleash the Giraffe, the studio behind tactical semi-auto battler Seer’s Gambit, and solo developer LautaroArino.
Bringing that experience into a full-scale strategy RPG should help tighten the battle layer and give the sequel more interesting decision points during fights.
Hero’s Hour 2 joins Hooded Horse’s growing stable of strategy and tactics titles, which now spans city builders like Manor Lords, 4X games such as Old World and ENDLESS Legend 2, and fantasy tactics like Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era and 9 Kings.
Hero’s Hour 2 will launch first on PC via Steam Early Access and will be localized from English into a wide range of languages, including German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.
For anyone who enjoyed the first game’s blend of fast strategic turns, dense heroes-and-armies progression, and messy auto-battler clashes, Hero’s Hour 2 looks like a natural next step: a bigger map, more factions to learn, more builds to test, and more ways to watch a pixel swarm collapse in your favor. Below, I share the announcement trailer.
