Home Behind 2 is a strategy roguelike RPG. It wants to be the next Darkest Dungeon but fails to deliver where it counts.
You start your adventure with a female player character. You can choose her class, basic stats, and a special attribute. Later in the game, you can also unlock a male character and more classes.
Your revolutionary group of fighters wants to overthrow the brutal authoritarian regime of Scaria. On your way to new missions, you need to explore the desert (mostly).
Tooltips explain the most basic mechanics and are pretty straightforward. Your crew moves automatically when clicking on “explore” and stops when you click on the button again. On your way, you can also click on objects to collect resources like fuel, stone, batteries, and much more. You can also go into buildings, explore them in different ways such as sneaking in, with explosives, or just brutally storming the building. Most buildings are a good way to collect a lot of resources, so don’t skip them over!
Events and happenings will force you to make decisions. It’s important how you approach a situation as every encounter can result in a life or death fight. But there are also events without an encounter like finding something or repairing something. In most cases, your character stats are important. It’s like in a Dungeon and Dragons adventure. The game will show you what chances you have to pass the test (like 84% to repair something) which is based on various things like how difficult the task is and what level the associated stat has.
After exploring, your crew rests in your camp. You have several buildings there, like a command center (used to send out fighters on missions), an infirmary (craft medical items), a warehouse, your truck, and a satellite phone. Every one of these can be upgraded with resources. Your command center is the main building and its level determines how much you can upgrade the other ones. This is the most strategic the game gets.
While the store page of Home Behind 2 tells you about the “strategic real-time combat system”, it’s really just an auto-battler. Yeah, you can pause the battle at any time theoretically but in practice, you won’t. A few seconds and the battle is over. You don’t feel like you can change much aside from healing your fighters and equipping weapons and armor before the battle starts. There is nothing strategic about that. All you do is click “fight” and wait a few seconds before clicking on “explore” again.
This is the sole reason why I can’t recommend the game. It mostly feels like an idler because you mostly just near-mindlessly click on the screen. There is really not much strategy involved in that.
The story is well-thought-out, at least as far as I can tell, and reminds me of a visual novel because there’s so much text. However, as this was supposed to be a strategy game, they failed to deliver.
Home Behind 2 is graphically appealing, the music is diverse (although some tracks just don’t fit into the setting) and the sound effects create the right mood and ambiance. But all of this can’t help if you want to play a strategy game and not an auto-battler (although even they can be strategic).
It’s still in early access and hopefully, they’ll completely overhaul the battle system. At the moment, I can’t recommend Home Behind 2 for the sticker price of €12.49 / $13.49 USD. Maybe on sale, but not at full price in its current state.