Almost a Hero

The joke in Almost a Hero is right there in the title: ten heroes, each of them almost useful. Bee Square's 2017 idle RPG, published under the HyperBeard banner and since passed to Deca Games, leans into its cast of lovable idiots, hands you the trinkets, pets and artifacts to make them slightly less useless, and lets the numbers do the rest.

It launched on iOS in March 2017 and Android weeks later, has been updated continuously since, and remains one of the best-polished idle RPGs on mobile. A PC version has been teased for 2026, but no Steam page exists yet.

What the loop feels like

Your heroes stagger into a fight and lose, slowly, while earning gold for the attempt. You tap the screen to fire your magical ring alongside them, slotting runes that trigger chain lightning, blizzards, or bursts of gold. That's Almost a Hero.

Trinkets get equipped, pets get fed, artifacts stack, and the heroes you laughed at in hour one are clearing stages by themselves in hour ten. That's Almost a Hero.

The systems doing the work

You field up to five flawed characters from the roster, each filling a standard RPG archetype, tank, support, attacker, with quirky mechanics and skill trees they level up dynamically during a run using gold earned from kills. The ring handles your input, artifacts handle your prestige: regular artifacts from prestiging grant broad passive multipliers to hero damage, global health and gold, while the mythical tier acts as game-changing passive structures levelled with dedicated currencies that fundamentally alter the rules, from cost reductions to auto-casting.

Trinkets are the custom-gear layer: specialised effects like increased team damage while an ally is shielded, matched and reforged to specific hero roles as the late-game optimisation puzzle. Beyond the main stage climb sit distinct modes: Gates of Gog, a puzzle-battler played with special charms where farming early gates, gate nine being the community's starting recommendation, banks the Aeon that powers your account baseline, and Time Challenges testing specialised builds under strict conditions. The community's collected wisdom on spending is a strict pipeline: pump early scraps into Vexx to mythical as your carry, boost Sam next for survivability, save the heavy investment for Ron, Jim and Oy.

Where it stumbles

Progression walls are the recurring complaint: pushing eventually demands heavy repetition of prestige loops or repeated farming of side modes for scrap and tokens, and managing those specific currencies can feel tedious late-game without spending gems. Once you have the optimal team synergies, the loop also settles into waiting, resetting and repeating like any idle game, however lively the presentation. And as an older, largely feature-complete title, the pace of developer updates has long since slowed.

Playing it today

Almost a Hero is free on the App Store and Google Play, maintained by Deca Games, with generous offline progress that respects your battery. If the squad-based idle register works for you, the catalogue's other tap-RPG entries make decent second visits.

The verdict

One of the better mobile idle RPGs: consistently funny, mechanically deeper than its cartoon coat suggests, and generous where its competitors are stingy. The grind is real and the walls arrive on schedule, but the writing carries you through them, and few games in the genre make failure this charming. If the free-to-play economy does not scare you off, the almost-heroes are worth meeting.