A-Z backlog challenge: Unholy Heights Review

Unholy Heights is a fun game which takes ideas from many different games or genres and combines it into a simple to learn, yet at times quite challenging package. You play as the devil and are looking to entice tenants to come to your building to give you money in the form of rent, as well as to protect your stash of gold from adventurers. This is an idea that has been done before in games such as Dungeon keeper but this has a different style and different features which make it unique.

You start with what looks like a very cheap motel which can only accommodate four tenants but by the end of the game it will become a four story dwelling of sixteen.

There are a number of different types of monsters who will come a look for a place such as elementals, demons, demi-humans and chimarae.  They all have differing stats: hit points, attack, physical defense and magic defense. They also attack from different ranges: melee, medium range, long range and super long range. 

Some of them don't get along with different types and they have different requests for what their rooms need to contain. Keeping your tenants happy leads to their stats increasing while unhappiness leads to decreases or them leaving. Tenants all also have jobs and as they move up the career ladder (like in the Sims) they can afford to pay more for rent so you can afford to put nicer furniture in their room. Your tenants can also find partners (from either inside or outside the building), move in together and have children. Their children have higher starting stats than their parents so it pays to keep tenants alive.

The fights in the game start off very simple, with you just wanting to have monsters of each range available. Later fights are a lot more complicated where you need to ensure your monsters being hit are the ones with highest defense to type of attack they are facing and you need to decide where to split up enemy forces and to be attacking from multiple sides.

 There are random attacks on your building but also quests to complete which see specific guilds or heroes attacking you. These give a lot more money and some give you access to new furniture or monsters types.

 The graphics are very crisp so it's easy to see exactly who is fighting where. The UI is also fairly good. Most information can easily be found and there aren't many wasted clicks. Most monsters are well balanced so you won't find that many that you'll be totally ignoring. For example some that are poor at fighting have more money so are useful to keep in the building for that. Sometimes the progress is a little slow in terms of accessing new monsters but I didn't have too many minutes of boredom. It took me a little under 10 hours to complete. There is some replayability as you may want to try focusing on the monster types you couldn't use due to them disliking the ones you used in first playthrough.

Release Year: 2013
Rating: 67
Normal Price: $3.99
Sale price: $0.99