Review: Bunch of Heroes
By Harry Monogenis | September 26, 2011 | Reviews | No comments | Share
Recently, zombie-based games seem to be getting increasingly satirical with games such as Dead Block telling a story of how Rock ‘n’ Roll in the 1950s woke up the dead or in Call of Duty: Black Ops where a couple of American presidents and Castro are attacked by zombies in the Pentagon.
NGD Studios is going for something very similar with Bunch of Heroes, their top-down zombie shooter which recently launched on Steam. Things seemed good at the beginning, with the addictive soundtrack and simple gameplay keeping me interested; however, that all changed after a while.
I ended up playing a game I hoped would suddenly improve, but had issues preventing that from happening.
Bunch of Heroes sees four very different people joining together to stop an army of the dead and ultimately the aliens that are bringing them back from their graves. They are: a Cuban revolutionary commander nicknamed Red Scare, a tough all-American hero named “The Quarterback,” a super-spy going by the name of “The Dragonfly” and Captain Smith, a highly trained pilot serving for the Royal Air Force. Each character has his or her own special ability which can be activated once enough blue orbs from the bodies of zombies are collected, providing devastating yet humorous ranged and area attacks like exploding Cuban cigars and airstrikes.
The gameplay & controls are as simple as top-down shooters get. You use the WASD keys to move your character around, the mouse to move both crosshair and which way your character is facing, and the spacebar to execute a roll. If you’ve ever played a top-down flash game shooter before, you’ll have no trouble getting used to Bunch of Heroes. And even if you haven’t, again, the controls are very simplistic and easy to grasp.
Speaking of gameplay, it’s hard to call it good or bad. Bunch of Heroes features 3 Campaigns, each with 3 Missions; all of which are playable right from the beginning, which is strange considering the fact that Bunch of Heroes’ story actually does progress throughout the Campaigns. Whenever you start a Mission, you’re giving an SMG with 10 bullets in each magazine with infinite ammo which cannot be replaced. Other more powerful weapons can be found in what appear to be military-grade crates which do have limited amount of ammo. Simply walking over the weapon once said crate is open will equip the player with it, but going over a weapon when you have another will automatically replace it making for an annoying experience when you’re retreating and accidentally roll onto one as players can only carry two weapons.
Each Mission has its own set of objectives to complete. At first it’s the basic “defend this house by killing x of zombies” or “stay in this circle for x amount of seconds in order to defend the thing behind you”, but it quickly gets a bit wacky with objectives involving rescuing the President’s daughter and her cheerleading squad, and then putting them all in identical cars. Oh, and then rescuing cheerleaders. And then rescuing cheerleaders. Oh yeah, and Bunch of Heroes also has you rescuing cheerleaders.
I thought that after rescuing the President’s daughter and her cheerleading squad in “The Farm” Campaign that I would see some more variety and humor in the objectives to help keep things fresh and unique, but no, NGD decided to have cheerleaders everywhere, even in the Mars Campaign when you’re killing endless waves of aliens — killing a funny feature and making it look like they just got lazy.
What really needs to be known about Bunch of Heroes is that it’s completely co-op based. The main menu has Play Online right at the top, with single-player simply accessed by clicking on “Play Offline.” When you play by yourself, you’ll slowly begin to realize just how much the developers want you to quit and start an online game. Objectives in later Campaigns almost scream of “co-op required” when you’re up against impossible odds.
Now you’re probably beginning to assume that I just hate co-op focused games. No, this is far from the point. You see, this actually sounds like something I’d like – a difficult game to tackle with friends and others online – but the thing stopping me from doing so is the fact that online is simply broken right now.
Bunch of Heroes relies on a peer to peer system, and nearly a week after its release the amount of available games is still more-or-less empty. There have been rare instances where I have been able to find servers, only to be greeted with a “Connection Failed” error that other players seem to be experiencing also. I did manage to successfully join a couple of games, though, only to see that character animations became choppy, grenades would get stuck in mid-air, weapon crates became indestructible and objects that needed to be destroyed as part of an objective would mysteriously have their health rise in chunks while shooting at them.
It’s a shame really. Bunch of Heroes had a lot going for it, with its cute art direction, addictive soundtrack and simplistic yet strong gameplay mechanics – the mistake was making it so co-op reliant when the player base just isn’t there, and probably never will be, on top of the fact that it’s riddled with bugs. Why couldn’t the developers make a solid co-op experience without destroying a potentially great single-player one? It almost frustrates me because Bunch of Heroes showed signs of something that might have ended up a success, but its issues along with the developers’ intent on having it co-op focused when the game doesn’t even seem ready for it yet has pulled it back from reaching its potential.
All of this said, however, playing Bunch of Heroes with a few friends is somewhat enjoyable granted you don’t bump into many of the issues. It’s like taking a glimpse at what the game could and should have been.
I’m disappointed. Although I know that some of the more hardcore players will stay with Bunch of Heroes for its challenging aspects, it’s hard to recommend this game to anyone else given its issues, missed potential and developer direction taken with the game.
Score: 6.5/10 | Read our Scoring Policy |
