In the past few years the video game industry has witnessed an increase in indie titles like Spelunky and Rogue Legacy, games that follow in the tradition of the 1980 milestone Rogue, a game that had players run through a randomly generated fantasy setting while fighting various monsters in order to reach the end of the dungeon and a ladder to the next level. The catch was that when you died, you had to start all the way from the beginning. What counted was that one round where you did everything perfectly and mastered the level in one go. Publishers Devolver Digital (publisher of the Serious Sam series since 2009) and indie developer Terri Vellman have recently come out with a game in this tradition called Heavy Bullets, which they themselves describe as an “FPS dungeon crawler”. Heavy Bullets follows in the footsteps of Rogue, and spices things up with an interesting mixture of loud colors and synthetic sounds.
Welcome to the Neon Jungle
The first thing that will catch your eye is the game’s striking graphics style – Heavy Bullets plunges you into a psychedelic jungle setting drenched in a bright and gaudy neon color palette. Each of the various levels is divided into blocky, angular chambers with fluorescent walls reaching from the ground up into the dark sky above. The grassy jungle landscape of tall trees, sprawling plants, and massive stones are all made up of a few polygons, and like the rest of the game, possess an interesting retro charm.
The objective of Heavy Bullets sounds simple enough: The security system in a world called “Highrise Hunting Grounds” is out of control, and you have to make it through a total of eight levels and shut off the central computer. You start with three grenades and a revolver loaded with six bullets. So armed, you fight your way through several chambers before you finally reach the escape hatch to the next level. There’s probably no need to explain that the complexity of the “dungeons” increases from level to level, and that your enemies get more numerous and stronger as you advance.
The name of the game is survival
What makes Heavy Bullets so interesting is a gameplay mechanic that drastically limits the amount of ammunition available to you. With just a few bullets and a few grenades, you’re expected to make it through the whole level, come what may. If you kill an enemy, you get your bullet back, and maybe even a few gold coins, which you should definitely stock up on. Even if you miss and end up shooting a wall, the bullet will fall to the ground and hop up and down until you walk over and pick it up and load it back into your revolver. In Heavy Bullets, ammo is a precious commodity – it’s always necessary to concentrate, and you’d better be sure to use your revolver with precision and care. You should by all means avoid just storming into the room and trying to mow down anything that looks like it might be an enemy. Play like that and you’re going to see the “game over” screen a lot sooner than you probably want to.
When you die, you don’t lose your gold or any of the items you’ve collected (if you’ve saved them in a bank machine, that is), but you do have to start over from the beginning, regardless of the level you were on. In the hostile world of Heavy Bullets, sudden death is a constant and ever-present danger. Creatures who look like they crawled out of a nightmare lie and wait to kill you everywhere you go – the first few chambers are mostly filled with black monsters with sharp teeth who fly at you menacingly when they see you. But equally as dangerous are the various worms creeping about who like to hide behind plants and rocks, ready to attack you when you least expect it. In later levels you run into long-legged spider creatures, suicidal bugs who rush at you and blow themselves up in your face, as well as armored rhinos whose hindquarters are their only weak spot. Another major threat is posed by stationary gun towers that follow your movements and fire laser beams – and later, rockets – that can rapidly reduce your health. And in later levels the gun towers take to the skies and hunt you from the air.
It takes a little while to get used to, but you’ll soon be familiar with the rudimentary AI of your enemies and you’ll be able to better plan your actions as well as your paths through each level. Every once in a while an enemy might get stuck behind a wall or a rock, giving you enough time to put a bullet in him. Though the creatures you come across are all pretty simple, more or less, running into several of them in one room can become a deadly problem. Sometimes you might fire off all your rounds, only to have to flee in a panicked attempt to find a bullet on the ground somewhere. The knowledge that all your progress can be brought to naught in one fell swoop is a constant concern.
Life from a vending machine
Appearing to provide a glimmer of hope in your fight for survival are vending machines scattered throughout the various levels which provide useful items in exchange for gold. You can save the gold coins you collect at bank machines so that after you bite the dust you at least won’t have to start over bankrupt, too. Another machine supplies items beneficial to your health, like healing potions, antidotes, and colorful pills that increase your speed. Another type of machine allows you to buy extra bullets, bombs, and a knife for close combat. Although you only have two slots for extra equipment, these slots can actually determine whether you will survive or not in some cases. Unfortunately, you can’t take items to the next level, and in each dungeon you have to decide what’s going to be most useful in getting you to the end. It’s going to take good decision-making and lots of planning ahead to make it all the way to the central computer.
In the tradition of Rogue, Heavy Bullets features levels that are randomly generated so that each time you play it’s a little bit different. Not only that, but it also means you can never be sure of the exact layout of any particular level. With enemies and vending machines redistributed each time, and the path through the level changed, it’s a brand-new challenge each time you go through. Unfortunately, however, the individual levels don’t really differ from one another all that much, and despite certain variations in color and brightness, the jungle interiors stay pretty much the same, and you keep passing the same trees and rocks. This is where the game could have really used an extra dose of creative insanity. The basic idea that a security system is suddenly running amok due to a glitch in the central computer just screams for crazy ideas that the player could have been confronted with. But everything Heavy Bullets offers in this regard – flying gun towers and exploding bugs – is clearly too little. They really missed their chance here to give the title a truly distinctive mark all its own.
The game’s dynamic soundtrack, on the other hand, really knows how to impress. The synthetic music harmonizes perfectly with the colorful psychedelic jungle world as thumping beats take us through the various levels. When you get into a dangerous situation, the music gets more urgent and doesn’t calm back down until you’ve killed all the enemies in that area. It kind of gives you the feeling that the music is playing with you and adapting to changing circumstances as if it were commenting on the action. The game also includes a multi-faceted spectrum of sound effects, be it the jingling of coins, the bang of the revolver, or the twittering of birds in the background. Taken together, all of these noises create an overall sound rich in atmosphere with a coherent, consciously artificial flair.
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