Not a Hero (PC)

When a game says “published by Devolver Digital”, you know you can expect something utterly ridiculous, shamelessly irreverent, and more often than not, a hell of a lot of fun. Not a Hero is a “2¼D” cover-based shooter from UK-based developers Roll7, creators of the fast-paced pixellated skateboard platformer OlliOlli. This latest offering is a brutally violent, high-speed romp through an insane, colorful world that’s about as British as afternoon tea. Keep reading to find out what we thought.

Vote for Bunnylord

As BunnyLord’s approval rating increases, more dubious crime fighters join the team, from a foul-mouthed Welsh chick who can run and gun, to a shotgun-wielding alcoholic, to a guy that talks like he’s James Bond or something, but dual-wields pistols like a “guy from a John Woo movie”, as BunnyLord puts it. Election day is in three weeks, and each day the crew will have to do something (violent) to increase their candidate’s ratings.

Each mission starts with a briefing, and ends with a debriefing in a café owned by BunnyLord’s aunt Ruby. This is where much of the game’s humor is found; some of it’s satire aimed right at the UK’s political and business elites, but most of it’s just straight up toilet humor. Oh yeah, the dick jokes are strong with this one. Sometimes it’s funny, but a lot of it comes off like a 4th grader who learned a naughty word and uses it to shock his classmates. I’m a big fan of immature humor, but sometimes you’re just trying too hard. Much of it is randomly generated, which gives it a sort of (post-cancellation and re-airing) Family Guy-style “that’s so random!” schtick, and it just gets old after a while.

I did find humor in the levels themselves, which featured an over-the-top and over-the-top-again level of violence that was highly reminiscent of the early Grand Theft Auto games. That is to say, it’s so cartoony and ridiculously violent that it hardly even registers as violence. The way enemies spout blood and blow up into chunks would be extremely unsettling in a game with more realistic graphics, but in Not a Hero, it’s so obviously a self-aware joke about video game violence that you’d be hard-pressed to take it seriously. The comments shouted by the various characters, especially the ones with funny accents (pace, you Scots and Welshmen out there) can be pretty hilarious; though one thing I did find more than a bit disturbing was how enemies, and sometimes even cops, will beg for mercy before you execute them. “Not the face, n-!” or “C'mon I was just doin’ my job, ma-!”... Sometimes it’s a bit much, even for a game that’s about as stylized as can be.

One thing I did really have a beef with was that there is no way to fast-scroll through BunnyLord’s briefings. You can either sit and watch each word that comes up, or you can press Enter to skip the whole thing. I wanted to read it all, but didn’t have the patience most of the time, so I did admittedly miss out on a lot of the jokes. Lots of games allow you to press a button once to see the whole snippet of text, then skip to the next one. Not here. It’s all or nothing.

“A Violent Today for a Better Tomorrow”

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to the gameplay itself. While Not a Hero is billed as a cover-based shooter, and cover plays an important role, I found it to be much more of a trial-and-error puzzler of a game. It reminded me a lot of classic platformers from the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, where you had to figure out how to get from point A to point B by learning from your mistakes, memorizing scripted events, and using the right weapons on the right enemies at the right time. Is it frustrating to die and have to start all over again? Absolutely! But they designed it that way for a reason. And the best part of all is that each non-hero plays in an entirely different way, so that beating mission with Mike will be an entirely different experience than with Kimmy.

Of course, not every character is all that useful, and I pretty much played exclusively with Steve, the starting character, until I unlocked Mike. Characters like Jesus (not that one, but a Spanish guy reminiscent of the character from The Big Lebowski. Or at least I hope so.) and Samantha are faster, to be sure, but their accuracy sucks, so a lot of their shots are just wasted. I think the game gets a lot more satisfying once you unlock Clive, the first of the three final team members. Clive, Ronald Justice, and Kimmy are all really fast, and compared to the other characters, seemingly invincible if you play them right. Wannabe super hero Ronald Justice has a claw hammer he can use to kill almost any enemy in one hit, and Kimmy is… well, let’s just say she’s like River Tam in that scene from Serenity.

Each mission starts with BunnyLord dropping you off in a van or helicopter, and each one ends with BunnyLord picking you up in a van or helicopter. In week one you’re taking on the Russian mob led by Bogdan Nabatov in what appears to be an industrial district, and the next week you’re in a council estate (basically the British version of housing projects, with all the implications) fighting the drug lord Upgraydd and his apparently West Indian gangstas. Finally, the last week sees you taking on Akemi Unagi’s Yakuza in the most stereotypically “Asian” atmosphere imaginable. Not only are there suicidally aggressive samurai, but also teleporting geishas that throw ninja stars at you and pompadour-sporting Yakuza henchmen. Oh yeah, and you can take cover behind washing machines and fireworks.

While there are only 21 “days” to play, each one has three extea challenges to complete for better ratings. These range from relatively easy ones like “kill everyone” or “find the lost turtles”, to more difficult challenges like “don’t get punched” and various time trials. There are four different tiers of success: “Mayor of England”, “Priminister”, “King of England”, and “Global Megalord”. The more challenges you complete, the higher your ratings go, so it’s a good idea to go back and complete challenges you previously might have missed once you unlock better characters. And yes, you can go back to any given day/mission at any time, though once you start one, you either have to finish it or quit it. No saves or checkpoints here.

The gameplay itself is highly tactical, forcing you to consider things like your character’s reload times and ammo capacity, not to mention their speed, accuracy, damage, and special skills. For example, Mike is super-fast and has a shotgun that packs a serious wallop. It also has just two shots before he has to reload, and that takes a while. Clive is also really fast, has a dash that can bust through doors to knock out enemies, and can fire in two directions at once. However, he can’t use any of the cool special weapons you can pick up, including pipe bombs, grenades, “riconades”, and the extremely powerful and utterly cruel “cat bomb” (you’ll see).

Levels usually have punny names like “Poster Mortem” or “Nigiris with Attitude”, and each one will have a specific objective, such as “destroy all the ganja” or “kill the statue”. The hardest levels are the ones where SWAT teams show up at the end, putting your vigilante crusade to an abrupt end if you’re not careful.

Presented in ISO-Slant™

While in some sense there’s not much variety to the levels, which all feature hallways, doors, platforms, windows you can break through, and a few other elements, the way they lay out each level is actually really different, providing unique challenges each time, especially in weeks two and three. When I first started playing, I was going to write that the levels were repetitive – and they are, in many ways – but that was before I realized just how different they actually are. And to be honest, I think when people demand more variety from a game that’s designed to look like it could be played on the NES, they tend to forget what games of that era were actually like. And since Not a Hero does not claim to offer Xbox One levels of visual diversity, I’m not going to hold them to a standard the developers didn’t hold themselves to. In any event, in the 15 or so hours I played the game, it never got boring.

Finally, a word on sound. I liked the music a lot. It reminded me of classic 8-bit games, but if they existed in a world that had already experienced the 21st-century UK electronic music scene. Voice acting is limited to comments uttered by player characters and enemies – BunnyLord himself talks a lot, but his “voice” is just random noise that sounds a lot like the adults in Peanuts cartoons. I would imagine this is to cover for the fact that a lot of the text itself is randomly generated.