Not a Hero – Review

In your quest for global domination where do you start? Politics of course. But this is not just your average political party, this is a time traveling guy aptly named Bunnylord, due to his appearance of a mask with bunny ears. He hails from the future on a mission to save the world from nuclear disaster by telling everyone he needs to be elected to stop the threat, and how does he do this? He employs up to 9 characters each opened up with the subsequence completion of the game.

The game is a 2D horizontal scrolling shooter that after a few minutes of a training level, gets you right into the action of high paced, quick beats of 80’s style retro music killing with, if done right, plenty of executions and over the top killing. In comes the first of a 9 characters named Steve, Steve is a funny little guy, Bunnylords best friend and likes to kill for his boss. When I mean kill I mean KILL. This is done via character traits that each character possesses, such as fast reload, shoot to blow open doors, slide tackle enemies and my personal favourite is a trait possessed by Jesus, which is moving executions. This not only allows the more experienced player to keep things moving but helps on completing particular timed based challenges on some levels.

Every level starts with a briefing, from Bunnylord himself, about the coming level, the script used for the game is well written but does fall flat on some of the jokes thrown about expecting a good laugh when it’s only good for a smirk or two.

“Steve is a funny little guy, Bunnylords best friend and likes to kill for his boss”

Your health regenerates over time which is great but if you are surrounded, ammo runs dry if it’s not used properly to which you must reload or pick up ammo power ups. That can take time compared to being shot at. It’s better to take it slow sometimes as sliding and cover use the same button, you can find yourself sliding right into the action when you want to cover and reload. Each enemy has different attacks and some of them are resistant to slide tackles and have what seems overpowered weapons and it feels like that when they can one shot kill you, which then prompts a quick death and takes you back to the beginning of the level. At times this can be frustrating.

There are 21 levels to complete and a few secret ones to take the total to 24, to which you can get to through certain hidden doors. If you don’t try to complete every challenge in every level you can play this game for a good few hours, but I do believe the challenges are there to prolong gameplay some more with the extra characters too. It’s a game you can pick up and put down quite easily which would have been brilliant for the Vita. Easy controls and a very quick learning curve.