Calum Petrie reviews Not a Hero: Super Snazzy Edition…
Not a Hero – Super Snazzy Edition is the console release of Rollingmedia’s disturbing and frantic side scrolling shooter. The game is a bizarre mix of over the top violence with satire of stereotypes ranging from drunken Scottish people to Russian gangsters. With its side scrolling shooting, pixel art style topped off with a bizarre and warped sense of humour; this game is hard to put into a single category.
Not a Hero is based around a crackpot team of operatives recruited by Bunnylord in his election campaign. With his goal of election success resting on cleaning up the streets of crime on the build up to the election date, players take the role of part of the clean-up crew.
The objective changes from level to level where players will sometimes just have to kill all enemies in the area, other levels will have players reach an objective and escape. Each level has its own set of bonus objectives which help improve the “approval rating” of Bunnylord and also help unlock new characters in the game.
Each character comes with their own unique gun and personality, this is where some people could find offense if you wish to. The English and Scottish are labelled as drunk and vulgar while other characters are stereotyped to whatever the country of origin is known for. This added more humour than frustration to the game for me and proved that modern games still have a sense of humour and people still wish to make games for the sake of fun.
The level select menu can be a one of the funniest thing you find in the game with each character giving out witty and funny dialogue when highlighted. You could literally spend a good 5 or 10 minutes in the menu exhausting dialogue option before deciding on a character.
The game itself has an extremely simplistic control scheme; you move the on screen character up and down at stairwells, navigate the screen left and right. While there are 4 other buttons, fire, reload, special weapons (grenades, mails bombs, Molotov cocktail) and slide attack/cover. A simplistic and uncomplicated control scheme almost feels like a breath of fresh air in today’s gaming market. The tutorial level and first few missions within the game do a great job of easing you into the terrors of the game and get you into a finely tunes murdering machine.
The graphics of the game are very impressive, the design option to have the game as a wide angle camera and display the majority of the level at all times is a bold choice. This allows players to see what is coming up ahead and have you player character as a small sprite on-screen not pulling all of the focus. The violence is probably the single thing you will leave this game remembering, when an enemy is killed with a baseball sliding shotgun attack you will feel a sense of wow and awe but also achievement.
The character design is interesting and yet fits appropriately into the games design, while Bunnylord himself always made me feel a little uneasy and somewhat freaked out. The idea of a giant purple rabbit who speaks in mumbles and muffled speech running for mayor and taking out mob bosses is bizarre to say the least.
A great value this game has is replay ability, being able to return to previous levels with new characters and complete objectives you may have found difficult before. Though on the same hand some levels can feel frustrating, if you skip past the mission briefing you might miss key details and have yourself getting angry over a simple matter.
The simplicity of the game can often make you underestimate the kill boxes in levels or other dangers that are easily overlooked. A player might think you can run into a room and kill everything very quickly and this is definitely not the case. Cover is key in this game and can often be a hard concept to grasp, while most enemies can be taken down with a slide tackle followed up by an execution; not all of them are so easy to take down. Sometimes you have to employ tactics to stop yourself from falling into the mistakes of previous and unsuccessful runs of a level. The main thing is do not let the simplistic graphics and control scheme lure you into thinking the game is a cakewalk.
The greatest thing to take away from this game is that Rollingmedia and Team 17 are not afraid to cause a little controversy, the game is simply a game. Nobody should go out their way to pick holes or find offense in this game, I can understand that we live in an age where people can get upset easily and things can be blown out of proportion pretty quickly. Not a Hero is just a simple game set out to make people laugh with cartoonish violence and crass humour.
The game deserves at least a 7/10 for its innovation and being able to make a simple game sadistically hard at times. The game is very enjoyable and is one for playing in your spare time when you maybe want to complete a level or 2 at a time.
Rating: 7/10
Calum Petrie – Follow me on Twitter
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Originally published May 23, 2016. Updated April 14, 2018.
