HERO X (PC)


Cheesy, cornball gaming anyone?

By MARTIN KINGSLEY

The so-called "Golden Age" of comics happened during the 1940s and 50s, just before the end of World War 2.

The populace was depressed, and the comics of the time tried to reverse this by being ultra-optimistic.

Good always triumphed over Evil, heroes never drank, smoked or cussed, and the economy was thriving.

World peace had been achieved, the girls were…over-endowed (think Betty Boop) and the guys looked like they'd been hewn rather than born.

Nobody died, villains survived multiple beatings and gunshot wounds to spend the rest of their days rotting in prison and the heroes were super-patriotic towards the good ol' US of A…you're starting to get the point?

The best example would have to be the Adam West-era Batman, where those crinkled sound bubbles with the words "BAM!" "BIFF!" "CRASH" and "THWOCK!" first appeared.

Freedom Force was the first game to revisit this era and recreated it in grand style, complete with overdone character designs, fanaticism… Uh, I mean patriotism, a pseudo-scientific storyline and costumes that can be best described as "camp-as-a-row-of-tents"… Hero X attempts to imitate this with lower system specs and succeeds. I think. Sort of. Maybe.

Okay, you caught me. It doesn't exactly rise to the pinnacles of gaming perfection. There, happy now? Good.

Hero X is the debut effort of startup games company Amazing Games. The first thing you notice about Hero X, besides the quite cool box art, is the sheer amount of exclamation marks on the blurb (15, to be exact), averaging an exclamation mark every 4 words.

Considering that the blurb consists of barely one paragraph, this kind of grammatical sadism is unforgivable. For me, as a writer, it's the equivalent of signing up for an S&M exhibition, thinking that S&M stands for Sam & Max. In other words, it's horrifyingly painful...

If you can drag your eyes away from the breathless enthusiasm that is the box blurb and actually install Hero X, things start to improve at a slow-but-steady pace.

This game was meant to appeal to the lower-end of the gamer market, e.g. those who are unwilling or unable to spend the money on a Beastie Rig and are still chugging along on their Pentium III 450/AMD K6/7s.

As such, this game isn't much to look at and is more reminiscent of Jagged Alliance 2 than anything else, with non-static objects (people, animals, vehicles) taking the form of pre-rendered sprites on hand-drawn backgrounds.

The sprites are clean, with no jagged edges or anything of that nature in sight, but there is nothing distinctly impressive on show either. No retina-bursting FX to be seen here, folks. Move along, move along.

Thankfully, the graphics are supported by a strong, if clichéd, storyline. You are a former sidekick that has been chosen by the American Super Heroes Association (Justice League, anyone?) to protect the fictional citizens of Smalltown, USA.

As is the case with comic-book storylines, there is evil brewing and a dastardly plot is afoot, involving crime lords, thugs and, for some reason, mimes. This kind of thing would usually make me suspect the intervention of my favorite French developer, Cryo Inc, but that cannot be, since Cryo finally bit the dust a few weeks ago. Tres weird, no?

The comic-book clichés don't stop there, though. You've got the stereotype thugs, complete with Chesty Bond singlets, leather jackets and sideburns, the stereotypical buff superhero and, of all things…a stereotypically mad professor!

Someone probably sat down, sometime after midnight if I'm any judge, and thought this would be a really good idea. In the sharp light of day, however, it didn't work out quite how it was supposed to.

See, the guy is a complete raving psycho! Take this example: You save him from getting a royal arse kicking, leaving bodies piled up all over the place. A little while later, when you talk to him, he says, "I'm afraid I'm a bit busy brushing all this mess aside." THERE ARE CADAVERS LITTERING THE FLOOR AND HE ACTS AS IF THIS IS THE NATURAL STATE OF HIS WORKSHOP.

I, personally, would just be a tad suspicious if MY assistant decided that a corpse motif would really help to bring out his natural skin color. I mean, is this a comic or American Psycho?

As a testament to 50s era comics, not a single pico-litre of blood is spilt, but it still makes for disturbing imagery. The similarities between this scene and Hellraiser are too uncanny to point out. "Please, no tears, it's a waste of good suffering!" Shudder.

Ahem…getting back to the subject at hand:

You can generate a super hero character, complete with their own costume, accent, gender and skin color. Once done, you can choose 3 superpowers to begin with and, as is the way with RPGs, you increase in power as your hero progresses through the game, allowing you to gain extra abilities and increased statistics.

From there, you are quite quickly booted on to the street with the general objective to protect all that is good and American.

As I said above, this game consists of more cheese than a 6-foot tall cheddar wheel and the missions don't do anything to go against this trend. From rescuing the necrophi… I mean professor, to rescuing suitably weird innocents from suitably weird villains.

If I was asked to describe the sounds that make up Hero X in one word, then I would struggle, as there are so many words that can be used but, after much consideration, I have decided to settle upon "overdone".

Everything is overdone. The speech is overdone, the music is overdone, and the ambient sound is especially overdone. Multiply the speech bubble "BIFF!" by a million times, and you are getting close to how overdone the audio is. It's funny for the first 15 minutes, but after that it gets seriously irritating.

See, that's the problem with Hero X : Its main selling point is it's cheesiness, but the developers apparently didn't know how to stop.

The inanity goes way beyond the point of normality to where the gamer begins to get nauseous, then annoyed, and, if the pain persists, angry.

Those fond of B-movies, comics and extra cheesy toppings will think they've died and gone to Heaven. Everyone else will go out and buy Freedom Force.

ORIGINALITY 75%
SOUND/GRAPHICS 70%
PLAYABILITY 70%
ADDICTION 50%
ENJOYMENT 50%