Dad's Gaming Addiction

I’ve been playing a lot of top-down arcade shooters as of late, not only because they are fun, but because they allowed me to rehash a little bit of nostalgia from those “Smash TV” days.  I picked up “Bunch of Heroes” for a few bucks during a Steam sale and I’m here today to weigh in on whether or not it was worth the effort.  It’s worth noting that I attempted to get some help for this review by the way of co-op.  My brother, who sometimes makes special guest appearances on my reviews, couldn’t get the game to run.  A quick look at the forums told me that others had the same issue and we were unable to get him squared away.  Buyer beware.

Bunch of Heroes (PC)

The main menu gives you the option to play online, play offline, or adjust game options.  You can adjust screen resolution, sound levels, visual quality, toggle fullscreen, and more.  There is a key configuration menu, but it pops up before you launch the game.  I would have liked an in-game key configuration menu, mainly so that I didn’t have to quit in order to try out different keystroke configurations.  It should be noted that double clicking the shortcut bypasses that option to adjust your keyboard settings…you’ll have to double-click the game through the Steam library.  Inconvenient, to say the least.  Viewing the controls during a match via the menu doesn’t reflect the changes you may have made to the keyboard configurations.  Again, inconvenient.

Options Menu

Picking either online or offline presents you with a campaign, survival, and time attack mode.  In most cases, picking either option will allow you to choose your mission, what episode you’d like to play, the difficulty, and permissions (public or private).  Difficulties include easy, medium, hard, and insane.  After that, you can pick one of four characters…though at the time of writing, I seem to have picked up a fifth that is “jolly” and “pissed.” I’m not sure if this Santa character will persist after the holidays, but I’m assuming that because it’s free DLC it may.

Ho Ho Ho indeed.

When you start up a match, you’ll see your character’s status along the bottom of the screen.  You’ll also see your health, grenade count, available weapons, and ammo count.  You can hold two weapons and switch back and forth between them, though if you run over a weapon on the playing field, it replaces the one you currently have equipped.  There’s also a minimap in the lower right hand corner of the screen.

Some missions involve escorting NPCs to other locations.

The gameplay is usually the same every round, and that involves a series of missions that task you with doing various things while fending off waves of enemies.  One mission might task you with staying near a mission critical object while another might involve killing a certain number of special baddies.  If you’re successful in completing these missions, you’ll win the map, plain and simple.  There are plenty of weapons and health kits lying around for your use and some of those weapons are incredibly fun to use.

You can never have enough flamethrower ammo.

All in all, “Bunch of Heroes” IS a fun game, IF you can get it to work.  Had the developers put more work into getting the little things polished, it could have been a fantastic game.  Running around and killing stuff with various weapons is the hi-lite of the game, but those little things add up.  If the devs can make keyboard configuration available in-game and do more to support those that have problems running the game, I’d recommend it, especially for the few bucks I paid during the sale.

Final Verdict: 6/10

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You can check out video play sessions here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDWBJ0HPJqQ

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