Not a Hero Review - It's a Crime

[NewClassic_v1legacy]

Not a Hero Review - It's a Crime

Not A Hero isn't a game for everyone. It's flawed, repetitive, but works so well when it works.

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[Barbas]

That's a shame; I was hoping for a bit more out of this game. Looks like it suffers from its speed being out-of-whack with its movement controls, which is compounded by a score system that feels more sticky than carroty. At least it looks like good fun. The trailer certainly raised my eyebrows.

 

[Kahani]

Anything that interrupts even a second's gameplay, be it the Steam overlay or an ill-timed pop-up from Windows, causes inputs to drop and player actions ignored, and near universally leads to player death.

This seems a rather odd criticism. Of course interrupting a twitch-based game is going to cause you to lose, that's just how they work. If you alt-tab out of CoD in the middle of a match you're probably going to get shot as well, and even blinking can be a bad idea in bullet-hell style games. That's not a problem with the game, it's a problem with trying to do other things at the same time as a game that requires your full attention and quick reactions. It's isn't necessarily the player's fault if it's something like surprise Windows pop-ups and not something they did deliberately, but it's certainly not the game's fault either.

 

[NewClassic_v1legacy]

This seems a rather odd criticism. Of course interrupting a twitch-based game is going to cause you to lose, that's just how they work. If you alt-tab out of CoD in the middle of a match you're probably going to get shot as well, and even blinking can be a bad idea in bullet-hell style games. That's not a problem with the game, it's a problem with trying to do other things at the same time as a game that requires your full attention and quick reactions. It's isn't necessarily the player's fault if it's something like surprise Windows pop-ups and not something they did deliberately, but it's certainly not the game's fault either.

Ah, seems I explained that poorly. The game's input almost feels baked into the framerate. So if there's ever a framedrop or the game slows down due to a pop-up being rendered in addition to the game engine, everything will slow down. That means the amount of time it takes for the game to react to inputs, the time it takes for the game to display whether or not you successfully reach cover (or if you were intercepted by an enemy), and if the timing is just-so, whether the input does anything at all.

The game is designed to run at a high framerate, and only the high framerate. Anything that slows it down, for whatever reason, will cause the inputs to fail, hang, or behave oddly. It isn't a problem that crops up often, but even just a single rogue "Hey, you want to play TF2?" message on Steam can cause a two or three minute long mission to fail in the last few seconds, and make the whole run need repeating. It's not really a fault of the gameplay, but it's not a problem that every game has. Even precision platformers like Super Meat Boy and Dustforce are less picky about inputs.

 

[Kahani]

Ah, seems I explained that poorly. The game's input almost feels baked into the framerate. So if there's ever a framedrop or the game slows down due to a pop-up being rendered in addition to the game engine, everything will slow down. That means the amount of time it takes for the game to react to inputs, the time it takes for the game to display whether or not you successfully reach cover (or if you were intercepted by an enemy), and if the timing is just-so, whether the input does anything at all.

Ah, fair enough, that makes a lot more sense. I guess it must be a handy programming shortcut to tie things to the framerate, since quite a few games do it and it always gets a ton of criticism.