‘No Heroes Here’ Review (Nintendo Switch)
A few months ago, I reviewed a game on the Switch called Super Chariot which made something (dragging a coffin around catacombs) feel like a slog in single player mode, but was transformed into a belly-laugh-athon in multiplayer. The exact same thing stands here for No Heroes Here, there is a single player mode, but this is definitely a game that needs to be played with friends (locally or online) to be liked and indeed, loved.
The introduction of No Heroes Here instantly sets the tone for what is to come. After an opening poem stating the urgent need to recover the King’s artifacts, a lone hero is sent out on this greatest of missions…and promptly killed by a single arrow upon arriving at the first fort. Thus the quest falls to our hapless non-heroes who now have to fight off the marauding attackers whilst hopefully stumbling across the artifacts as they do so.
No Heroes Here is essentially a tower-defence game with a focus on micro-management but I can assure you that it’s far from being as tedious as those words in that order may suggest. The game play is similar to Overcooked but with a medieval setting which struck as more interesting and fulfilling. After choosing from the characters available (all of whom play the same), the deceased hero acts as a sort of spirit guide to explain the game play mechanics which boil down to loading cannons to shoot at approaching enemies. It may sound simple but throw in the fact that you first have to take charcoal to a workbench to create gunpowder, then high-tail to the cannon to load it, pop back down (the Castles are specifically awkwardly laid out) to get some raw metal which needs to be forged into ore and THEN placed on a workbench to shape it into a cannonball before it can be loaded into the cannon, which is then fired…and needs to be cleaned.
It sounds like a lot but the process is so fast that pegging it around the single-screen castles whilst trying to find out the best path becomes exhilarating, especially when you have other friends doing the same, lobbing items at you to assist whilst running around doing their own thing, yelling at you to, “make some more balls!!! No, we need gunpowder!!!”.
The game is truly pure fun, the difficulty curve is gentle and each world adds new items and enemies, for instance honey-bombs* that slows down enemies and reduces their attack power and large battle-ramming humans that need two cannon blasts to take out. There is also a (difficult) boss at the end of each world.
With it’s super-fast pace, pixelated visuals and jaunty soundtrack (with surprisingly meaty sound effects) No Heroes Here is an extremely satisfying and tightly designed game for up to four players. The ‘one more go’ factor is unbelievably high and it’s clearly going to become a game that appears in heavy rotation during my multiplayer night.
Right, I’m off to fill up my cannons with honey…is that a massive wooden chicken on the horizon?
* Yes, yes the following exchange happened more than once during the game: “We need some more honey…” “…we need some more what, darling?”
