Flat Heroes Preview

Flat Heroes is an arcadey game where you play as a square and proceed to beat challenges set in a level/world. Basic in design, it delivers by the handful, until the game becomes near impossible to beat alone without a lot of determination.

Its design choice caught my eye. Being clean and precise with controls, my expectation of the game was solid 2D platforming with cool mini games to help flesh out the content. Delivering on that front, the level design of each level gave it a morish feel that left me losing track of time when I should have gone and focused on my chores. Oops.

Featuring six worlds with 15 levels currently, the game is pretty feature complete from the get go: the main campaign has the option to “Speedrun”, playing all levels in a world and being rated with three squares based on your time. At first I thought that the game took a safe route for gameplay: evading projectiles and emphasis on level design and layout; rather than quick responsive movement to dodge something by the skin of your teeth - not say I beat the first world without dying repeatedly. But as I went through the game, planning and responding to each level was the difference between beating it in the first couple of tries to dozens of attempts (playing with a controller is highly recommended).

Sadly that's the fastest time I've got for speed running a world.

Each level lasts around thirty seconds if done without dying - for the most part. However, the lack of instructions or text directions is slightly aggravating as some levels require the use of a certain mechanic to complete it. Which is made slightly worse with the inclusion (and emphasis) of multiplayer, as not everyone will know the control scheme. Maybe this adds to the fun of a coach co-op/vs match, bickering and having banter at each other’s skill.

It’s here that issues with the game as a whole crop up, predictably as an Early Access game: the slow motion effect locking up making the game unplayable, inconsistency of the game’s logic. The most egregious bug though is the inability to quit the game without using Alt + F4 (the three bugs being easy to replicate). Something less mechanical is the inclusion of unlockables for the game that are tied to the multiplayer, being less than ideal since some of the more competitive modes need to be unlocked before you can play them.

This is the most awkward bug since escape is not possible without quitting.

What did surprise me the most was the arduous task of beating the game alone. It became alarmingly obvious that the later worlds are more geared towards having assistance to beating the levels with some of them requiring incredibly quick responses that were sometimes near impossible to do without thinking two to three steps in advance of the game. But then the game mechanic, that was initially fun, with the homing projectiles became increasingly stressful with tightly nit levels that require somewhat precise movements that are ruined because of the random nature of the tracking that led to some projectiles behaving oddly and straying.

Aspects of the game that aren’t meshed well as a single-player experience include the tight timing of beating bosses and the tracking of the shots being too accurate and moving in methods that don’t seem nature. Coupled with the inconsistency of the shots path, it creates a game that started so strong to fall so hard because of the later half. I would like to know if the devs did single-player tests on the boss and later levels, since they feel arbitrarily difficult akin to pixel perfect performance when that perfected performance leads to an infuriated gameplay experience that will drive people away from playing it and watching someone else beat it (potentially heavily intoxicated).

Final Thoughts:

Flat Heroes is fun game that takes a moorish game concept and fleshes into something more fulfilling and long lasting; if it continues to build from its current state I think that as final product it could gain something like a cult status. But unless they make the single player aspect more forgiving and with their current price, I can only suggest that you pick this up now if you want to experience a an alcoholic fun fiesta of a games night.