NOT A HERO

Nope, no you are not.

Not A Hero is a 2D shoot ’em up developed by a British developer, Roll7. It is a single-player game with unlockable characters.

The premise of the game is as follows: A purple man with a bunny head traveled back in time to run for election to be a mayor. He did this in order to save the world as we know it from total annihilation. To make sure that he wins the election, he got together a bunch of gun-totting lunatics to shoot criminals in the face. At this point my brain just left my skull and went off somewhere to have a drink.

Anyways, in every mission there is an objective you have to achieve to aid Bunnylord the mayoral candidate. Either it is to grab a bunch of gnomes, kill a private investigator with some sensitive info on the purple bunny man, destroying a bunch of ganja … Really, what in the world is happening to UK’s elections?

And aside for the main objectives, there are three optional sub-objectives for you to do in every mission. They add more challenge to the gameplay, and with every sub-objective achieved Bunnylord’s approval rating increases faster. And with a higher approval rating, you get to unlock more and more new characters with different guns and perks.

Every character has a sliding tackle. Sliding into an enemy will let you knock him out for a short period of time, letting you execute him. Some enemies can’t be tackled though, and they’ll knock you back if you try. Sliding up to a cupboard, computer terminal, or any sort of cover will allow you to flatten yourself to the wall and behind cover, which makes you untargettable by enemy gunfire until the enemy walks up to you and punch you out of it.

The game is rather fun. Slide tackle into an enemy, execute him, throw a grenade at some unsuspecting mooks and jump through a window into the building next door through another window. The game does have regenerating health, but being careless will cause you to lose them faster than your wallet losing money during Steam sales, especially when the SMG- or shotgun-wielding mooks show up. There is one thing about this game that severely annoys me though.

The game is in a very unusual resolution, 1400 by 842, and there is no resolution setting or a full screen mode as well. Someone on the Steam forums mentioned that pressing [Left Alt] and [Enter] can enable full screen mode, so I tried it …

… and got this.

The game itself is pretty fun and rather challenging (or I’m just bad), but this resolution issue is just annoying. I’m not even sure why this happened in the first place.

Overall, I say Not A Hero is a fairly good game. The plot is absolutely nonsense, and deliberately so. The gameplay is fun and feels like a playable 8-bit action flick at times. My only issue with the game is with the weird resolution issue.

Despite that, I will recommend this game. If you somehow have a computer screen that has 1400 by 842 resolution, this game is made for you. If you have a regular screen though, tough luck, but you’ll still find this game rather enjoyable.