PAX East 2015: Hands on with Not A Hero

At PAX East 2014, I got to play a little bit of Not A Hero from Devlolver Digital. A fun little 2D side scroller where you go from building to building, level to level blowing away anyone in your path. I returned to the Devolver Digital booth at PAX East 2015 and got to see how Not A Hero has progressed over the past year. The good news is that it's still a lot of fun. 

Not A Hero has one of the wackiest premises for a game I've heard in a long time. Mayoral candidate BunnyLord needs your help in cleaning up the city. By cleaning up he means, murdering all of the criminal scum in the city. So he hires a bunch of psychopaths to help him with that. Not A Hero has you running through buildings blowing away anyone in your path. The challenge is that you have to constantly slide in and out of cover or else you will be killed in a hurry. All you have to do is press the slide button and you will automatically snap to cover, and will automatically pop out of cover when you shoot. Sometimes enemies wont die when you shoot them so you will have to run over to them and perform and execution style move as you stand over them. You also have to pay attention to how much ammunition you have in your gun as well, which is one thing that I kept forgetting. If you are out of ammo, the enemy will try to rush you and you will be dead in seconds. 

There were also various characters to choose from, each with their own unique trait. One character could slide and shoot at the same time, one could run and gun, and my favorite, a hillbilly type character had a shotgun which could blown down doors and kill enemies standing behind them. I look forward to playing through the game with the various characters to see which one I enjoy the most. I also think that since the characters all play different, it will be fun to just replay the game over and over again with each character as each other will require you to go into each level with a different strategy. 

One cool thing about Not a Hero is that each level in the game has objectives that will improve your overall rating once you complete them. Some of these including finishing in a certain amount of time, not taking any damage, or killing enemies in certain ways. The challenge is that all of the objectives have to be completed in a single go. You can complete one, and then replay the level to get the rest of them. I actually like this idea because the levels themselves are pretty quick but if you are going to the objectives, it adds a layer of challenge onto it and in my opinion, adds tons of replayability to game as well. The game also features amazing pixel art graphics and while it was hard to hear at PAX East with all the madness going on in the background, it sounds like the game will feature a fantastic soundtrack as well. 

Not A Hero was a lot of fun and I cannot wait to get my hands on the final game because this is one of those games that seem like it's going to be incredibly addictive and will pack in tons of replay value. It seems like it will offer up plenty of challenge, but a fun type of challenge and that is something that I really appreciate that game developers do.