Introduction

Unruly Heroes is a side scroller puzzler/beat 'em up that sits squarely between Trine and Child of Light. You play as four interchangeable heroes without almost-but-not-quite unique skills, and charge through some extremely large and vertical levels, smashing your way through puzzles and hidden areas. There are also smatterings of instant death traps akin to I Wanna Be The Guy, which was a bit of a surprise, but it certainly added a bit of urgency to the otherwise laid back approach to level progression.



The art style is a particular selling point as the game features some pretty incredible backdrops and truly unique and altogether bizarre enemies and hazards. The main issue the game faces is that the side scroller genre is fairly heavily saturated at the moment, and it has some rather heavy hitters across the board that have maintained their rule over the top echelons. It's an upward climb for developers Magic Design Studios because they've got some serious competition to face. When you're borrowing so lightly from some big names, you had better be sure your implementation does the genre justice.

I also made a video review, see below:

Storyline

The storyline here is a bit generic, to be frank. A magical scroll a day keeps the evil away, and somebody broke the magic scroll into dozens of pieces. Now, the world is inundated with evil, and it's the job of your four playable characters to stomp through some areas of the world and recover these pieces of the scroll. Along the way, you're curtailed by a really irritating geisha you chase through multiple areas as you beat your way through fortresses and their respective bosses. You're aided by a goddess along the way who graciously provides you with checkpoints and shrines coded to each of your heroes, allowing you to complete levels in a puzzle-like fashion. It's a bit meh and doesn't quite have the subtle but sharp quip of Trine. Even the latest Strider game was wise enough to leave the story in the backseat and focus more on gameplay instead of throwing some vague text at you constantly. You either need a really strong story to reference throughout or just leave it at the beginning and let the quality gameplay sail you through the hours.

Gameplay

Like most side scrolling adventure games, Unruly Heroes doesn't stray too far from the general recipe. Like I mentioned earlier, it has a heavy emphasis on the four quickly interchangeable characters and their two unique traits. These are simply the ability to double jump or jump and glide, which was somewhat of a disappointment. Their uniqueness is stretched further, but not in a much more meaningful way other than "You must change to this character to do this". The monkey and sand monk can double jump, while the definitely-not-wizard and pig warrior can glide (yes pigs can fly haha, hehe; it's not funny beyond thirty seconds). In terms of it being stretched further, there are a couple of shrines throughout the game that are dedicated to one of these four characters, although in the sand monk's case, it's less a shrine and more of a gargantuan block that can be smashed with his fists. That said, the smashable blocks are more of an arbitrary addition and do not in any way provide the game with more nuanced depth than, say, objects that have to be jumped over.

The shrines allow the monkey to grow a huge ghost staff that provides a bridge, not just to walk over but also for protection from projectiles. The wizard can shoot enormous balls of light very quickly to destroy objects that are concealed, forcing you to solve it via bouncing, and the pig can inflate himself to float upward, then slowly deflate himself to gain speed and float through smaller gaps. In short, not all unique abilities are made equal, or even vaguely worth including.



Switching between characters is simple, although really quite irritating to begin with. Why? Because on an Xbox controller, switching characters is done with LB. Not LB and RB, just LB. Instead, the developers thought the dodge key should be configured to RB. So for the first hour or two, you will try to dodge an attack and switch characters, or try to switch characters and instead dodge and fall to your death. Not ideal bindings. Each character has a unique move set and is vaguely suited to certain types of combat, although to be blunt, each functions just as well as the others. I stuck with the wizard because the long range attack was suitably large, and the aerial AOE attack had a solid hit box. Most of the time, I only switched characters when forced to do a puzzle, and the only time I used the sand monk was when there was a smashable block of rock or I died with another character.

Which is all very frustrating because the characters looks incredibly cool, and their fight moves are all unique and AWESOME. Unfortunately, the urgency to switch between them is nonexistent, so you only ever end up switching between them when you want to show them off to yourself or are forced to. Death is not permanent, lending this game a more casual look. If a character dies, you can switch to another, and after about ten seconds, a soul bubble will appear for you to pop, which brings that dead hero back to life.



Levels are utterly enormous and take a surprisingly long time to complete. They have a fair amount of puzzles spotted about here and there, but to be blunt, they're exceedingly simply. Whether this was intentionally designed to be a casual affair or whether the creativity involved in crafting these puzzles was lacking, I don't know. Overall, it felt exceedingly casual, although in random instances, there were parts where you'd instantly die from a scripted hazard if your reactions weren't fast enough. So overall, I'm not entirely sure what this game intends to be. The bosses, however, are quite wonderful. They are something very special, beautifully animated, and the fight mechanics are quite beautifully choreographed. The general art of the game is really what makes it a visual wonder as everything looks like it was hand drawn and toiled over for hours on end until it looked the part.

In terms of rewards, achievement, and progression, there isn't a whole lot to look forward to. There's no point-scoring system, although you can get a bronze, silver, or gold award trophy depending on how many deaths you had and how long you took to complete a level. You also collect coins, although their sole purpose is to allow you to unlock character skins and absolutely nothing else. There are no currencies aside from the main story scroll pieces, and no real purpose beyond that. It's a gorgeous game, but the only wonder lies in its looks because all the gameplay and systems involved are either light on flesh or just ham-fisted in to stretch out the played hours count.