Flat Heroes

A-Cup in Dimension but A+ in Execution

Simple yet deep gameplay. Easy to pick up but hard to master. Couch co-op multiplayer for wacky fun. This is how you advertise the generic party/arcade game from an amateur developer. Perpetually on sale for 90% off, these games form the bargain bin of the eShop. Even if they do deliver on the three features, these games lack the polish or extra features to make them noteworthy. They’re plain hot dogs in a world of brats.  Theoretically, a hot dog only needs ketchup and buns to be serviceable, but no one wants your lazy wiener unless it sells for under 25¢.

Flat Heroes ticks all of the checkboxes for your generic indie game but makes them true selling points instead of buzzwords. You must simply keep your square alive, yet doing so requires Matrix-level gymnastics. New players can pick up the controls within minutes of playing, yet weaving your character through the projectile hell requires dexterity, quick reaction times, and a level of strategy. On top of this, almost every mode in Flat Heroes can be played with up to four players for wacky local multiplayer fun. Flat Heroes shows what all indie games could be if other developers strived for more than the dirt floor bare minimum.

What is it?

With its lack of heroics, Flat Heroes would be more appropriately titled, “Agile Square Avoid Game.” As a basic square, your heroics amount to little more than running away and surviving an onslaught of attacks, from simple bullets to missiles to homing arrows to rotating lasers. Your character can roll on the ground just fine, but its true maneuverability comes from being in the air. You can jump, cling to walls, wall-jump, and suspend yourself in place or dash mid-air. Additionally, you have a pulse attack which either breaks through projectiles or propels them away from you, and that’s the closest you’ll get to Superman.

The game’s campaign features ten worlds, each with fifteen levels, including a boss stage. Each level throws a set of enemies at you, and as long as you or a teammate survives until the end, you’ll progress to the next level. If you all die, you reform at the start and retry immediately. The bosses, conversely, typically require the magical three hits to fall in battle. Beating bosses unlock the next world and occasionally a world in “Hero Mode” which features harder versions of the levels in the main campaign.

Survival and Versus modes provide more of an arcade experience outside of the campaign. In the Survival stages, you must simply live as long as possible, and if you play as a team, you can revive exploded allies. Except for the Daily map, each stage follows a predetermined pattern of waves, so memorization and practice will help you ascend the online leaderboards. In Versus, it’s an all-out bloodbath as you play variants of King of the Hill, Death Match, Keep Away, and Get to That One Thing First.

What’s good?

1. With its tight controls, you’ll feel like the coolest parkouring square on the X- and Y-axes. Enemies will overwhelm the screen quickly, but your agility allows you to duck and dodge with precision. With the B button controlling both jump and dash, you don’t need to memorize complex button sequences to revel in the adrenaline-soaked action in front of you.
2. Flat Heroes delivers a smooth difficulty curve. Each world in the campaign adjusts you to new enemies without holding your hand, and respawning takes only a second, allowing you to practice particularly hard stages without wasting time on load screens or elaborate death sequences. Survival levels follow a similar format, so newcomers can learn the basics in the early stages and still support you in achieving the high scores, even within their first attempt.  For veterans of precision platforming, the Hero Mode campaign amps up the difficulty considerably, especially if you’re playing alone.
3. Whether you’re alone or with three others, Flat Heroes provides a good deal of content. Altogether, you have 300 campaign levels, seven endless survival stages (including the ever-changing Daily level), and four multiplayer modes. The game’s longevity mostly comes from its survival leaderboards, but with its pick-up-and-play nature, Flat Heroes capitalizes on the Switch’s gimmick of playing a game anywhere, anytime, with anyone.

What’s bad?

1. The pulse mechanic can feel imprecise and ineffective. You can often dodge projectiles instead of shielding, but certain enemies will hound you until you blow them up. The pulse seems to have a split-second delay before it activates, so it feels just unintuitive enough that you’ll find yourself hitting the pulse too late too often, resulting in your death. Against some of the final bosses, the pulse mechanic is supposed to shine but more comes off as a throbbing headache.
2. The music and visuals feel more simplistic than minimalistic. Neither detract from the gameplay, and in the case of the soundtrack, you might not notice it at all. The clean art design allows you to admire the small visual flairs when enemies die or your particles scatter everywhere, but stages can feel barren and static, especially after replaying a specific level multiple times.
3. The Versus multiplayer is the black sheep of the modes, better left ignored and to develop attachment issues. Although each mode presents a different goal, all of them devolve into a chaotic frenzy to explode everyone else. With no stage select, AI difficulty settings, or gameplay options, multiplayer feels like a vestigial organ kept for sentimental reasons. If Flat Heroes adapted its Survival mode into a last-man-standing contest, its competitive multiplayer would actually be attractive.

What’s the verdict?

Anyone can make a great idea. For instance, toilets should flush automatically when they detect a possible clog. It’s a fantastic idea. However, it takes a creative and hard-working person (or group of people) to translate that idea into a great product. Whereas other small-time studios present slapdash concepts, Parallel Circles fleshed out Flat Heroes. They took a simple concept and married it with precise controls, fluid gameplay, and a clean presentation. This polygamous relationship results in an engrossing experience with depth and variety to entice the single-player score chaser and the multiplayer partiers.  Even if you abhor the platforming genre, this one may sway you.

Arbitrary Statistics:

• Score:  8.5
• Time Played:  Over 5 hours
• Number of Players:  1-4
• Games Like It on Switch:  N++, Super Meat Boy