Now Playing: Not A Hero (2015)

A Devolver Digital game with shooting, pixel graphics, and a nice chiptune soundtrack? What could go wrong? Shifty controls and outright cheating, that’s what. The game starts out decently, with fast paced shooting that feels a little like a side scrolling Hotline Miami, though a little more forgiving. There are multiple characters to be unlocked, though they all seem pretty useless once you unlock the fast running shotgun guy whose name I already forget.

There are comedic briefings between each mission that are amusing at first, but then get a bit grating after the first few times, when you just want to see your mission objectives, but are just given several minutes of jokes and nonsense that scrolls by way too slowly.

The biggest problem is that the button for the slide dash move is the same button used to take cover. Tap X to take cover, hold X to slide…except a lot of the time, even when you just tap X, you still end up sliding. When you are trying to take cover from a guy shooting a hail of bullets at you, but instead you slide directly into him, well…you can see how that might be a problem. A bit more than halfway through the game, the difficulty takes a huge, sudden leap too. It goes from walk in the park to Super Meat Boy type, one single wrong twitch and you’re dead, difficult. This suddenly turns that minor annoyance of a control issue into maddening mission failure after mission failure. I was trying to push through anyway, despite it becoming frustratingly un-fun to try to beat the missions with all the challenge objectives too, but then this happened in a ridiculously tough and strict secret challenge level:

I don’t even know how many times I had to try this level just to get this done, 50 times at least, and then it fucks me over like that? You can very clearly see that I got to the exit before the time ran out, but then the timer kept fucking clicking down anyway. No thanks, buddy. Quit and deleted the game before I ended up breaking another controller. Luckily, it was a free game this month, so all I lost was a few hours of my time, though I regret even that.