Gravity Heroes Review

Gravity Heroes is a 2D action platformer/shooter with a twist. In order to be able to kill everything on screen, you’ll need to use your gravitional pull, a.k.a. the Gravity Shifter, in order to reach different platforms in the arena. Instead of being a traditional action game, you’re going through wave after wave of enemies to kill in a single arena.

Given you cannot shoot in any other directions other than the one you’re facing, jumping around and enabling the gravity mechanic will allow you to reach the ceiling and walls in order to kill enemies that spawn there. It does become a bit trickier when trying to destroy flying enemies that move everywhere on the arena.

When starting the game, you can choose from four different playable characters (Abel, El Tostador, Nala and Magnus); which play similarly. And as you can imagine, you can play up to four players at once both locally and online. While you can do the main “campaign” mode with 3 friends, there’s also additional game modes such as Versus mode and Survival.

Throughout your survival, a gentle robot will come in and drop power ups to aid you on your struggles. You’ll be able to pick up additional weaponry such as uzi, shotgun, grenades, armor and even some items that will regenerate your health. The ammo for the weapons is finite, so make you shots count.

The game does look great in all of its pixelated glory; it’s highly colorful with each level having its own theme, however on a single screen arena, it’s a bit limiting in terms of variety in level design. Unlike most action platformers, given the gravity mechanics, are more of an hindrance than beneficial. The soundtrack is an interesting chiptune score, albeit a forgettable one.

The main issue here is that this game is a one trick pony. While unique at first, the Gravity Shifter mechanic becomes old after a while and not being able to shoot in any other direction, especially when there’s flying enemies, is irritating in the long run because you feel restrained; those flying enemies are fast little buggers so jumping from surface to surface trying to get an aim on them is frustrating.

Gravity Heroes is an interesting 2D action platformer with its gravity mechanics that has players figuratively flying around the area; it’s even more chaos with up to four players. It also make boss battles more fun than just shooting and jumping. However, the Gravity Shifter gets old fast; unless you play in short bursts. It has its charm, but don’t expect it to grab your attention for long gaming sessions.