Herodes is set in the futuristic year of 2197 where humanity has never been closer to immortality as there’s no disease or virus that can’t be cured or defeated. But as with anything, good things come to and as a new stronger, unstoppable threat menacing humanity as surfaced. By using cutting-edge technology, players will find themselves shrunk and flying through through a human in order to defeat a mysterious virus.
Herodes is a 2D horizontal shmup, shoot’em up, where players need to shoot their way through each level while dodging enemies and their projectiles on their way to the boss. As with any shmup, players’ arsenal includes a default machinegun, a bomb; and you can also get power ups for additional firepower. And your bomb can be used to help clear out the screen (and I use the word clear out lightly, more on that later).
Instead of having a fix amount of bombs, it works with a meter. Meaning once you use it, your meter empties and slowly fills up allowing you to reuse it once ready. Additionally, unlike other shmups, this game has a health bar giving players a chance to survive the onslaught, but when getting the damage is pretty high; sometimes so much so, you won’t even realized you lost a life. Boss fights, as expected, are fun and challenging; definitely one of the better aspects of the game.
The game looks fine for what it is. There’s a limited enemy variety, bosses look great and menacing. The game was also designed so that enemies and projectiles aren’t lost in the background. The overall tone of the visuals is quite grim/dark looking, but given we’re in a human body, it’s expected. Also don’t expect a lot in terms of visual variety. The soundtrack is quite generic and forgettable. It does match the game’s slow moving paced.
Oh boy. So the first issue here is that the game moves slowly compared to other shmups; it lacks that fast paced reaction time to flashily dodge enemies. Also, smaller enemies take quite a bit of bullets to die which means that sometimes you’re better off just dodging everything. Which brings me to the bomb; it feels utterly useless. In most games, a bomb will kill everything on screen whereas in Herodes, the bomb only causes damage to enemies, rarely killing any of them. And for whatever, everything slows down when using a bomb. At first, I thought this was a glitch, but apparently it’s the desired behavior.
As a fan of the shmup genre as a whole, I’m happy that there’s a new game players can experience in the genre, unfortunately, this isn’t the best one. The game has a handful of nuisance; whether it be the questionable health system, utterly useless bombs or slow/slugging movements, this one is hard to recommend. Long time fans of the genre can dismiss it and look elsewhere, but given the slower movement of this one, this can be a decent game for those looking to dab in the genre.
Overall
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CX Score - 50%50%
Summary
Pros
- Interesting premise/li>
- Challenging boss battles
Cons
- Bombs are useless
- Slow down when using bombs
- Health system feels useless
Hey there, how’s it going? I’m the game developer, and I might have failed to explain some things throughout the game, so that the end player could understand, but I’ll leave here some clarifications that may or may not change your viewpoint on some negative aspects of the game.
1 – The life system really wasn’t very good, I need to improve it and I totally agree with you on that.
2 – About the game’s action speed, it was intentional, so I really wanted to make it slower as it’s a different premise, a game inside the human body, I thought it would be better this way, not so frantic.
3 – Now about the bomb, I think I failed to explain exactly its use, the bomb with the charge bar is not for damage, but to slow everything down, so that you have action time during the game. When you defeat the bosses, you acquire their powers, like Megaman, then you can switch using the L or R and use with the same button that uses the bomb, because it is selected, there’s laser, a Waveshock and even a protective shield, this depends on which boss you defeated. It’s also possible that you collect genomes and buy upgrades for the ship, like damage, more life and speed. Take a look later.
Thanks for the review <3