How much time must a reviewer put into a game before they can review it? How far must a reviewer get before their review can count as valid? I made it to the final boss of Hit Zero: Chronos and spent the past 2 hours on it. I nearly quit before then when I spent a good 45 minutes in a previous boss because it kept bugging out. I can't even tell if the bovine excrement that is happening is an intended part of the fight or just the game breaking as there's a load of weird meta stuff going on with the game so I don't know if the final boss removing the core mechanic of the game being able to slow down time is intended or just yet another in a long line of issues in the game. Oh but you know what I beat it, you know what else? It wasn't worth the effort.
Title: Hit Zero: Chronos
Price: £0.79 / $0.99 on Steam
Review Bit:
Hit Zero's unique selling point is if you're not moving the enemies move in slow motion and you fire faster. So extremely indie 2D indie Superhot except quite hugely inconsistent as building up momentum to slide along the floor counts as moving but running and diving through the air doesn't as long as you let go of a direction button. You can also hook onto things to swing about supposedly but in practice it just pulls you toward the surface in question and also counts as moving so enjoy being shot a lot. Even just hanging still from the hook apparently counts as movement. Spiderman this swinging mechanics definitely isn't. The core gameplay consists mostly of shooting enemies only for them to explode into showers of pixely red blood that stains the levels in a somewhat over the top display of a bit of the old ultraviolence.
There's also a story, I think, I'm not entirely sure if it was deliberate or just a number of random ideas thrown together to make a sequence. So this is the story (very little of this is outright told to you other than on hints on the start screen and my own interpretation) after the assassination of the President World 25 is considered lost and the Pandora protocol enacted which cause a merger with other dimensions to allow a version of the president to be alive again, however having failed to protect the president and being blamed for his death you're thrown into Guantanamo Bay prison. After escaping you end up stealing a plane to try and reach the president. On route you're intercepted by a group of paramilitary contractors who down your plane and attempt to kill you. After surviving the attack you find the base location for those who attacked you and decide to take the fight to them. Whilst fighting through the base you end up having to fight off a strange giant monster robot thing. You proceed to escape through a church realising that the paramilitary group are actually cultists trying to bring to life the machine god and have already constructed what they hope to be a body for said god. In an attempt to stop the cult you locate the president and rescue him from their clutches. On the way to Washington however the presidential train is attacked by the cult with the aid of aliens that happen to have ended up on earth as a result of the Pandora protocol ripping a hole through the dimensional fabric of the universe. You escape with the President but the cult takes control of the President train and the body the cult had hoped to use to bring into being their machine god which was being transported as part of the presidents train to be researched further. The President reveals that he can't stop things now but gives you intelligence as to the location of the cults main headquarters. However you arrive too late as the cult have committed ritualistic suicide finally bringing to life the machine god whom you must fight and kill to save the world. The entire story as such is framed as being a film with random jumps in location filled with intermission segments or segments implied to be where different films have got mixed up.
The overall problem with the game is it feels somewhat unpolished even after a couple of patches as I mentioned certain actions count as moving while others don't and personally I think the game would have just done better with a toggle button to turn slow-mo on and off with a gauge and limited amount before having to stop and let it recharge rather than relying on the game to determine if what you're doing counts as moving or not. On the bike chase sequence in particular the unpolished nature shines through as later in the level you have to take down trucks attacking you which explode and are sent flying, the problem is they can fly and land on you or pull you off the bike at which point you basically instantly die. With the trucks you're pretty much at the mercy of the games physics system and hoping you can blow up the biker stuck to the truck and have it blast away from landing on you and not end up still hitting you. The only level in the game that feels mechanically solid for the most part it a place level were you're trying to evade missiles.
The multiple boss fights in the game while at least somewhat unique in design all feel somewhat overly long and drawn out with the bosses having large health pools which also isn't helped when the bosses in most cases can kill you in 1 hit. The spider boss in particular is pretty broken and due to the 1 hit kills and the fact it kept glitching out and getting stuck at the back of the screen I had to cheese it an bit. The big kick in the groin the game gives though is when you reach the final boss.
The final boss of the game is the machine god powered by the souls of the dead. Except in Hit Zero in a move that feels somewhat out of Metal Gear Solid 3's the Sorrow that also includes all the people you've killed throughout the game. Now while Metal Gear Solid 3 plays with this in a somewhat clever way in Hit Zero it just means a lot more HP for the final boss for engaging the its core mechanic of actually shooting people and enjoying the over the top display while in Metal Gear Solid 3 being a stealth game killing people isn't a core mechanics. So you then have to go back through the games levels trying to complete them without killing people as much as possible or in my case fight a boss with 25,000 hp where each shot hitting its weak point doing a whole 10 damage. The final boss fight is made harder because while it can 1 hit kill you it can also just damage you. Where does it tell you or hint about this HP mechanics you might ask? Well it's a random message that can appear on the title screen so if you've been powering through in 1 go you might not even have seen it.
Another problem being there's a glitch (or possibly intended mechanics) where if you get hit and survive your slow-mo abilities stop working entirely which makes the final boss near impossible to fight especially in the bosses 2nd stage where he starts firing homing missile at you that you have to use slow-mo to shoot down. Even after repeating levels and getting the final bosses health down to a more modest 11,500 it still too hours for retrying to beat it and about 15 minutes and fairly intense concentration per attempt before I finally beat it. The worst part is after beating the final boss I didn't feel any sense of accomplishment like I did in in beating Furi , I just felt like I'd pushed through a wall of grinding where banging my head against it enough for long enough meant I'd eventually do it.
Verdict:
A somewhat nonsensical storyline that is at least imaginative but poorly actually told to the player combined with some seemingly buggy mechanics in a game which then punishes you for engaging in one of its main core mechanics. The game's final kick in the groin feels like a rather annoying attempt (as seen by some recent snobby directors) to screw with the audience and try to present it as "subverting expectations" but doing so without laying down the work or build up to make the subversion seem worthwhile or to have been well planned and foreshadowed.
I put in near 7 hours on the game 45 minutes of which were on the spider boss before I decided to cheese it and I'd say another 2 were on the final boss and repeating levels to reduce the final boss's health. While I can respect the diversity in enemies and work that's gone into styling them the games mechanics seem too unpolished and for what would have been a 2-3 hour game where I wasn't dying on bosses or dealing with a some trial and error stuff, without the roadblocks I encountered the buggy gameplay detracts heavily from the score here as it detracts so heavily from the 2-3 hours of what I'd call decent content on offer. An overhaul of the mechanics and a fixing of some of the issues such as the bike level or the random nature of the "Donkey Kong" esc level could see this climbing up at least a point more or even 2 for me.
The ending kick in the groin definitely holds it back from being given a higher score too and feels like there needs to be some better foreshadowing about killing enemies making it more powerful or a rework to make it so if I don't know, you haven't found and destroyed some hidden pods then the boss has more health or something. To truly reach the higher scores along with the changes I'd say there needs to be more and an actual emphasis on the story rather than it needing to be somewhat interpreted and feeling somewhat random.
The game ultimately feels like trying to watch a Neil Breen movie, big concepts but not very good at doing much with them or detailing them to the audience and not being very technically competent in the production. Hit Zero: Chronos feels big on ambition but unfortunately poor in execution.
Two other minor things I think are kind of issues, the blur effect during slow-mo really does get unpleasant to look at after a while specially as it's mostly round the edges of the screen and I'm not exactly sold on the soundtrack choices either.
Composite Score:
Overall Score:
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| Now that's a set of names you don't expect to see together as having inspired a game |
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