88 Heroes is an action platformer developed by Bitmap Bureau and published by Rising Star Games. It’s a callback title to 16-bit era platformers with all the expected trappings of tricky jumping, floor spikes, moving lasers and spinning chains of death. For all intents and purposes it probably plays exactly how you think it would play at first glance. That is, until the character on screen is changed completely and the joke becomes clear. Every time you die or finish a level, you’re given a completely different character to play as. 88 Heroes, 88 different ways to play the game.
This is a game about the joy and humour of discovery and surprise. Every character has their own look and abilities, handy or otherwise, that change the way you approach each level. They have guns, swords, explosives; some can fly and some can barely even jump. One of the heroes is a giant hamster in a ball that crushes enemies by rolling over them. A few of them are absolutely useless but, hey, they won’t be hanging around for long. They’re all goofy and funny and brilliantly rendered in pixel form. About half of them are named with a pun and a good lot of them are sly references to cultural figures and characters from other titles.
Is there a story here? None insofar as an opportunity to make a few jokes. As you might guess after looking at the store page, the game is themed around the number 88. On top of their being 88 characters you can play, there are 88 levels to get through, with 88 seconds given to complete each level and 88 minutes to complete them all in total. In the game’s universe the year is 1988, it’s the 8th of August and the game starts at what other time but 8:08. The villain is called Dr H8, and he’s demanding 88 octillion dollars or his 88 nuclear missiles will blow the world to smithereens. To my mild disappointment, and I had to double check with design director Mike Tucker on this, he isn’t an octopus; he’s an alien. He does have 8 fingers though, and there is a character called The Great Blocktopus who is, of course, an octopus magician who can summon blocks. It’s all ridiculous, which is sort of the point.
You might be able to see every character in the game in your first hour of playing but 88 Heroes is a title that encourages you to go back and spend more time with each of it’s eclectic cast. Death is fast and sort of permanent, meaning your first encounter with a character might only last a few seconds. You’ll probably laugh at whatever gimmick each new character presents, read their bio – something that shows up at the entrance to each level, walk forward a few paces and die immediately. Till next time, then, unless you collect enough coins to pull them back into the roster. Enough coins, by the way, is 88 coins. It’s unlikely you’ll even be able to get through the game on your first playthrough, I ran completely out of heroes twice but, um. Well I’m sort of terrible at games.
Past that, trying to get through the game with as few deaths as possible is the ultimate sell. Every time you get through a level, your active character is shuffled to the back of the group, meaning that to really do well you need an understanding of every character you’re presented with. There are a couple of other modes which are repackaged versions of the main game. One allows you to pick a team of 8 heroes, and attempt it with a more predictable roster, the other allows you to pick just one. I could see the speedrunning community picking up on that and it’s possible this allows for 88 different variations of challenge. Like the hero with a jetpack? Stick with him then.
The art direction is pretty great in general. I think the backgrounds are a little plain but that might be a necessary conceit to prevent such a variety of different character designs from getting lost in visual muddle. This criticism could land on level design too as Bitmap Bureau have had to do the incredible job of ensuring such a diversity of abilities and movement controls can navigate to the end of each level. This means that complexity has to be somewhat restricted and while the game certainly gets more difficult the further in you go, occasionally the levels just don’t hit. When I first played the game, I had to double check that the levels weren’t procedurally generated which is incredible considering how bespoke they actually are. Keeping the levels malleable enough for each character has created a strange feel to the design. It’s an understandable handicap, though, and it doesn’t stop the game from being challenging in the same way that it’s 16-bit forbears were. The design is best when it presents multiple routes through a level that require different abilities to take. Early on getting a character that can fly seems like a cheat but later levels tend to account for everyone. Apart from Batbot, though. Batbot is broken.
88 Heroes is out today for digital download on PS4, Xbox One and Steam for £11.99 and a boxed version of the game is even available for PS4 on Amazon for £19.99. For that price I think it’s worth the early few hours of discovering each new hero alone. The fact that there’s a proper game behind the scenes? Well that’s just icing on the cake.