Hero Express

My first thought loading Hero Express was that someone had distilled Hill Climb Racing down to its core loop, dressed it in pixel art, and shipped it on PC for pocket change. That instinct is basically correct, and whether that excites or bores you tells you everything you need to know about fit. You play a delivery driver tasked with ferrying tools to an absent-minded superhero who, somehow, forgot his gear before heading into battle against a rotating cast of kaiju. The premise is thin window dressing, but it sets up eleven distinct levels spread across a world map that is open from the start, each paired with its own vehicle and a different set of terrain hazards. The core mechanic borrows straight from the Excitebike playbook: tilt left or right mid-air to keep your vehicle upright on landing, manage momentum on steep inclines, and collect fuel cans to avoid the instant-death explosion that kicks you back to the start of the level. Four vehicle stats (engine power, tyre grip, stability, and traction) are upgraded using coins collected per run, and that progression loop is where the game lives or dies depending on your tolerance. When the loop clicks, particularly early on when each upgrade visibly extends your reach up a hill you have been staring at for twenty minutes, the "one more run" pull is genuinely strong. The physics feel consistent and bug-free; you can learn how each vehicle interacts with the terrain and build real spatial memory of a track's layout. The honest downside is that the upgrade wall is doing most of the heavy lifting where skill should be. Several sections are impassable until your stats hit a threshold, meaning you will rerun the first half of a level many times through no fault of your own driving. Once fully upgraded, hard mode (which simply strips fuel cans from the track) is noticeably less brutal than it sounds, because your vehicle is already maxed out. The sixteen listed hazard types sound varied on paper, but reviewers across the board flagged that later levels feel like reskins of earlier ones, and the music loop gets tiresome fast enough that muting it and playing your own soundtrack is the practical choice. There are two power-ups (a jump and a windscreen cleaner) but neither adds meaningful decision-making; they are utility buttons rather than build choices. From a strategy-depth perspective, this is about as shallow as sims get. There are no branching upgrade paths, no meta-progression carries between level attempts beyond the coins you bank, and no mod ecosystem to speak of. What it does offer is a clean, well-built arcade experience that respects the pick-up-and-play format. All eleven levels are unlocked from day one, so you are never forced down a linear path. Estimated play time sits around five to six hours for a normal-mode run-through, roughly doubling if you chase hard mode on every track, though grinding players have reported sinking considerably more time into stubborn levels. For newcomers to 2D physics drivers, the difficulty curve is gentle enough that casual players and genre veterans can both find a rhythm. If you want Trials Fusion with build depth and a modded campaign, keep walking. If you want a no-fuss, sub-five-dollar arcade distraction that handles well, looks decent in pixel art, and scratches a very specific "just one more go" itch for an evening or two, Hero Express delivers exactly what it advertises.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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