Bunch of Heroes

I want to root for Bunch of Heroes. It arrived in 2011 wearing a bright, cartoonish art style and a goofy premise - aliens invade Earth, summon a zombie army, and a wildly mismatched squad of four heroes shows up to ruin everyone's day. That pitch has genuine charm, and for a brief window in a four-player session it almost delivers on it. Then reality sets in. The game is a top-down, twin-stick-style shooter built around four playable characters: El Comandante, a cigar-hurling Cuban revolutionary; Jared Joe, a muscle-bound American jock with a focused energy blast; Captain Smith, a British pilot who calls in bomb runs; and Agent Liu, a martial-arts spy who sets enemies on fire. Each character has a unique ultimate attack charged by collecting energy drops from fallen enemies, and the weapon roster spans uzis, flamethrowers, rail guns, gravity bombs, tesla guns, and deployable turrets. On paper that sounds varied enough to stay interesting. In practice, the characters feel nearly identical in moment-to-moment play - different animations, same function - and the ammo economy is stingy enough that you will spend most of your time with the default pea-shooter while waiting for a reload to finish. The structure is three campaigns, each with three chapters, all unlocked from the start so you can jump around freely. Missions chain together small objectives: clear a zone of enemies, destroy a set of devices, protect scattered NPCs (including, repeatedly, cheerleaders), defend an area. That format is not inherently bad, but here the objectives repeat with very little variation from mission to mission, and the difficulty scales poorly when the player count drops below four. Enemy density does not adjust, there are no checkpoints, and each player gets three lives per chapter - run out and you watch from the sidelines. For a game whose whole identity is co-op camaraderie, that spectator purgatory stings. The cartoon visuals hold up reasonably well for the era, and the funky rock soundtrack has an unpretentious energy that suits the tone. There is a genuine flash of joy when zombie chickens swarm out of a barn and your whole squad erupts in panicked crossfire. Those moments exist. They are just surrounded by repetitive objective grinding, erratic online netcode, and persistent minor bugs that early reviewers flagged and that time has not smoothed out. The online lobby situation has only worsened since launch - finding a stranger-filled public session is largely a lost cause in 2025, which makes the game entirely dependent on whether you can personally gather three friends with the patience to get it running. If you have that group, and you are willing to treat it as a throwback curiosity from a studio that has since grown considerably, there is a compact, unpretentious afternoon in here. If even one of those conditions wavers, the cracks are too wide to ignore.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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