Heavy Bullets is an indie FPS with a lot of aesthetic style but not much substance after the first few levels of fun.
Story
The only blurb of story I got from this game is this beginning screen. You’re a Janitor at the Highrise Hunting Grounds when the security system fails. You are tasked to wrest it back into control, so good luck.
That was the only form of story I gathered. Heavy Bullets is very much like an arcade game where you’re supposed to just jump into it and have at it, and that’s fine. Critical failures aren’t the most unique concept I guess, a game that comes to mind is Half-Life, but it’s a simple enough reason for running around and shooting monsters.
Gameplay
The gameplay is very basic. Point and shoot at enemies, get coins, get upgrades. They mix it up by having bullets act like arrows so you can pick them up after shooting. You start with six, though you can buy more from the vending machines about, and sometimes you’ll stumble upon a random cache of them as well. The only reason to have more is for those tense moments when you keep missing your shots and you can’t go pick them back up.
Upgrades in the game are also pretty run-of-the-mill. You can get more inventory space, increase your health, stuff like that. There are also ATMs to bank your money for your next life, or take out insurance so you’ll get some money after you die. Health stations are around as well to get your life back up, which you have very little of.
The game has a decent difficulty to it. The few bullets you have need to be used at the right times, and you won’t get much from spamming in this game. Your tiny health bar can be depleted extremely fast as well, so you need to be on the top of your game to get through all the levels, which I never could do.
The enemies look different but mostly act the same. There are creeps that run at you, and creeps that shoot at you. Some block their faces to defend from your bullets, some are flying, but they mainly do the same things. It’s not the most advanced AI, but at least there are some differences in the enemies.
The game is very raw with its gameplay. It’s a pure FPS game that knows what it wants to do and does it. It does, however, suffer from a lack of uniqueness and variety, because it doesn’t try to do anything too groundbreaking within the levels. There are great building blocks, and it controls really nicely, but the repetitiveness of the levels doesn’t do it justice.
Graphics and Sound
The graphics, obviously, are very stylized. I didn’t like it in the beginning, but playing it for awhile it made an atmosphere for the game that I enjoyed. I’m sure if you looked at this for long enough periods you would eventually get a headache, but I didn’t play long enough for that to happen.
Heavy bullets tauts its rouge-like randomly generated level design. For example the beginning story blurb says different things for each new game. However, since a lot of rooms usually look the same anyway, it’s pretty hard to see any difference in a lot of the generated levels.
The sounds and music are nice, though. I like chiptunes, so the music played from the vending machines are nice and ambient. The sound effects are good as well, and the music, while not too memorable, sounds perfect for this particular game.
Conclusion
Heavy Bullets has great fundamentals, but it’s lacking in variety and things to make it more interesting. The randomly generated maps don’t seem to be too different, and the game is a bit boring after awhile. If you’re specifically looking for a good barebones FPS with a few different features than its competitors, you’ll probably like this more than I. I did enjoy what I played of it, but it didn’t keep me around for long without much to separate it from other, more in-depth titles.
