Playstation Move: Heroes Review (PS3)

Dangerously close to becoming zeroes

If there’s one thing we can’t get right in this day and age, it’s good old fashioned platforming. The endless scavenging for shiny items with the same rabidness as a homeless magpie took up a strangely huge amount of my Playstation2 days, and could account for the weird 100% obsessive compulsiveness that resides in today’s achievement hunters and trophy whores. Unfortunately the Sony superstars of said era seem to have been dropping into retirement as of late. Insomniac are still pumping life into a raucous Ratchet & Clank, yet Jak & Daxter didn’t exactly go out with a bang, and some truly indebted fans are still waiting to see whatever happened to Sly Cooper.

Playstation Move: HeroesWhilst dealing with their own respective problems in their own respective universes, dynamic duos Ratchet and Clank, Jak and Daxter and Sly and Bentley are all immediately lifted by a vortex from their everyday adrenaline pulsing lives for a bit of competitive R&R. Upon meeting a ingenious backpack robot, a disabled tortoise and a wise cracking weasel, all teams are suspicious of each other for bringing them to this strange new world and leaving their home planets frozen in time. The heroes soon bizarrely shrug off any aspect of danger when they learn they’ve actually been brought to compete in the first ‘Inter-Universal Hero Games’ (or my by far catchier sounding ‘Convenient Crossover Contest’).

The plot isn’t exactly something to really spur you on, but remains a constant spur of slight motivation. Playstation Move:Heroes neglects the extensive adventuring of yesteryear and scales down the quests of the epic duos into Olympic style mini-games. Doing away with the average controller, you’ll have to tilt, rotate and swing mercilessly around the living room with a Playstation Move controller in order to earn golds and free fans. Strange green blobs are imprisoned by the strangely suck-up organisers and the more you free, the better the medals you obtain.

Though the competitions are designed to allow the heroes to face off with one another, you’ll always be able to pick from three plucky protagonists to enter a challenge, be it the lead characters in some or the sidekicks in others. Each event gives you different gadgets and gizmos to go for the gold, but the premise of each remains relatively the same, be it searching for fans to rescue, protecting them from waves of enemies or even guarding yourself from the nefarious baddies.

The enigmatic leads actually get the raw end of the deal, being offered some of the worst weapons in the game. In the combat heavy events, Ratchet, Jak and Sly are often just handed their signature weapons, if not some weird electric whip thingamajig. Unfortunately the controls feel so annoyingly unresponsive that some injury prone wrist jerking is required to battle through hoardes to ensure you don’t suffer some sort of cheap death. Things only get progressively worse when swapped with the aforementioned whip, with a frustrating delay on swinging and whipping which means you’ll be getting an unfair thrashing whether you like it or not.

Playstation Move:Heroes is the Sony equivalent of Wii Sports

When it comes to fighting large enemies, the sidekicks are clearly not much up to the task simply due to size, but the conventional melee weapons are swapped with various firearms. Unfortunately, this doesn’t exactly even the odds as much as it does spin them completely in your favour. Guns will either blitz shrapnel the entire length of the screen into assailants or concentrate shots into mini nuclear explosions, taking out armies. It’s an ease to practically skip through these levels, the only difficulty really comes from niggling camera controls not moving as smoothly as you’d like it to.

There are events which use the Playstation Move controller brilliantly well, but aren’t really built on in depth to really give the game its merits. Occasionally you’ll be forced to hunt down fans using immense Frisbee and bowling skills. Once the accessory has left your hand, it can still be guided with the Playstation Move controller in a tactical bid to hunt down hidden fans. Considering the previous games fall out with precise controls, it’s surprisingly easy to guide these objects around the arenas and actually turn out to be the most enjoyable challenges of the bunch, despite them practically neglecting your childhood heroes for a majority of the time.

The colour craving collectable hoarders who grew up on these franchises will be impressed by the dedication to the original series’. The fragmented arenas replicate their characters’ worlds to a tee, with some looking like they’ve been appropriately torn from their original games. The original cast of voice actors return to perform as their plushy alteregos. Even unlockable costumes reference even some of the vaguer adventures of the ensemble. It’s nice touches like these which are an unexpected joy considering the franchises have been entrusted to an outside developer, and a much appreciated surprise that enough attention has been devoted to each series.

Playstation Move: HeroesIt’s nice how this emphasis on the ultimate tag teams is also carried onto co-op play, if only for aesthetic amusement. Though pals can jump into the game to help out, it’s purely on a supervisor basis. Rather than taking on the role of the appropriate sidekick by bashing baddies and saving civilans side by side, player 2 is nothing but a cursor darting across the screen. A buddy can only help out in a slightly more advanced Super Mario Galaxy stylee where they can fire crystals to distract and kill enemies or offer the star of the show that is player 1 extra time or health. It makes the already easy games a breeze to get through, though, and is also a boring hinderance on the poor bugger dragged in to play thinking they’d have a more pro-active role.

With its simple yet repetitive content and heavily endorsed family friendliness, Playstation Move:Heroes is the Sony equivalent of Wii Sports. It just feels like it should’ve replaced that dainty demo disc that came with the Move Starter Pack as a great little tech demo for the Playstation Move controller. The repetitive games begin to grate well before the finishing line, and the daft inclusion of some very petty multi-player co-op gameplay rather than competitive bouts of mini-games makes it feel like it’s a party game severely missing the party. This could’ve been a fantastic adventure game with such a nostalgic dream team, but Playstation Move:Heroes isn’t exactly the all stars entry the trademark duos deserved.

The Good: Great reprisal of platformers gone by, Frisbee and bowling games use the motion controls well
The Bad: Mini-games are just way too repetitive, Co-op is too dull, Fighting controls are unresponsive and frustrating


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2.5 2.5 / 5

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