Herodes Review

If you’re going to pick a movie to steal from, you could do a lot worse than Innerspace. Yep, this isn’t your traditional shoot ’em up foray into space: this is a run through the human body. You’re Dennis Quaid, flying through the body of Martin Short, clearing out toxins with a machine gun. 

Well, not quite, but close enough that we watched Innerspace as soon as we were done with Herodes. We’ll take any excuse. But in story terms, Herode’s got slightly more ambition than re-telling the eighties classic. 

It’s 2197, and Earth has pretty much eradicated disease. People are living for centuries (the pension infrastructure must have thrown a wobbly). But like another 20th Century classic, Demolition Man, the world has got complacent with so much peace and healthiness. A new microbe has appeared in a human body which, if left alone, could become a plague that wipes out humanity. No drugs can touch it, so humans have resorted to a tiny man and his bio-ship. That’s you, if you hadn’t guessed. And it’s not clear which orifice has been chosen as your entrance.

You’ve got to have respect for a shooter whose levels are named ‘Kidney’, ‘Lungs’ and ‘Brain’. Herodes has you entering critical organs to find the corruption and blast it away. The liver is full of fat cells that cling to your ship and drag you down. The brain has a nasty tick-like parasite that has burrowed into it. Each level is gruesomely organic, and it’s refreshing to sidestep the usual mechs and flying fortresses. 

That’s if you can get to them. Herodes has the toughest tutorial in living memory. Honestly, we got curious and checked TrueAchievements to see how many people had finished it, and the number is a lowly 42%. It’s an indication of how difficult the rest of Herodes is (the answer is ‘incredibly’) that the tutorial handed our asses to us four or five times before – finally – we were able to defeat it. Be prepared: Herodes is not for casual shoot ’em up fans. 

Outside of this unforgiving difficulty, Herodes made a good opening impression on us. That’s mainly because the player’s ship has a lot going on. You can fire forwards and fire backwards with a tap of the RT button. There’s a Rush bar that allows you to surge from one end of the screen to the other, and it replenishes fast enough that you can be pretty free with it. A special attack also replenishes over time, allowing you to use one of many abilities that you unlock over the game. The starting one is a Smart Bomb which slows everything to a crawl, and it’s as abusable as it sounds. Finally, there are power-ups that dish out shields, satellite ships and increased attacks. We couldn’t tell you the rules of when and where they appear (Herodes is slightly too abstract in this way), but grabbing them feels great. 

But as we bounced from body part to body part, failing on almost every attempt, we started to realise something was up. Herodes wasn’t as sophisticated as we first thought. It was the opposite. Rather than being a big-brain shooter, it kept slipping down towards the colon. 

Something is wrong with the enemy pacing in Herodes. Waves appear, you wipe them out, and then there’s an interminable wait until the next one. It’s as if a loading bar appears between waves and Herodes is chugging along, downloading the next. It makes for a very artificial stop-start experience, as attacks never overlap and enemy waves are completely discrete. You never have to worry that you’re clearing out enemies too slowly, as the next enemy is waiting patiently in line with an Argos ticket in its hands. 

If the waves were interesting, we’d be more forgiving. But it’s a conveyor belt of the same enemies. The next wave is identical to a past wave, but with one more enemy. And those are the exciting waves: some are exactly the same as one before. Again, if the levels were short, this might have been okay. But they are protracted affairs with long waits between waves, so we yawned and twiddled our thumbs. 

If we drew a difficulty curve of each level, it would look like a right angle. The basic enemies in Herodes are nothing special. You can wipe them out with some well-timed rushes and smart bombs, emerging with the full three lives to take on a boss. That’s the flat gradient of the right-angle. But reach a boss and the difficulty curve goes stratospheric. Did Herodes need to be this rock-hard?

The difficulty comes from multiple channels. It’s bullet hell of course, so you’re trying to find gaps. The Rush move becomes a liability with the bosses, as they aren’t reduced to atoms like the basic enemies are. It will propel you into the boss, leaving you exposed to multiple hits. Finally, there are few if any invulnerability frames after getting hit. We’ve been reduced from three lives to one by a single attack, simply because we got subsumed by it. You can get completely undone by one bad choice. 

It is, if we’re being honest, slightly too hard. There are no options to increase lives or continues, and there are few options to change the difficulty. You’re left to complete each level with the three lives you have been given. Should you fail, you’re not returning to a checkpoint: you are starting the level from the very start. Remember what we said about those levels being too long, with large gaps of nothingness? That becomes a problem when you’re dying regularly and forced to restart from the beginning. 

Herodes has some charm that we shouldn’t ignore. While the enemies are brutalistic in their blandness, the levels all make you feel like you are travelling through an undulating organ. It’s horrible and brilliant. Bosses are a mixed bag – some are surprisingly small, and we often mistook them for mini-bosses – but they’re also grotesque, as it felt like we were tussling with cancerous cells. Their attacks are varied and cleverly designed. We just didn’t see all of them as the difficulty spikes would impale us.

Ultimately, Herodes didn’t stick. We felt like we were being regularly flushed out of its system. The difficulty was one thing, but the erratic pacing and identikit enemy waves were too much. We find it hard to bounce off a shoot ’em up – give us power-ups and hulking bosses and we’re anyone’s – but bounce off Herodes we did. We went to watch Innerspace instead. The evening wasn’t completely lost.