Bionicle Heroes Review

09-07-17 08:46 PM

yaoyao9 is Offline

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yaoyao9

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I remember back in 2006. I got home from cram school, hopped over to my mailbox, and got my greedy little hands on the newest issue of the LEGO Shop At Home magazine: what was in it? A full page of info about Bionicle's newest game: Bionicle Heroes. The novelty of having a 3rd person Bionicle shooter was interesting to me, and I spent a lot of time on the free PC demo. I completely skipped out on the GBA version of the game back then, and in hindsight, I don't think I missed out on much.
Graphics: The graphics are perfectly acceptable for a GBA title. Special merits goes out to the enemy, cut scene, and hero mask animations. The Bohrok, Visorak, Vahki, Rahkshi, and Bahrag all look really good, and the feel of a natural world with LEGO elements was captured well in the game. The cut scene graphics are rather appealing as well, doing a good job mimicking the graphics found in the game's home console versions. Finally, the little hero mask icon at the bottom left corner of the screen looks pretty well animated. The player character, however, doesn't look so good. Aside from the constantly bouncing eye pixels whenever the player runs, the overall feeling I garnered from watching the player avatar in action is a pixelated mess. The same can be said for the Piraka enemies, who seem to suffer from this as well. I praised the cut scenes for being good replicas of their home console counterparts, but that also creates a problem with the visual styling of the game. The console ports of Heroes uses a worn, pitted style for their character models; the Toa and Piraka all look battered and worn, with chips in color on their armor to show their wear. Meanwhile, the GBA game has a primarily clean art style with no hints of dirt and grime existing whatsoever. Finally, the hero mask icon may be well-animated, but its certainly completely useless. Every time the player is struck, the mask will reel back and then shake its head, telling the player that they've been hurt. The useless nature of this inclusion should be entirely obvious. When a player is staring at their avatar in the game flash when they are hit, it seems completely arbitrary to waste screen real estate on useless add-ons. A map feature would have been far more appreciated, seeing that the levels can get obscenely large.
Sound: The graphics generally lay out a pretty good summary of the game at large. The music was praised by reviewers of the time. but I certainly don't find anything enjoying about the music. I can complement the composer(s) for their varied use of instruments, but every single song in this game simply drones on and on without end, and I often find it more comfortable to play the game with the sound turned off. Ironically, the one song I do enjoy is the jingle that plays when the player dies, which sounds admittedly very epic. Compounding the repetitive music is the bad sound design in general. The firing noise from the player's "gun", combined with the relentless screeching from enemies like the Visorak and the Bahrag, destroy the overall presentation of sound in this game. Unfortunately, sound isn't even remotely where most of my criticisms lie.
Addictiveness: Zero. None. The game is a shallow wreck in terms of actual depth and rewarding the player. The game's action comes from nonstop shooting, which means the player will be mashing the A button harder than in a Dynasty Warriors game. While the game does have a auto-fire feature for its primary blaster, the firing rate is pathetic and can be easily outmatched by just mashing the button over and over. The repetitiveness of the shooting (coupled with the difficulty of the game as defined later) kills the player's enjoyment of the title. Not helping matters is the often inconsistent hit detection from enemies. Enemies seem to have an invincibility after hit, much like the player, meaning that sometimes shots will pass straight through them after sustaining a single hit. This is especially infuriating with enemies like the Visorak, who can almost endlessly dodge attacks, which in turn wastes the player's time. Heroes also includes a reward system. According to the manual, the player can receive 20 awards in each Zone by performing tasks such as "dying five times" and "keeping at least one turret alive in the Arena level". However, these rewards offer nothing in the long run, making the shallowness of the game even more obvious.
Story: Bionicle Heroes on the GBA surprisingly doesn't follow the console storyline whatsoever, as it seems to feature all 6 of the Toa Inika in lieu of the single hero arriving via a travelling canister that can assume the forms of each Toa through collecting their masks. The game's introductory cut scene shows the Piraka annihilating the heroes, while a small Matoran villager sees the carnage and flees into a cave, falling into a pool of Energized Protodermis and emerging as the single hero mentioned above. After that little debacle, the story disappears. Have fun!
Difficulty: Bionicle Heroes is like a kidnapper. It lures people into the game with its seemingly easy difficulty before smashing the player's face into the concrete (and their Gameboy screen) with a massive difficulty spike, mainly because the game dislikes the fact that the player can advance in strength. As mentioned previously, the player controls the 6 Toa Inika. Each Toa also has a secondary weapon that varies in property depending on the character, and the player can call upon each Toa by swapping through their collection of masks with the L button. This, however, is locked on the first play through of every level in each zone, with each zone having 3 levels, and a total of 6 zones plus one final level in the final zone that has character swapping unlocked by default. The player's inability to swap heroes during their first time trekking through each zone after the first one becomes this game's greatest downfall, because this is where the game punishes players for advancing. Near the end of the first level of each zone, the player will find a power-up mask for the hero that is defaulted to that zone. The mask will upgrade the hero's primary attack power. However, upon entering the next zone, the player's mask resets to a less powerful state, as each Toa starts their zones at the most basic mask, and has the same primary attack. Worse, the enemies will continue to become more powerful while the player remains stagnant in attack strength, leaving only the nightmarish treks through each level. The first level of each zone is also incredibly long. I clocked in about 30 minutes for the first level of the first zone, and the length just gets longer and longer with each successive zone, and each level has one or more splits in the route with no ways of backtracking. The difficulty serves little more than to grind the player's sanity as they play through humongous levels with no ways of saving on a nauseating, small screen. I'm not sure what the afterlife is like, but if it's playing Bionicle Heroes for eternity, I'll be doubling down on that search for an elixir.
Overall: Even though this review can be summed up as a humongous rant, Bionicle Heroes is still just an average game. The controls are fluid, and if the player has a lot of time to kill, it could be a entertaining but repetitious time. I would definitely recommend playing the console ports instead, as those versions have the graphical power to present the lush world of Bionicle in 2006 that this game simply failed to do. Plus, the console versions are just far less repetitive in general.

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09-09-17 10:56 AM

DragonSlayer22 is Offline

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DragonSlayer22

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Good review! I remember when people were still talking about Bionicle and how popular it was. I actually think I still might have actual Bionicle sets somewhere lol.

Good job.