Headlander (Xbox One)

While it’s probably no surprise that in a game called Headlander with cover art featuring three flying heads you do, in fact, play as a disembodied head, there’s more to your situation than initially appears. Your head, in the world of Headlander, seems to be the last organic human head left, and whether you pick the man, woman, or old man head, your story will still be the same.

 

Taking place in a far off future, mankind has mostly given up on their human forms, their minds joining a computer consciousness that allows them to swap into different mechanical bodies as they please to live in their outer space colonies. Unfortunately, an AI named Methuselah has corrupted this system, limiting their behavior so it can exert full control over its creators. Fortunately, there are some who can still resist its influence, and one such character, Earl, manages to find your head cryogenically frozen and sees you as the last possible hope to push back against Methuselah’s control. Earl ends up being a helpful voice in your ear as you progress, his southern drawl making for a delightful contrast with the retro-future aesthetic of the large space station most of the game’s action takes place on. Headlander’s highlight is definitely its world design and humor, the robotic lives of these former humans having plenty of silly and strange quirks. From rooms devoted solely to the robots trying to rub up against pleasant textures to robots with less humanoid designs so the human minds can play in strange bodies, the designers definitely play with a few different ideas about how humans would react to having such expendable and customizable bodies, all while the robots themselves will comment on the strange discrepancies between their former organic lives and the new situations that being mechanical introduces to their lives. Everything else in their lives is controlled by an AI as well too, the doors and janitorial machines each having little personalities and quips about their lot in life when interacted with to make almost any interaction a bit more interesting and funny.

In Headlander, you do remain a head throughout your whole journey, but the little helmet it is contained in has a few useful abilities. The most important one is definitely its mobility, a jet on the bottom of it allowing it to fly around the air freely, but while you will eventually get extra abilities to support your flight like protective shields that can deflect lasers, your main tool for dealing with puzzles and problems is the ability to latch your head onto different devices and even the robots that make up Headlander’s world. Using a tractor beam, you can yank off whatever is controlling an object or character and then plop yourself on top of them, now able to control the functions of that machine. The most common way the game will expect you to use this is to yank off the heads of your enemies and commandeer their bodies to fight other foes, but there is one major fault in this concept. When you pop your head onto most of your enemies, you find your new robot body equipped with a gun with limited ammo. You can choose to shoot at other robots, but unless you precisely shoot off their head, many take quite a few shots to take down. There is a cover system so you can avoid damage during a gunfight, and certain enemies pack more powerful weapons, but since Headlander is a 2D sidescrolling game, your aim is handled by a control stick that makes aiming at a tiny head take a little time, especially if it is a moving target. In many cases, it really is just simpler to fly around a room as the head and pull off the heads of your enemies, a bit of dexterous movement required to avoid being blasted apart but only the most dangerous of rooms making this simpler means of defeating enemies less safe and easy.

 

Some enemies do pack some better weapons than the basic guns you’re given, some beefier bots packing melee attacks that are simple to execute and strong to boot, and in a creative chess segment of the game, the different chess robots all have guns that match their movement styles, the knight for example having a shot that moves forward a little before bending upwards. There are only two boss fights in the entire game though, and while these will require you to pop into some gun-wielding robots and use their weapons effectively, the shooting never really finds a good footing for a combat role. However, the world design of Headlander does favor the use of robot weapons in puzzle solving. Headlander is a Metroidvania with plenty of secret upgrades and experience point boosters to find, your head and anything it possesses able to unlock new helpful ability and skills if you go off the beaten path or return to old areas with the skills you earn or discover along the way. Sometimes, getting the right robot body to the right place is how you’ll unlock these secrets, certain guns having more barrels for firing lasers and robots coming in different shapes that allow them to get into different places. Reflecting lasers off mirrors in the proper manner is a common barrier to these extra goodies, but even on the main path you’ll need to hijack the right robots to get through special doors or activate certain mechanisms. In addition to some sidequests that ask you to search around the map more closely, the use of your head for figuring out puzzles is a bit better executed, the game able to establish reasonable roadblocks so you don’t spend all your time as a flying head yanking off other heads.

Unfortunately, a lack of creativity does limit some of its play. The chess segment is perhaps the most interesting since you have to navigate specific robots to specific positions while under attack, some segments asking you to be more combat focused, others more about keeping a fragile body safe, and the weapon quirks meaning that you can put a little more thought into their use. Most of the time though, you’ll end up hijacking an enemy because they have the right color to activate doors with similar colored locks. Rather than gradually evolving the concept as you continue, the game trots out similar challenges right up until the end, some of the robots you take over getting more interesting but nothing really breaks away from a style of play that starts to gradually get stale over time. It ultimately gives off an impression that the game is cut short, the gameplay never evolving into something greater, the boss count surprisingly low, and the story wrapping up in a bit of a confusing manner. Had more time been spent in the game’s world, perhaps it could have fleshed out everything a bit more instead of wrapping things up so quickly to make up for the fact it seemingly had few ideas on where to go next.

THE VERDICT: Headlander takes place in a creative and funny future for humanity where our minds are locked in robot bodies as an AI tries to exert control over us, but the imagination sort of stops there. Controlling the head is an interesting mechanic and hijacking the bodies of your foes starts off interesting, but not much changes over the course of the game even when you gain new abilities or encounter new bodies. The fact combat is better handled as a head rather than with the different weapons of the bodies you take certainly stunts the potential mechanical growth, but there are moments where puzzle design and exploration mix together well with the body stealing system. Fun dialogue and some decent concepts like the robot chess segment means Headlander can make it to its end without getting downright dull, but the gameplay does lose its luster, especially since things wrap up before they really found their stride.

 

And so, I give Headlander for Xbox One…

An OKAY rating. Headlander hits the scene with a neat concept and a fun world to experiment with it in, but it doesn’t populate the game with enough to do as the Headlander. Searching for secrets and figuring out puzzles works well enough, but the envelope isn’t really pushed even as you start getting new skills and abilities that should at least shake up play a bit more than they do. This mostly ties into the bodies being expendable by necessity and not the best fit for many combat portions, the game perhaps investing too strongly in them even though most of the play will have you hopping from host to host. Flying around as the head has a decent amount of variety to buoy the experience and some moments do find some interesting uses for the hijacked robots, but most robots are either carrying marginally different weapons or pack a color you need to unlock a door onward. There aren’t the kinds of exciting abilities that would make taking over a body feel truly distinct, and the ones that do stand out are things like the small cleaning robots that only really move around rather than offering new abilities. Besides the combat mechanics though, Headlander is definitely a game that falls in the category of not failing so much as not succeeding enough, its components not pushed as far as they should have been and thus the end product feels like it lacks a lot of what makes the core mechanic exciting conceptually.

 

When Double Fine Productions makes a game, they tend to use some pretty fun aesthetics. When Adult Swim Games publishes a game, you can usually expect some pretty intriguing concepts on display. While Headlander does feature both of these, it doesn’t fully deliver on their potential. With a bit more thought put into it though, this mediocre Metroidvania about flying heads could have been a more mentally stimulating experience.