Unruly Heroes (Xbox One)
Unruly Heroes is a gorgeously realized video game adaptation of the Chinese novel Journey to the West. Vividly detailed character models are animated with remarkable fluidity whether they’re just background color or combat participants, and even as you keep seeing new characters and creatures it’s still easy to be dazzled and wowed by the game’s intricate backdrops and massive bosses. All of the splendid artistry gives the impression that this might be a serious journey only for the goddess of mercy to greet the heroes at the start sounding more like a Californian teenager. Many of the bosses blubber like children or getting upset with the heroes for trivial matters, and even the pig hero can inflate himself like a balloon so the others can ride on top of him as the game isn’t afraid to get practically cartoony despite its lovingly drawn world.
Unruly Heroes is certainly a silly adventure at times and you’ll see this aspect realized just as beautifully as the more serious character designs. The geisha-like first boss is an impressive moving piece of art, but then an absurdly large man running a stand can barely cram himself inside it later. You’ll play as the four heroes who all have hard-hitting attacks early in the adventure only for a trip to the underworld to render them into adorable babies, one of them even riding a toy horse during the unusual visit. Not every moment is trying to provide a visual feast or a humorous sight of course, this side-scrolling action platformer having many moments in dark caves or walking alongside a river for settings that serve more as transitional parts of the journey, but you can always expect the art to be top notch whether it’s just giving the background a lovely look or trying to extract some humor from a situation you might not have expected it in.
Unruly Heroes can be played either alone or in a group of up to four players, each of the heroes having different skills that are necessary at parts for making progress. If you don’t have a full team of humans along for the ride though there is an option to swap characters so you’ll always be able to solve both optional and required puzzles, but the skill usage is actually probably one of the weaker ideas in a game brimming with a lot of different ways to provide variety. This is mostly because each ability is fairly straightforward; Wukong the monkey king is able to extend his staff out as a bridge, the monk Sanzang fires a ricocheting sphere to try and activate switches, Kihong the pig inflates and can float up to new areas, and the burly Sandmonk smashes through special barriers only he can break. Sandmonk gets the short end of the stick in that his interactions remain pretty basic throughout and Sanzang’s sphere firing grows in complexity a touch but not to the point it ever feels like you’re doing much more than trying to suss out the right ricochet angle, but Wukong and Kihong get off a bit better. Wukong’s bridges start to act like a way of introducing horizontal barriers to scenarios and Kihong’s more active ability will require him to move around dangers as he floats, but sometimes the bigger challenge in these ability-focused moments is navigating a small dangerous area and successfully moving the ability statue used to activate them properly. It could be said that the abilities are sometimes more like the key you finally get for solving the statue placement puzzle too, but these are one of the few recurring challenge archetypes in a game brimming with constant activity diversity.
Unruly Heroes at its heart is an action platformer, and you will always have a little bit of focus on combat and jumping for it. Wukong and Sandmonk both have a double jump while Kihong and Sanzang can hover a bit after their jump to give them a few moments of different utility, but in combat they do fight quite differently and have combo options deeper than they probably need to be. For the most part your basic but lengthy and quite flashy combo is good for dealing damage and the options like aerial strikes are important for specific foes and bosses, but enemies have pretty simple attack approaches and bosses are pattern focused mostly so maybe beyond grabbing and tossing away a pesky foe for some room the fights don’t feel like they need the complexity. They also don’t suffer for such options either, especially since the game even packs in a multiplayer battle mode where the four heroes fight each other and you can even rope in AI players. Your expanded attack options can find more utility here, plus it doesn’t hurt during regular play that you can do a launcher attack, ranged strike, and running strike so you can keep mobile and dangerous in a battle. Essentially you’ll get the benefits of its depth even if it doesn’t feel necessary most of the time and if you do string together more involved combos you can even get more energy for your character’s unique power attack. While fights don’t demand such advanced mechanics with their simplicity, the extra effort does fit well with the game’s general attention to detail.
Looping back to the game’s incredible variety though, when you aren’t doing the more typical battles and jumping challenges, Unruly Heroes has a lot of ideas for how to change up the action. At a few points you can possess certain enemy types, each instance of doing so bringing a new puzzle mechanic like a wolf man who can command the help of another wolf in the background to solve puzzles in tandem. When you go to the underworld you lose most of your powers but you need to pull along a soul on a leash that takes damage from things that don’t harm you so you need to carefully navigate yourself and your burden through hazards. Some gimmicks require you to move quickly like crumbling level geometry while others slow things down like figuring out how to shut down a steam boiler in a tight and dangerous space, and mostly the ideas tend to bring some fun new twist to the play. Some ideas though like the strong winds on fire mountain slow things down too much and involve a lot of waiting though and while they’re not present throughout all of fire mountain, it does feel like the game lingers in that setting disproportionately. 9 of the game’s 29 levels take place there, and while they do vary it up like the game’s other settings and there are new mechanics introduce that do work like a fan you have for a while to cool burning blocks into platforms, the resplendent hand-drawn art is given less to work with when there’s a lot of black rock and red flame so it feels a shame it lingers there so long.
The game does throw in a lot of extras to collect like scrolls to add some extra side puzzles to find, many of the area-specific mechanics given greater legs in your ability to use them to head off the beaten path, and there’s a ranking system for those who want to try and push forward quickly since many stages are fairly conducive to such swift play. It’s a well-rounded platformer that tries to put its wide range of ideas through their paces even when they can come and go so quickly, but perhaps that ever-shifting spotlight does mean some ideas like the character abilities end up feeling like they’re present for their place in line rather than adding much besides a shift in style for a moment. Rarely do concepts come up short, but this grab bag of good concepts does feel like it misses out on any truly great ideas since the depth either doesn’t get to thrive or you’re onto the next play style fairly quickly.
THE VERDICT: Artistically lavish but tonally silly, Unruly Heroes gives the player a nice mixed take on a familiar adaptation choice and seeing the vivid art and absurd subversions is a treat in itself. This action platformer has a buffet of gimmicks and new mechanics rolling out frequently as well, the fundamentals perhaps more solid than they even needed to be and the extra layers of constant variation ensuring Unruly Heroes keeps its gameplay strong. Not every idea is a winner and some could have maybe used more attention to really build a high point to the adventure, but Unruly Heroes is a constant and enjoyable stream of bouncing from one idea to another with very few obvious compromises.
And so, I give Unruly Heroes for Xbox One…
A GOOD rating. I praise diversity of action in a game quite often, but usually that’s variation within a certain gameplay space. Unruly Heroes takes diversions outside of its fundamental designs like the enemy possession and underworld portion that make it almost feel like an entire game could be built around those concepts, and since it wants to move onto another idea soon it doesn’t get the degree of depth you would if that was the title’s main focus. However, Unruly Heroes doesn’t tackle these portions halfheartedly either, creating optional puzzles and difficult trials to overcome before it retires the idea and gives you some time with the action and platforming basics before you’re introduced to something new. For the most part your hero’s skills will always be kept around a little so you can slip right back in when it’s time for a boss fight or a group of enemies, the underworld’s baby heroes being the exception to that usual rule, but it does mean the game is a mostly solid ride even if it might sometimes stumble with one brief idea.
The graphical excellence is certainly its biggest draw though and perhaps also what might put the uninitiated off. It does look like a rather serious adventure in certain action stills and a lot of the characters do look like they could be from a genuine effort to make something more artistic than action-packed and goofy. Personally I didn’t expect its more humorous moments and even after a goddess introduced herself rather casually it took me a while to see the irreverent game under the deceptively lavish paint. The fact the game can fit in so many shifts in gameplay direction while making everything look so fluid is commendable as well, and it certainly has a breadth of content to justify looking into the adventure even thought more focus on some ideas could have availed it well. Perhaps putting its sillier foot forward would undermine the impact of absurdity sticking its nose into the affair, and the kookier side of things definitely has its own charm to justify its inclusion. Unruly Heroes definitely deserves plenty of love for its gorgeous look, so perhaps it’s just best to say you shouldn’t dismiss what looks like yet another Journey to the West inspired game as not only is the action featured enjoyable, but there’s plenty of varied content here to show the development team is talented, creative, and undaunted when it comes to including anything they believe will be interesting or fun.