Ground Zero Hero (Xbox Series X)
After a nuclear apocalypse devastates the world of Ground Zero Hero, its hero climbs out of his fallout shelter to see a devastated world full of mutant creatures. Without any weapons, this person who survived the end of the world very quickly decides to embrace the nuclear wasteland, grabbing radioactive goop to force mutations and fight all the absurd monsters that keep him away from the only food he really cares about: candy.
Ground Zero Hero is a very silly horde survival rogue-like, the post-apocalyptic setting really just a justification for how nuts things have gotten. Giant man-eating snails, walking cacti, penguins drooling slime, and all sorts of other mutated animals are out to get you, but there are also outright monsters like vampires and werewolves, planes with pig faces, viking snowmen, aliens, and all sorts of strange things to encounter. Sometimes its you who gets to use them, like calling the sun down to roast enemies, ringing a bell to drop an overweight fairy who’ll freeze everything nearby, and many creatures like two-headed cows or fire-spitting lizards are actually things you can briefly ride to cause some mayhem. With a cartoon art style that looks a good bit like The Simpsons at times, especially when the radioactive goo monster, a set of devils, or three-eyed fauna show up, some of the fun will be from just seeing how outright strange this post-apocalypse is, and that delightful oddity isn’t just for show as it infects how the action unfolds as well.
Your goal during a run of Ground Zero Hero is to take out 9,999 enemies in one of the game’s five levels to spawn a boss to defeat. Luckily, the wastelands are all fairly open, their design randomized and which enemies you see shifting around at times, but for the most part everything you need to kill will helpfully be trying to charge towards you already. At first the enemies start out slow and weak as do you, meaning you’ll need to collect rads to unlock mutations to handle them as they increase in power, durability, and especially number. Some larger foes can actually do more than try to run into you, packing a projectile attack, detonating on death, or other little tricks that don’t change up the action too much, but they do require you to move around more or give them a proper berth as you try to also clear out the incoming horde as best you can. Your own attacks are always going off on their own though, the player mostly in charge of just walking around to survive, grab the radioactive goo dropped by defeated enemies, and work your way up to being an automatic killing machine that can make quick work of that huge enemy-killing quota.
When you collect enough rads to get an upgrade, a screen will appear offering three random choices on how to change your hero. These are where you’ll get your attacks from, with things like a stretchy tentacle slap, a small radioactive aura, or even the power to lay explosive eggs meant to help you passively deal with enemies so long as you can move into their range to hit them or can lure them into traps you’ve left behind. Your attacks go off fairly frequently, although increasing attack speed or power are upgrades that can appear as well, your hero starting to look weirder and weirder as you layer on more helpful upgrades like porcupine quills you fire from your back or an electric eel tail to zap foes. As you play the game more you’ll gradually unlock new upgrades to pick from, some kind of unfortunate clutter like increasing how long you can ride a friendly beast or how quickly it takes to unlock a safe with golden bottle caps, these effects situational and keeping you from getting more helpful offensive attacks. At the same time, while there are new mutations to unlock, there isn’t a huge range to be had and you’ll probably settle into a somewhat comfortable set of choices once you know what works well. Sometimes having to choose a weaker one isn’t as bad as having to grab faster safe-cracking though, but it does feel like some of your upgrade choices will homogenize a bit early on.
However, if you die in a run, all those upgrades are wiped and you’ll need to start from scratch again on the next attempt. There are persistent passive boosts available for purchase with the gold caps either found in those safes or as rewards that are a fair bit rarer than rads, and the lingering upgrades will have some pretty noticeable effects. One of the main ones to invest in early is something called Bonkers Chance, every power you can grab having the potential to occasionally trigger a super-powered Bonkers mode. For the porcupine quills you’ll suddenly fire them at insane speeds, for the tentacle arm it will turn massive and do an arcing swipe that makes a rainbow, and the hammer fist will just let your ground slams set off an atomic blast. This adds a nice bit of exciting randomness to the affair, the player sometimes getting squeezed in tight by the crowd and just banking on a Bonkers boost to trigger and bail them out, and if you diversify your powers and invest in the probability of it happening, you can start having your super versions of attacks go off frequently enough to take on some of the game’s harder moments or trivialize the easy stages. Other upgrades like Explosion Size, Max Health, Pickup Range, and so on have their value too, but the safe strikes again with Bonus Safe Coins, an option that can feel like it’s pulling you away from more productive choices. You’ll take a lot longer to purchase all the persistent upgrades though, especially since one of the main ways to earn decent gold caps involves the game’s missions.
While the basic goal is to clear each wasteland and defeat its boss, missions are there to give you some rewarding extra tasks to attempt along the way. Often they can involve using an area’s specific gimmicks effectively, and many of them have ties to Ground Zero Hero’s interesting day/night system. During the day you’ll be able to fight back against the irradiated monsters of the wasteland, but when the sound goes down every few minutes, it’s time to run as monsters that are much more powerful will start showing up. You can try and stand and fight those vampires and werewolves, each one dropping more rads and extra bonuses if you can take them down, but at first the best you can hope to do is find a fallout shelter to quickly hide in to bring morning back around. It’s a decent pace breaker so a good set of mutations that can handle the simple enemies still can face moments of peril, but there’s also another element trying to force you out of your comfort zone with your hero’s candy requirements. While you have a health bar and healing food is actually fairly uncommon, candy is a meter you must always pay attention to since if you don’t eat it often enough, you’ll start taking damage automatically. Candy can be found in dinosaur pinatas that appear around the wasteland for some reason, some randomly appearing enemies like a dancing crocodile in a top hot drop candy when they’re hit, and other little ways can help you scour for this resource, it usually not a problem if you keep moving but that also means you’re sometimes leaving behind useful pick-ups or having to push into dangerous territory to get your candy fix. These elements help shake off some of the passivity a horde survival game with automatic attacks can slip into if you don’t find ways to keep the player’s power in check, but it doesn’t feel like quite enough to give the game an exciting hook either.
Ground Zero Hero is unfortunately a fairly short horde survival rogue-like. While its final level is much harder with more durable foes who can’t be wiped out so easily and there’s nowhere to hide at night while also facing the toughest night monsters yet, the levels leading up to it will probably only take a few tries to clear before the last stand proves to be a time sink. It does at least require you to play a great deal better than in other stages if you want to actually clear it, making active moment more crucial than ever, but I managed to clear the game in a little over seven hours with very little left to do, and a good deal of those hours were just bulking up for or attempting the final stage. For the most part, it was missions like beating levels without taking damage or buying the last few passive upgrades that would serve as an incentive to go back by then, but there were no more exciting rewards and level attempts don’t feel that different that playing them through again felt all that appealing. They did work well enough during that first climb through though where you have more limited mutation options and hadn’t upgraded your power too far, and the newness of each strange location makes beating the unfortunately recycled singular boss a rewarding activity. If viewed as a game more about progressing to the credits properly rather than a rogue-like where you play through many times for gradual long term gains or just for the enjoyment of the action style, Ground Zero Hero still works well enough, but even the silly comedic parts will have already become familiar by the time you clear the last level, replayability not one of the game’s strong suits.
THE VERDICT: The crazy cartoon post-apocalypse of Ground Zero Hero gives it a wonderfully strange personality and your power upgrades being tied to wacky mutations that make you look odder and odder suits that direction nicely. There are amusing moments of discovery as you unlock new wastelands to conquer, but the breadth of upgrades and unlocks is a little small and it wears down the game’s replayability. If you only care for making it to the end, Ground Zero Hero fits its horde survival well to a gradual difficulty curve, but once the credits have rolled, there’s not much motivation to go back to levels you won’t struggle with anymore since the meaningful rewards will have dried up by then.
And so, I give Ground Zero Hero for Xbox Series X…
An OKAY rating. Like other horde survival rogue-likes, there are moments in Ground Zero Hero where you don’t need to think all that much, just letting your automatic attacks do the work as you walk about collecting goodies, but you will often enough be incentivized to move around more for safes, special assistance like the rideable animals, or to do things like grab candy or avoid nighttime terrors. The mutations are a decent mix but there isn’t enough complexity or depth to them to incentivize mixing things up save for the initial need to use them for a while to unlock their Bonkers modes. While individual powers can be leveled up mid-run, usually it’s just making things fire more or hit harder rather than adding interesting new twists to their use or synergizing with other tools you grabbed. They’re a mostly creative bunch, a set of clay hands appearing from the ground to launch bombs like basketballs is certainly absurd in a fun way, but there’s not much reason to break away from practical picks or rewards for doing so. Ground Zero Hero feels like it needed more things to unlock in most every category, reasons to return to the game or play it in less optimal ways to keep the action alive longer. However, if you do only care for clearing all five wastelands as a sort of progression journey, you will meet decent resistance since it can handle that ramp up well and oppose your power decently enough before you break free of the power curve once you can afford the juicier persistent upgrades.
Endless modes for each wasteland does try to weakly inject some replayability into Ground Zero Hero but also will probably be too easy once you’ve cleared the main adventure to put up a fight, I even just forced myself to die after the hour needed for a mission since I had become basically untouchable well before then. The run-based format and upgrades work well enough when you’re going through the game initially though and there’s life enough to that initial playthrough to provide some entertainment before you even consider whatever amusement you’ll get from its kooky world, but the systems are a bit too shallow to really elevate the action whether you consider it a game about beating its simple story or a rogue-like you’d want to return to over and over again.