7 Days Heroes

When I reviewed Contra: Operation Galuga earlier this week, I found myself disappointed by its lack of ambition. It played well and did a good job of updating the lore, but it didn’t really add much to the genre. Today I’m reviewing 7 Days Heroes, a similar run ‘n gun shoot ‘em up that may not look as good as the new Contra, but comes with a more ambitious campaign that offers up a few new ideas to the tried-and-true formula. Unfortunately, this game proves that not all new ideas are good, and maybe I should have been more specific when I asked for a more ambitious action game. You’ll see what I mean when I review 7 Days Heroes by Dolores Entertainment.

This is the story of a trio of siblings who were born with powers and raised with the idea that they could become potential super soldiers. When their A.I. guardian goes rogue and decides to unleash a bunch of teeny, tiny nanomachines on the world, it ends up turning those infected into a form of zombies. Now it’s up to the three siblings (and their dog) to escape their confinement and stop the rogue A.I. dead in its tracks, all over the course of seven days.

At first glance, this looks like a pretty typical run ‘n gun action game, and in a lot of ways it is. After a plane crash separates the siblings, you play one of the brothers as he searches the lake and nearby areas for clues to his family’s whereabouts. This plays out like Contra, Metal Slug and countless other games in the genre, where you use your platforming skills to gain the upper-hand on the zombie invasion. You shoot, double jump, climb walls and do everything you’re used to from this type of game, all with an adorable little pooch right behind you.

As our hero finds his siblings, the game opens up and shows you some of its unique ideas. One thing you’ll immediately notice is that each character follows the leader, so there will be levels where you’ll be followed by two different people and a dog. This allows you to switch between the different characters at any time, and as each of them has their own unique abilities, you’ll be doing a lot of that as you survive this week from Hell.

The hero you start out with is good with guns, so you’ll spend most of the game finding and unlocking new types of firepower for him to fight with. His brother, on the other hand, is a bit of a nerd and specializes in secondary items that are more for convenience than combat. For example, one of the early items he’ll find will act like a magnet for the nanomachines, which can be extremely useful in the later levels. There’s also a sister, who will use a bunch of necklaces to cast magic that will help the squad. Oh, and don’t forget about the dog, who can fit in tight spots and collect nanomachines that are otherwise out of reach for the siblings.

Because there are so many people in your party, you’ll immediately notice that there are a lot of items and abilities to unlock. In fact, you are expected to find a new gun, necklace or special item in every single stage, most of which will have a substantial impact on how you play the game. That makes every level important, and I’ll admit that the promise of a new ability or weapon was enough incentive to keep me invested throughout most of this game. You can also upgrade all of this gear, so collecting all of the nanomachines quickly becomes a big deal. This is the one thing this game gets right.

In theory, there are some interesting ideas at play here that could shake up the run ‘n gun formula in some fun ways. The problem is that the developer of this game has no idea how to execute on its ambitions. The most glaring problem is that the levels aren’t really designed with these different characters in mind. In most stages, you won’t need to switch between the different characters. You’ll mostly use the gun-toting brother as he kills bad guys and makes his way to checkpoints. All you really need is for one of the characters to get to that checkpoint, and the best hero for the job is always the one with tons of firepower.

It's actually worse than that, as these are some of the worst level designs I’ve seen in a run ‘n gun shooter. These are levels designed for a single hero to play through, yet you’ll often have three extra characters tagging behind. And they don’t directly mimic your movement, either, so you’ll have to rely on the A.I. atrocious pathfinding. The other characters are constantly getting stuck on what should be simple jumps, so you’ll need to switch between them in order to manually get them through the stages.

This is especially frustrating because the heroes will often make things way harder than they need to be. I kept running into the issue of getting one hero where I wanted them, only to switch and have that hero backtrack and make me lose all of my progress. The only real solution to this is to switch characters and then immediately commend everybody to stay put. That will solve some of the issues, but it also means you’ll need to tackle a lot of platforming challenges four different times. Once per character. It’s frustrating and bad design.

And then there’s the bridge level, which has the single most obnoxious background I’ve ever seen. It’s the combination of color and sluggish animation that makes it a real eye sore. I don’t have epilepsy or suffer from seizures, but I felt like I was going to have real problems while playing those stages. I found that it was impossible to tell the difference between the red bridge and the red enemies, which led to so many cheap deaths that I stopped counting. It’s especially bad when you’re playing on a large television. I swear, I kept having to look away to protect my eyes. It felt like somebody jumped out of the TV and started flashing colors in my face while I played. It’s bad, and I can’t believe the game got released without somebody toning down the background.

Once you get past the bridge levels things go back to normal, but then you’re left with level designs that aren’t much fun to play. This is one of those short games that feels like it goes on for 100 hours. The best parts are all at the beginning, and the initially intriguing story stops being compelling about halfway through. I like that Dolores Entertainment wanted to shake up the run ‘n gun formula, but 7 Days Heroes is not a game I can recommend. Not today or any other day this week.