Review: Heavy Weapon, Trudging Through The Battlefield
by Daniel Lipscombe - October 25, 2009
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I love PopCap Games, they make amazingly simple, addictive and can be eaten in bite size pieces.
That’s the beauty of the companies games, from Bejewelled to Zuma , from Bookworm Adventures to Plants vs Zombies each time PopCap release a new title gamers across the world fear for the hours they will lose whilst feeding the addiction.
Heavy Weapon carries on that history with a ‘jump in, jump out’ dynamic, keeping things basic, but perhaps maybe too basic?
Heavy Weapon will likely appeal to fans of R-Type, Xenon and 1942. Controlling a tank that constantly keeps rolling on through the battlefields; you can speed up or slow down, but can only move horizontally. You can however, using the right stick, move the tanks turret in an arc that allows firepower to cover the entire sky.
Playing through each level sees enemies buzzing around above your tank, blasting each one out of the air until reaching the gargantuan boss at the end.
The similarities with R-Type and the like continue throughout collecting power ups from a support helicopter that swoops in above, adding weapons to your arsenal. One of the best features about the weapons here is that they stack up, so if you pick up a laser and then rockets, you’ll have both, not just the last one you picked up. You can also buy more of these upgrades in the menus between missions; this adds such a different dynamic to the game.
The core mechanic of the game that sells itself is the varying difficulty, from easy slow moving enemies that shoot the occasional rocket to planes that dive bomb you from different angles. After some time the games ramps up its toughness and becomes a real challenge, which is a welcome change as it keeps pushing you forward.
But that’s about it. Everything is a bit too basic, even for a PopCap game. The backgrounds are often dull and vapid, changing merely the style rather than the content. It would have been nice just to see some movement; an example of this would be on the Triassic Park level.
Rather than having a static dinosaur just standing there, how fun would it have been for it to move around? Maybe even snatch a plane out of the air?
The biggest problem is that Heavy Weapon has no character and /that/ is what makes PopCap excel. Bookworm, the Zombies and the Peggle Masters, they give the games they star in character. Colourful, bright and humorous, Heavy Weapon lacks all of this, not even a big gruff general, nothing.
Start to finish it’s an uninteresting game that has no real spark of imagination; it’s really just a copycat scrolling shooter with cartoon visuals slapped over the top.
There’s plenty to keep you going here, with a survival mode and boss blitz. The former being a traditional game mode that sees you trying to survive against waves of enemies with no let up and the latter challenges you to fight every boss from the game back to back and finish as quickly as you can.
There are trophies to collect and you can venture online or bring a friend round to attack the levels as a group too. If you can look past the lack of character, copycat design and empty quality, the action itself is tight and pretty fun, but that’s where it stops.
