Ground Hero Zero throws itself into the overwhelming arena of bullet-hell games gnawing at Vampire Survivors' pie. Despite an appealing art style and some wacky mechanics, the experience is over far too quick to feel meaningful.
When I had wrapped up Ground Hero Zero‘s five visually distinct biomes, I was told my completion time came in around 6 hours and 14 minutes.
I had maxed out almost every permanent upgrade and only had a handful of achievements I was missing–many of them relating to beating each biome without being hit. An entire hour of that time was spent working towards staying in an “Endless” match for an hour. Which was also how I earned enough gold to fund a large chunk of permanent upgrades I wanted.
Ground Hero Zero was over fast. Too fast. Worse yet, I felt no desire to return.
We play games because we want to be entertained. I hesitate to use the word fun because some of those emotional rollercoasters I’ve been on are hard to describe as such. For the most part, Ground Hero Zero is a solid game and it certainly has pockets of fun. But it falls surprisingly short of what I expect from a game in the mold of Vampire Survivors.
Ground Hero Zero suffers the inverse problem that I had with Yet Another Zombie Survivors, a game I recently spent over double the time with. Yet Another Zombie Survivors was an excellent Survivors-like, wrapped in a relatively unattractive box. Drab visuals and generic enemies and characters would have made the eyes glaze over had it not been for the explosive action and wealth of progression available.
The strongest card Ground Hero Zero plays is its art direction and zany creativity. Championed by solo developer Rowan Edmonson, the game is the brain child of a person on a heavy diet of The Simpsons, Ren & Stimpy, Rocko’s Modern Life, and Rick and Morty–though the latter feels more like a marketing play or way to appeal to a more current audience.
Set in a post-nuclear wasteland, Ground Hero Zero is colorful and silly, never taking itself too seriously. Edmonson’s illustrations burst off the screen in their vibrant silliness. And there’s simply just a lot of diversity, even if most enemies literally shamble towards the player and nothing else. Across forests, deserts, frozen tundra, an alien planet, and an abandoned facility, each area features its own set of characters.
Everything is meant to resemble some bizarre thing effected by nuclear fallout from some untold event. But so few of the enemies here are that freakish. It is all meant to be bubbly and cartoon-like, all-ages fodder that allows for experimentation and goofiness. Mushrooms and stumps and cacti come alive. Zombies, werewolves, devils, and vampires creep out at night in larger numbers. And as the player character acquires new weapons and abilities, their body transforms in the vein of The Binding of Isaac.
To keep things visually and mechanically fresh, each biome offers its own kind of spin. In the desert, players can summon a sun that sweeps the field and burns up enemies. In the forest, a shotgun-toting lumberjack moves in a horizontal line and provides support. On the alien planet, meteor showers can devastate anything moving. Unlike some games in the genre, these levels seem to infinitely scroll or at least loop upon themselves at some point. Littered around are fireworks and environmental hazards that can explode and kill enemies without harming the player. Towers can crash on enemies or racks can hold brains that swarm the player when knocked down.
Ground Hero Zero wants to invite variety in any way it can, to inject surprises and potential strategy into each run. And that incentive lasts for a bit. It took me a handful of runs to understand everything a biome had to offer and helping me know what to look out for that might aid in survival.
Then the problems becomes actually surviving.
Two modes exist in the game: the Endless version and the standard run where players need to kill 10,000 enemies to get a boss that shows up to kill. Kill the laughably easy boss and a new biome opens up and a new tier of permanent unlocks becomes available for purchase. Beat all five bosses and that’s the game. Yet as easy as that process may sound, enemies can swarm the screen in devastating numbers. Pathing can be even harder when obstacles impede movement and are littered everywhere. And it just takes a bit before there is a genuine sense of power that the player acquires through leveling up.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with simplicity and considering how convoluted this genre can be, it’s welcome in the right form. Unfortunately, Ground Hero Zero is far too bare-bones to remain compelling–especially after the difficulty spike in the final section.
The game follows the same formula where killing enemies has them drop radiation puddles on the ground which are then collected to mutate the player character, unlocking mutations that will make them stronger. Over the course of the game, 19 mutations can be unlocked, some are actual attacks where others are passive abilities like attack speed or damage increases.
Each attack is capable of being upgraded, usually increasing the amount of projectiles and/or overall damage it does. Stacking upgrades of the same mutation also increases the chance of each attack being a “bonkers” attack which turns the attack into an exaggerated, devastating version of itself. Where the player may normally drop an egg that explodes on enemy contact, the bonkers version spawns a man in a chicken costume who kicks enemies and flies around. The electric tail will normally chain lighting between a few enemies where the bonkers attack spreads it across the entire field.
These mutations are fun but it becomes readily apparently which ones are the best. A tentacle and fireball don’t auto-aim, instead attacking in a singular direction. Vultures that encircle the player and swoop in to attack enemies are okay but can miss large swaths of mobs. Certain attacks do great damage but have longer cooldowns. Two mutations I almost never used was a medusa effect that would freeze enemies in place and one that would cause explosions when enemies made contact with the player.
Were the player able to spend coins to permanently upgrade attributes like damage or attack speed, it might allow all mutations to shine. However, Ground Hero Zero has a severe progression problem. Only eight permanent upgrades are available. Over the course of the game players can upgrade the pickup radius (which starts out pathetically meager), critical chance, bonkers chance, max health, and a few other stats. But added tiers of these passives require players to beat the boss in a biome first.
Simply put, there’s not enough to upgrade here. In-run mutations cap out at 20, meaning that players never get too powerful because some mutations are likely going to go into passives that should be permanent unlocks. For example: one of the biggest sources of gold is unlocking safes, requiring the player to stand near the safe why it unlocks; the only way to speed up this process is to use a mutation. Why wasn’t this a passive that gold could be spent on?
By making victory dependent on kills, player damage has to be kneecapped. Because of that, it takes a long time to collect enough radiation pools to level up after a point. Therefore, it feels like the game has a kind of artificial difficulty attached to it. Vampire Survivors was a difficult game for the initial several hours but the sheer amount of stats players could invest in made the grind interesting and fun, plus free resets made it a non-issue. Ground Hero Zero seemingly wants to strip out that initial grind and just have the entire loop be that crystallized moment.
The frustration here is that players can do almost everything the game has to offer with such low effort, that victory feels a bit meaningless. Vampire Survivors also succeeds because it takes the concept of a simple 20-minute run and offers players quicker versions, endless versions, and other in-run challenges.
More weapons, more passives, and more levels wouldn’t make sense here because when those five bosses are killed, that’s it. You can mop up optional challenges and collect all achievements, sure. An argument can be made for shorter experiences, especially with the amount of games available anymore and in this genre nonetheless. It’s a shame that Ground Hero Zero looks so fun and generally plays well that it feels short-changed.
I enjoyed the day/night cycle where at night harder but more rewarding enemies come out and players can retreat into a bunker to heal and skip this phase. I found it interesting that players must collect candy or start taking health damage. This means players actually have to move around the map to find candy and can’t stay in one general area. But the moment you are strong enough to survive an Endless run, you can stay in there for an hour or more and grind out the necessary gold to tip you over the edge. And that’s simply not exciting.
Ground Hero Zero throws itself into the overwhelming arena of bullet-hell games gnawing at Vampire Survivors‘ gargantuan piece of the pie. Though the game features humor, a visually distinct style, and wacky mechanics, it’s spread too thin over too little game. The result is an experience that should be more meaningful and rewarding but instead of one more run, I’m one credit roll and done.
