Game Reviews

BIONICLE Heroes is one of the first person shooters of all time.

It was made by the UK developer TT games after they created Lego Star Wars, and I believe is the last game they developed that didn’t follow the formula that they created with Lego Star Wars (at least until the Skywaker Sega and the upcoming Lego batman game).

I am not going to give a full history on BIONICLE here, as it would take a while, I only have a surface level understanding of it, and this game is not even cannon as it breaks the lore in tons of ways so it does not matter anyway.

The game itself is a third person shooter, and is very simple. The combat is mostly point and shoot no taking cover, no special abilities, no dodging or dashing. The game does offer several different weapons, that cover all your standard video game guns (be it recontextualize to be more kid friendly). You got your smg, shotgun, rocket launcher, sniper rifle, grenade launcher, and of course, the classic big laser beam. They are all very useable, throughout the whole game besides the sniper rifle as there are no real long-range combat situations, and the scope controls suck. Weapons and your max health can also be upgraded with money you find throughout the levels, but you can get through the game quite easily without them, it mainly just speeds things up.

You can change weapons anytime by changing “masks”, which essentially changes you into one of what would have been the current Bionicle figures on sale in real life at the time (lore wise it is there mask giving your unnamed player character their skills and abilities). I will touch more on abilities later but in terms of combat, all the masks do is change your weapon, move speed, and armour. Speed is the only useless stat and is only noticeable in the downtime between fights.

When you start a level you will only have a limited selection of masks, but can find the rest (and copies of what you have already) throughout the level. When you lose all your health you do not die, instead you lose the current mask you are wearing, you only get a game over when you lose all your masks. However, I don’t know if this is done on purpose or just a big oversight, but when you do lose a mask all collection points for that mask will respawn, so as long as you only use the masks you know have spawn points nearby, they can be recollected right after you lose them making you effectively immortal.

The level design in this game much like the combat is extremely simple, you mostly just keep going forward taking out anything in your way.

The game has “puzzles” tied to using the right mask’s ability (the correct mask always happens to spawn nearby) but most the time the puzzle is just equip the right mask then either hold or tap the A button. The only exceptions are the fire and water masks, which let you walk on lava and water respectively, and then even more rarely the ice mask which can use there ”sniper rifle” to destroy certain objects blocking the way.

Each mask also has a hidden extra ability you can buy, but ALL of them are just you can now hold down the A button on new objects to find hidden collectables.

There is one last kind of roadblock you may find where the path is blocked by golden bricks. To get past them just keep killing enemies in the area nearby (they keep respawning until the roadblock is gone) to charge up a meter to activate hero mode. In hero mode, you are invincible for as long as you want! It will not expire until you clear the golden bricks, and of course how do you clear those bricks….by walking up to them and holding down the A button of course.

Almost every level ends with a boss fight which mostly involves dodging there attacks until they drop there shields so you can shoot them. Sometimes golden bricks will show up, so you will have to kill the normal enemies that spawn in to help the boss to enter hero mode, so you can use the bricks to make a random object to hit the boss with to damage them or break there shield. When a boss is on their last bit of health, they normally lose all their arms and/or legs and sit there helplessly until you make the last shot to end them. Honestly if everyone was not made of Lego that be extremely dark for a kids game (well any game really).

I am probably making this game sound boring, and that is because it is for anyone without nostalgia for it, or under the age of six…!

However, I would not go as far to say it is a bad game. It set out to be a shooter game made for kids, and does a good job at it. Yes, it is simple and very forgiving but that kind of is the point.

Last thing I want to mention, the soundtrack for this game is surprisingly good. I would 100% look it up on YouTube

Did I just make a probably bad review just to say a game I played when I was a kid has good a soundtrack… Yes yes I did.