“Kill mutants. Absorb their remains. Mutate into something stronger every run. Stack insane power combos and survive overwhelming hordes in this fast, chaotic, highly replayable action roguelite bullet hell.” – Steam Description

Ground Zero Hero is a Survivors-like that stays pretty true to the genre as far as gameplay and progression. As stated in the Steam description, it’s a bullet hell, roguelite style game with a number of levels and power-ups to gain along the way. The unique take on the genre comes in the form of a hunger system and a day/night cycle in which the night gets waves of much harder enemies but you can seek shelter to sleep through until morning.

There are a number of power ups to be found as well in the form of one-time aoe damage dealers like not yet detonated explosives or dead trees to knock over, or you can find a mount to ride temporarily through hordes of foes.

To fill your hunger, you will find pinatas scattered around the map that will drop candy or you can also sleep to refill your hunger and restore a small percentage of your health. In order to sleep, you will need to find bunkers that dot the landscape but each can only be used once per run.

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Mutation Time

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As you slaughter the denizens of the wasteland, you’ll gain experience and with that experience you will choose a new mutation as you level up. Each mutation not only changes your gameplay but the way that your character looks as well. This is always a huge bonus for these kinds of games for me as I love to see the monstrosity I’ve become over the course of the level.

At the start, there are only a handful of mutations available to you but you will unlock more with subsequent runs. Some of my favorites included a radiation aura, which damaged enemies around me, and a massive fist I could use to slam the ground and create a massive shockwave.

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Meta-progression: The upgrades that matter.

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If you’re familiar with the genre then you know, you are meant to die. A lot. Every run you’ll collect bottle caps (Yes, really.) and use them in the upgrade menu between runs to boost your characters permanently. This makes future runs a little bit easier every time until, hopefully, you’re crushing everything that is unfortunate enough to be on the screen at the same time as you.

Most of the options here are pretty basic. Max HP, movement speed, and extra bottle caps to name a few. The one that stands out for this game is the added statistic of “Bonkers Chance”. Each offensive mutation has the chance to “Go Bonkers” which changes the behavior of the attack and massively increased the damage for a short time. Spitting a fireball turns into a constant fire breath attack, the hammer fist mentioned earlier strikes the ground with the force of a nuclear blast, and the tentacle attack sweeps in an arc around you rather than just slapping out in front of you.

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Ok, but how is it?

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While the game does fit all the criteria of a Survivors-like, it doesn’t do much in the way of expanding upon it. The hunger system doesn’t do much more than force you to continue to wander instead of staying in one place to farm experience. There are pinatas everywhere on the map and sleeping at night fully fills your bar.

The mutations are interesting but as the screen fills with more and more enemies, the camera pulls back and you see less detail on your character. For a game that put so much effort into changing the physical appearance of your character, that seems like it’s shooting itself in the foot in that regard.

The biggest flaw of this game is that it is entirely dependent on the “Going Bonkers” mechanic. Even after leveling specific mutations a few times, at no point do they ever feel like they’re enough to deal with the massive hordes of enemies constantly chasing you. This forces you to continue to wander for power ups or hope that you trigger the bonkers effect of one of your attacks, which by the way starts at a 1% chance and really only gets up to about a 5% chance on average per run. Most of the game feels like running until RNJesus takes the wheel and clears the screen temporarily.

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• Graphics– The graphics, by admission, take heavy influences from The Simpsons, Futurama, and Rick and Morty. The vampires are straight up Mr. Burns, some of the larger monsters are just Homer or Human Bender, and a lot of the basic enemies look like something Rick has accidentally created or killed in his journeys.
• Gameplay– Gameplay is very basic even for the genre. You move around and avoid enemies or projectiles while looking for items of note in the map and letting things die around you. This really suffers though as your build doesn’t feel like it matters in most cases as you wait to “Go Bonkers” or look for a temporary power-up to clear enemies for you.
• Sound– The sound design is decent. I didn’t hate it, there were no weird spikes and everything had a place but I couldn’t tell you about the soundtrack. Nothing stood out here.
• Controls– Controls are pretty standard for this kind of game. WASD to move, the mouse to navigate the menu.
• Story– I think there was an attempt at a story here at some point. This wasn’t just a demo copy I was playing, it was an early but full release of the game. It mentioned the wasteland once and there seems to be some kind of theme of aliens every now and then but there is no real story to be found. The Steam page boasts “dark humor” but I cannot find anything that would indicate why there’s mutated creatures, horror creatures like vampires and werewolves, and aliens other than “for the giggles”. Normally, I’d negate this category entirely but the Steam page says there’s a story and I can’t find one.