Winning The Election One Bullet At A Time: Not A Hero
House of Guns, Frank Underwood's dream game
As anthropomorphic animals go, Not A Hero's [official site] giant time-traveling purple mayoral candidate BunnyLord (no prizes for guessing the species of this guy) is up there with the best of them. His cover-hiding, gun-toting campaign manager, aka you, is a regular old human tasked with taking a tough stance on crime as part of the election run. "Tough stance" here meaning "extreme Hotline Miami-style violence" playing out in a side-scrolling world. Vote for me to get a trailer below.
Along with ex-assassin Steve, there are eight other characters to control as you slide, tackle and dismember your way through levels. As you'd expect, the chioce of character determines your available armaments and abilities.
The game itself is a split between bullet dodging run-and-gun and a cover system that's specifically designed to be quick, and easy to move in and out of. The aim is to keep the free-flowing nature of the combat intact while preventing every moment from becoming a bullet hell of incoming fire.
If you're a fan of the looks, as I am, the quite-far-from-serious ISO-Slant page describes the 2¼D look they were going for. Jokes aside, the perspective is great for picking out relevant details without reducing backgrounds to boring masses of non-colour.
The newly announced release date is May 7th, and there will be playable builds on display at PAX East in Boston, SXSW Gaming in Austin and EGX Rezzed in London.