Patchwork Heroes Review

            Like all the portable games I play these days, this one was played almost exclusively during my lunch break at work in a small room with several people staring at me, wondering why a grown man enjoys lunchables and videogames so much. And like Bangai-O Spirits before it, it has become something of an institution for me. I played it almost every week day for like 30-40 minutes for over a month. And in this case, I played it for 30 hours. That's a lot. 

            Patchwork Heroes is a 2d game in which you and a small crew must crawl around on a giant flying airship. Your objective is to saw it to pieces until you get it very small, causing it to crash. You must do this before time runs out and it gets to your village and bombs it HARD. You crawl around on the ship with the analog nub or the arrows. L makes the view zoom out as long as it is held down. You will usually need to switch between this zoomed-out view and the normal view quite frequently to keep an eye on your surroundings. Holding down circle makes you saw. While sawing, you move slowly. If you separate a piece of the ship completely, the smaller part falls away, so ideally you want to chop whatever is left of the ship in half to get rid of the most at once (although this is almost never possible once you get into later levels. I'll explain why soon). The bigger the piece of warship you chop off, the longer the airship will temporarily stall, which freezes the countdown timer. Pressing square makes one of your squad members stay in place with a bomb that will go off in a few seconds (they parachute away as the explosion goes off). This is useful for taking out areas that are reinforced metal, which you can't saw through. However, each member of your squad also acts as a hit point, so you must be aware that you are trading a hit point for an explosion. You can have up to four people on your squad. You usually start a stage with a few and can also rescue others who are trapped in prison cells on the airships.

               Guarding each level are robotic defenses. These range from stationary missile turrets to insect-like robots that chase you. Each robot has a different AI routine. Some chase you down mercilessly. Others move in a set pattern. Others only attack while you are sawing, or when you aren't sawing. There is quite a variety, and there are usually quite a few in each level. You can block enemy attacks by hiding behind a shield by holding R. You can do this indefinitely, but the clock is always ticking... Surprisingly, you can't directly attack enemies. The only way to kill them is to saw them off with the piece of ship they are standing on or  trap them in the blast of a bomb. Killing enemies fills up your mojo meter. If you have any mojo, you can press triangle to activate a mojo attack. While you are in this state, the mojo meter drains rapidly. You run quite fast, sawing as you go, and you can saw through reinforced metal in this state. You are a little hard to steer, though, as you are propelled forward without stopping and have to take big wide turns instead of sharp ones. You can often try to set yourself up for a mojo attack that chops the ship in half, which in turn nets you lots more mojo so you can go and try to repeat the feat. 

             This all might sound somewhat basic. It's easy to understand, but the game really sets itself apart with its incredibly clever level design. Once you get a few levels in, the design of each ship is really, really smart. There are some that are very complex and interlinked in many ways, almost like a little maze. Others seem basic but have different sections connected in multiple little walkways that all need to be cut. Others seem straigh forward until you see the little bits of reinforced metal you have to find a way to deal with. Many also featuring strategically placed enemies that chase down and repair any cuts you make in the ship. Many levels also feature objectives you must complete, such as saving prisoners with time-bombs on them or not chopping off a certain part of the ship, or using timefreeze power-ups and stalls to complete a level with only 5 seconds on the clock. All these levels are quite different from each other, but they are all very efficient at making your task of slicing the ship anything but straightforward. You need a plan in order to chop that thing up in time, especially if you want to rescue all the optional prisoners as well.

            There are many levels. I played all 30 story levels and all 50 challenge mode levels on normal and pro difficulty levels. That's 160 levels played, and I was having a blast all the way to the end. It's quite challenging even on normal mode, and pro mode makes everything move maybe 2-3 times as fast, which is hilarious and makes even basic enemies very deadly. Challenge mode, which gives you alternate win conditions such as winning without sawing, or without bombs, or any number of other conditions, gets really out of control toward the end. It's quite challenging but so engaging that you won't mind re-trying its hardest levels 20 times.

            The game also has a great art design, nice music, and a cool story. The art looks like Russian steam-punk or something. The airships look like giant quilts. The menus are all animated tube screens, mechanical gears and gadgets, and projections. There are also little mechanically animated dolls all over the place in the menus. It's all in nice dull colors. The music is also great. There is a lot of horn and woodwind work that fits perfectly with the visuals and is a nice change as you usually don't hear that kind of stuff featured so prominently in a videogame. The story focuses on a captain in the airship fighting squad named Titori, the missions he and his friends undertake to defend their home town from the airships, and the things that start to come to light about the airships when he meets Asli, a young woman who joins his community and starts to ask him to retrieve airship parts for her while he is out sawing airships. This story starts out pretty strongly, and I had high hopes for it, but it doesn't finish as strongly as I would have liked. It's still pretty solid though, and also adorable.

            The game has a strong sense of theme to it in the way it does many different things. For instance, each time a squad-mate dies, the screen temporarily freezes and their name and age pops up on the screen along with the word “dead.” It's kind of heart breaking, especially since these people end up in a graveyard that you can visit between levels. You can even think of them fondly and place flowers on their graves. The game also encourages you to try and save as many prisoners as possible for moral reasons. Characters say thing like “You wouldn't leave them behind, would you?” Each person you rescue (and there are a few hundred) has a little write-up about them and a unique portrait. You also get a nice sense of progression as each mission earns you pay depending on your performance, and you increase in rank after you get paid a certain amount. Rank increases usually unlock bonuses, like songs to listen to or special cutscenes and even a gallery with 99 wonderful pieces of concept art. Even when you don't earn a rank-up or reward, the game will comment on big accomplishments, such as congratulating you on beating story mode or challenge mode on pro, or completing the game having rescued every prisoner. Unfortunately this is one of those games where you need to have played the game on every difficulty for your save to read 100%. Not a big deal, but it bothers me a little that after playing on the normal and pro difficulties, I would still need to play every stage on easy and hard to get to 100%. I'm not going to do that. I wish beating a stage on pro made it count as if you've beaten it on every difficulty.

            It's hard to think of any flaws in Patchwork Heroes. I'm not sure there really are any. I don't think I'll give it a perfect score, but it certainly flirts with it. It might be there if the story took a little different direction and had a stronger conclusion. The game's simple concept mixed with its smart implementation and scenario design and wonderful aesthetics make it great fun for the long haul. It's a great game, tier 2.