subject: Half-Minute Hero PSP Go Game Review - Download Half-Minute Hero For Free! [print this page]
While traditional role-playing games have their perks, they're often loaded with hours of tedious grinding and dozens of melodramatic cutscenes that take as long to watch as they do to unlock. Half-Minute Hero eschews all that in favor of fast-paced action, breathing fresh life into a genre in which minigames and stat management are often as prevalent as enjoyable quests and combat. The resulting experience is invigorating and fun throughout a variety of different gameplay styles, if only slightly marred by some redundancy and minor quirks.
Half-Minute Hero's most fun and rewarding element is its innovative time concept, which it cleverly implements by having you complete objectives in just 30 seconds. Such a strict time limit shifts the focus from standard RPG elements, like collecting items and exploring, to making every second count as you race against the clock, which is an invigorating change of pace. If whizzing through stages in 30 seconds sounds nigh impossible, that's because it usually is--but the intriguing Time Goddess mechanic allows you to extend the timer in exchange for cash collected from fallen enemies.
The game's real thrill comes in managing your remaining time, which adds intensity by forcing you to balance every activity--from equipment raids to leveling--against the clock. This enables you to speed through the game as you wish, or you can go that extra mile and risk global annihilation for rare gear and better stage rankings to show off to friends.
You'll spend roughly 15 hours completing the game, but Princess mode feels a bit shortchanged at an hour's length. The lack of any underlying depth, such as skills to master and dungeons to explore, limits your motivation to revisit Story mode for better scores. Fortunately, ad hoc multiplayer boosts replayability by pitting you against friends in a feverish race to defeat the boss in Hero mode. Though Half-Minute Hero may be troubled by repetitive objectives and trivial flaws, its cute presentation style and great speed-driven gameplay offer an enjoyable adventure you won't soon forget.
Half-Minute Hero PSP Go Game Review - Download Half-Minute Hero For Free!
