You are currently viewing Why I’m Having Trouble Reviewing ‘Not A Hero’

Why I’m Having Trouble Reviewing ‘Not A Hero’

Not A Hero game stillAs someone with a fairly limited amount of time to pursue my passion for writing about games, the backlog of titles I want to get around to is enormous. May saw a lot of cool games get released, and my free time has only lessened due to the release of c earlier this week. One game I have been playing is , the latest title from Roll7 of OlliOlli fame and Devolver Digital. I was actually having a blast with Not A Hero, with its quirky humor and fast and vicious gameplay, but the further I get the more issues I keep running into, and now I’ve hit a brick wall that prevents me from continuing.

I’m one of a handful of players experiencing massive performance issues with the game. Based on what I’ve read in the forums, most are playing the game without issue, but there are several topics discussing framerate drops, freezing, crashes, or even the inability to start the game in the first place. This seems to be affecting people regardless of hardware, with reports from gamers using aging laptops all the way up to high-end systems with brand new GPUs. I’m a member of that first group by the way, being a poor college graduate drowning in student loans. The devs even have a pinned post discussing these issues and potential fixes until they can release a patch, but none of these workarounds have worked for me.

The game started out running just fine. I was getting a smooth, consistent framerate and enjoying every second of the game’s over-the-top brand of violence and crass, nonsensical humor. Then I’d occasionally get times where the framerate dropped to the level of a Powerpoint presentation, rendering the game completely unplayable until I quit and booted it up again. Now, at just over halfway through the game, I’m getting stutters and micro-freezes literally every time I slide or shoot when enemies are on the screen. No amount of fiddling with suggested workarounds and reinstalls have fixed my issue.

So here I am, unable to continue playing a game I otherwise really enjoy. As you can imagine, this makes the game hard to fully review as well. Lots of people are enjoying the game right now without issue, I’m just one of the unlucky ones encountering bizarre performance issues that, as of right now, are unresolved. I’ll keep an eye on Not A Hero‘s Steam updates and possibly revisit it when the promised patches go live. Until then, I’m in a strange position where I can’t fully recommend the game due to my experience with it, yet can’t deny that plenty of people aren’t encountering any issues at all.