You want to know something? I feel like that 3D sandbox block games may be popular. I wonder how I can tell; could it be the many clones that were spawned by the genre’s success for years on end? Yeah, I think that’s it. Pixel Action Heroes isn’t the first game of its kind and it certainly won’t be last. However, the more important question is: Does it have what it takes to hold its own as a video game on the Nintendo Switch? Well, the answer is kind of complicated.
Graphics
Take a good guess what popular game Pixel Action Heroes looks like. I guess if ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I’m not really sure how else to describe the style other than that it looks exactly like Minecraft. It’s not like the Nintendo Switch isn’t capable of running these blocky visuals. One oddity I did notice is that there is a limit to how wide a randomly generated map could be. It’s actually rather easy to get to an end of the map’s boundaries which are guarded by invisible walls.
Audio
The sound department in Pixel Action Heroes is on the “meh” side of things. Sounds do happen, and they are the ones you’d expect for whatever actions you may do in the game. More notably are the voice clips for the game’s parodies of action stars. These are amateurish at best. At worst, they don’t even bother making a voice impression of the very person the character is supposed to imitate. Isn’t that the whole idea of the characters in this game?
Gameplay
At first, I thought Pixel Action Heroes would be an FPS game carrying the graphical style of Minecraft. In reality, it’s a Minecraft clone that happens to have FPS modes. For a budget-priced game, this does at least have a good dose of content for Minecraft players to eat up if they are the creative sort. The game’s Creative mode is what you’d expect by this point; you roam around a randomly generated map, and you’ll get to build whatever you want over it. You can even play Creative online to interact with other people.
More often than not, however, you may find people playing the Deathmatch modes instead (although a Soccer one is also available to pick). These honestly kind of suck. The mechanics and weapons are very shallow and it’s hard to tell who is on what team. People always get taken out in a single strike and they can never see it coming because the transition to “YOU DIED!” is so abrupt. There is also a single player mode where you can fight off waves of zombies but that tends to wear thin in due time.
Verdict
Overall, I can’t say I recommend Pixel Action Heroes too highly. The best it can do is just be another Minecraft clone. Whenever it does try doing something different, it doesn’t try hard enough. The traditional Creative mode is certainly fun to mess around with, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the selling point here. If you happen to want a Minecraft clone that follows along the same concept as Pixel Action Heroes, I recommend Battleminerz on the 3DS. Things are more impressively handled in it, particularly in its sandbox; while its own FPS mode isn’t really too skill-based either, there are some design choices made that make it feel more fun than frustrating.
Review copy provided by Cypronia
