Iro Hero is a very challenging old-school style pixel art shoot ‘em up available on Nintendo Switch. Learn more about it in our Iro Hero review!

 

Iro Hero is a rapid-fire shooter with 16-bit era graphics. The story is about mankind becoming human batteries, enslaved for electricity, used to power up a ton of gadgets and gizmos. If this sounds a bit like The Matrix, you wouldn’t be far off! The Nyagu gifted humans with the ability to produce electricity, which at first sounds like a very cool thing. Imagine how you could use this to power your phone or tablet, or your entire home! But this was too good to last, and humankind became nothing more than a large supply of batteries for the Nyagu.

This is a very niche shoot ‘em up aimed at those of you who eat games like this one for breakfast, since you need to complete a stage before you run out of lives, and while this doesn’t go straight into bullet hell territory, it’s still a challenging experience where death awaits you every step of the way. You better have fast trigger fingers, because you’re definitely going to need them!

If you manage to beat a level, then you will get a chance to revive one of your ships, which is nice but not that big of a reward. If you want to survive, you’ll pretty much have to memorize each stage so that you can learn where enemies come from, how they’ll attack you and how they’ll move around the screen, because a few hits are all its going to take to end your existence.

On top of this, there’s a color polarity system by which you’ll need to flip the color of your firepower to the opposite of the color of the ships that you’re fighting. If there are blue enemy ships, then you’ll need to shoot red energy, and if they’re red, well, you get the picture. You can imagine how things get a bit hectic when you’re trying to stay alive, switching from one color to the other as you absorb bullets that are the same color as your ship.

The level design for each stage is colorful and highly polished, and the soundtrack is very upbeat, perfectly fitting the genre. There are nine stages to complete, and just as many bosses to defeat, so your skills will be fully tested as you try to get to the end of the game in one piece. This one does not mess around, and the difficulty only keeps increasing as you progress further and further into the game.

If you’re the type of player who likes to be challenged by a game, then this one will certainly scratch that itch. Iro Hero wears its influences with pride, and it brings a hardcore shoot ‘em up experience to Nintendo’s hybrid console, paying homage to the classics while ramping up the difficulty considerably. Are you up for the challenge?

Disclaimer
This Iro Hero review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by eastasiasoft.