POSTED 8/12/11


POWERUP HEROES

Ubisoft
Xbox 360/Kinect

Hands up if you didn’t imagine growing up to be a superhero when you were a child. Yep, we’re not seeing many hands waggling about.

Our hands aren’t up either, for we couldn’t wait until the day the ability to rain fiery lightning death down upon our enemies switched on somewhere deep within us. Naturally, as most kids not named Peter Parker or Tony Stark discover, it’s all bullshit. Just another lie fed to us by mass media. Still, at least we don’t have to keep our invisible plane all squeaky Windex clean.

PowerUp Heroes is here to give kids – and adults - with healthy imaginations an alternative to eternal disillusionment. It nabs your carefully-constructed avatarical X-you, plops it into body-snuggly lycra and lets you loose on assorted villainous scum with the zotting and the kicking and the punching and the whatnot. Humiliate said villainous scum and you get to dack them, adding their duds to your wardrobe. First you get the suits, then you get their powers...

The requisite pieces are here, save for one. We hate saying it, but, like dead puppies, PowerUp Heroes isn’t much fun. There’s no great freedom to your fisticuffs. Only shite freedom. Now, some may say shite freedom’s better than no freedom, but our buddy William Wallace disagrees – so hard that he’s gone blue in the face.

You’ve limited ‘super attacks’, which need to power up before reuse; three for the suit you’re wearing, three for your spare which you can change into on the hop. Deplete these and you can go the traditional biff, but there’s no flow, or reliable movement reading. The blipkids agreed, so were running around like the red cordial junkies they are destroying Gamesblip HQ within minutes, rather than fulfilling super-fantasies.

Damn, where’d we put the Windex?

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