Heroes Rise: The Prodigy

I first played Heroes Rise well over a decade ago, when Choice of Games was first inviting authors to write for their professional label. Heroes Rise received quite a lot of criticism for its railroaded design back when it was first released. A long time later, I’m taking another look at this bit of CoG history.

As has been said before, the story is quite railroaded. Speaking of which, this railroad does forcefully take you to a couple of sections where you get brutally defeated before crawling over to your next challenge. The plot also feels very convoluted, with twists and revelations thrown at you in a chaotic fashion.

There is also a RO whom I simply didn’t like. That said, the game gives you plenty of choices to say no, then disregards them all anyway. (why??) After making clear (multiple times) that I was (sincerely) not interested in her, she planted a kiss on me anyway and the game went on to suggest that we had a thing going on. Honestly, I love having romance in games, but this didn’t feel good at all.

The writing is fairly solid, with plenty of action-packed scenes in the middle of the madness and chaos. It’s fun, but could have benefitted from a more organized plot. Additionally, the game also touches on some hot issues like nuclear arms and real-life geopolitical matters, but these were handled so lightly and fleetingly that I think the game would have been better without them.

On my latest playthrough, my performance was about average. Despite the linearity, the game does build up a numerical score for you over your playthrough, and hands you your report card at the end. Still, this magic number still felt detached from the various experiences I had over the course of the story. I could have played again to try to obtain a better score, but simply didn’t feel like it.

Heroes Rise was probably solid at a time where there were few good choicescript games. Nevertheless, I feel that this hasn’t aged well.