Technical problems undermine a promising premise.
One True Hero combines 3D platforming and 3D Zelda into a challenging and ironic adventure game. You play as a farmer wielding a magical and powerful sword. Donning your green tunic, you set out to defeat the evil that took the land. From the start, One True Hero’s writing and character interactions stand out as strong features. The characters are downright funny, wonderfully animated, and often serve as parodies of Zelda staples. For example, one character states early on that whenever something bad happens, someone appears dressed in green and wielding a sword.
Gameplay focuses on navigating a mostly linear world filled with platforming challenges, occasional small puzzles, and combat encounters. You can pick up collectibles along the way. Use this to access special challenging platform stages outside of the main progression. The platforming is simple, but overall it feels pretty good. Unfortunately, level design is often ambiguous. Sometimes it feels like you’re trying to platform your way through a game that wasn’t always designed with platforming in mind. The random pieces of geometry had no collision detection at all, and I often found myself in territory where I shouldn’t have been, simply because the game didn’t know exactly where I wanted it to go. It’s simple but effective, and generally free of quirks that plague the platform. As you progress through the story, your skill tree unlocks new combat abilities to keep combat from becoming obsolete.
One area where One True Hero eventually hits a snag is in its bugs. I have encountered bugs on an incredibly regular basis. I was able to reproduce almost all of these on a regular basis. Most of them aren’t even caused by doing anything particularly abnormal on my part. I was able to push and jump through levels. On another occasion, I respawned completely below the level geometry. At one point, I accidentally moved the box out of reach, causing the game to autosave immediately and not being able to reload. I don’t think it’s all bad). Less serious but impactful visual bugs are also common, such as the periodic loss of character and object textures in the middle of cutscenes. are both excellent. This is ultimately a very well optimized but buggy game.
One True Hero feels like a very early access game. There’s a lot of great game potential here, but it’s buried under so many problems that it’s hard to see through the fog.I usually enjoy it when One True Hero works. But there are so many issues that need to be pushed through. Its script is downright engaging, the characters are alive and well, and he maintains a steady frame rate and resolution even as he makes his jumps over the playable area. With some aggressive patches, we might have something here, but it’s not perfect yet.
