Publisher: SCEA

Developer: Acquire

Release Date: 3/18/2010

Available Exclusively On

Patchwork Heroes is one of those strange, quirky games that makes you really appreciate indie games. Heroes are all about strategy and are less puzzle-like, and I liked this a lot. You play as a team of kids who are hell-bent on destroying airships and scrapping them for parts. There’s really no story involved, but the cutscenes break up the levels nicely.

The main mechanic of the game is sawing parts off a 2D ship. Each ship is measured in feet at the beginning of the stage, and your goal is to cut it all off. There are obstacles on the ship, such as enemies and even prisons, that have your friends trapped. If you break them out, you can use them as bombs to blow up parts of the ship that can’t be cut by your saw, such as metal. Some enemies can patch up what you cut, so you have to distract them by cutting an area that’s not near your target and watching them fall.

You can find power-ups that let you move faster, slow downtime, etc. Once you saw off enough pieces, you can get a special power that will let you continually see up to a certain amount of time without stopping. After you sawed off almost the entire ship, you had to avoid the self-destructing bombs and saw off one final piece. While all this sounds easy, it’s kind of fun at the same time. The graphics are really charming, and the 2Dness of them brings the whole game to life.

I honestly think this is one of the best sleeper handheld hits of the year. It should have gone multi-platform on the DS and iPhone and would have done better on touch screens. Nevertheless, Patchwork Heroes is a great game to pass the time and shouldn’t be passed up.