Vertical Drop Heroes HD review: drop it like it's hot

If you never played the original Vertical Drop Heroes, you might not think that “jumping down from stuff” could be a good premise for a game. You might also think that merging concepts like 2D platforming and permadeath wouldn’t work. But I’ve played Vertical Drop Heroes HD, and I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong!

Vertical Drop Heroes HD is a new PC and Mac version of the older flash game Vertical Drop Heroes (which you can play here). Like the original flash game, HD was developed by Malaysia-based game dev Nerdook, and it was officially released today on platforms like GOG.com and the Humble Store for the price of $5.

Gameplay: droppin’

Vertical Drop Heroes HD (let’s call it VDH for short) is, at its heart, a very simple game. You’re a 2D character in a vertical world. You start at the top, and you need to get to the bottom. Manage to do that through each of the game’s 10 levels consecutively, and you win!

In practice, of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that! Between you and your destination are a large variety of enemies, traps, alarms that will alert more enemies, and a final boss you’ll generally have to take down to make it to the level exit. There are also prisoners of various types you can free to fight alongside you, keys you’ll have to find to unlock those prisoners, treasure to collect, and more.

You start VDH with a hero that has randomly-assigned skills and stats, although you can re-roll as many times as you want if you don’t like the options the game initially gives you. Don’t get too attached to your hero, though, because when you die, that hero is dead forever. You get to start over again at the beginning with a new character.

As you’ll discover, though, you’re never really starting from scratch, because the treasure you collect carries over from hero to hero, and it can be used to unlock stat boosts and other bonuses that will apply to all of your future characters. So, when you start again from level one on your 10th hero, you’ll be significantly stronger than you were with your first hero. That means that even though the game features permadeath and makes you restart from square one whenever you die (although unlockable warp areas will let you pay a few gold coins to skip levels), you’ll still feel like you’re making progress.

You also likely won’t care about having to replay the same levels over and over because while the visual theme of each level stays the same, the levels are procedurally generated so that the layout, the treasure locations, the enemies, and everything else is different each time you play. No two games are the same, so it’s all about building your stats and developing your skills rather than figuring out optimal routes like you might in other platforming games.

Thankfully, the controls feel great! I played Vertical Drop Heroes HD on the PC using a gamepad, and the controls were very natural. I liked it a little less on the keyboard, but that’s really just personal preference.

Bells and whistles