Whilst potentially this review is poorly timed, Arsonist Heaven is a jetpack flamethrowing 2D action game that is currently being remastered with a fair few quality of life improvements. I bought the original on deep sale earlier this year as I was sucked in by that jetpack flame thrower dangling carrot. Sadly, I wished I hadn’t as this is a missed opportunity.
Each level in Arsonist Heaven is like someone has randomly drawn out square blocks to create a mash up of caves and cliffs with no rhyme of reason to them. Levels can be traversed relatively openly as the goal for each of them is to kill everything. That can be done in any order as the various beasties roam back and forth on platforms or aerial space for you to pick off with your weapon of choice. Platforming is stiff but not terrible, in a rough edged 2D budget indie title way and with its heavily pixelated retro aesthetic, the rough platforming is forgiven as you get used to its underpowered jumps over time.
The selling points here are the jetpack and the flamethrower but both are severely limited by a lack of fuel pick ups to run them. Jetpacks should be used as an absolute last resort as you only get a couple of seconds fuel before it conks out. You can maybe get three leaps out of it at best. Whilst you can jump and climb around levels without it, there’s not much fun in that when a jetpack is on offer. The flamethrower comes in three varieties of flame length and strength but equally burns through its own separate fuel pick ups at pace too. Initially I went in blazing and soon ran out of flames and ammo to actually finish the levels. You learn very quickly to be economical with attacks in the main levels. Thankfully enemies are largely quite dumb so you can pick them off from a relative distance or char them a bit, leap to another platform as they charge at you, and then jump back to rinse and repeat.
Where the difficulty of Arsonist Heaven spikes is in the boss battles. Bosses are fast, ammo is scarce and the bosses feel like you’ve whiplashes from an easy game to a brutal one without warning. Bosses follow you around like your catnip and since they can run at almost your speed, you’ll spend most of the boss fights deciding when its time to take damage to get a few flames in and when to hide from them. Whilst hard, the bosses weren’t hugely interesting. They were just fast. Add to that some cheap platforming deaths and level designs that rarely change and you have an experience that is too constricted and dull to stand out.
A lot of my criticisms of Arsonist Heaven look like they’ll be addressed to some degree in the remaster. The remaster will apparently add more fuel pick ups, pitfall indicators for death jumps and to stop enemies feeling on rails, they’ll run away in fear randomly when they are set on fire. These things are lovely and will go some way to improving the game but unless the level design is made a bit more interesting, I can’t see the remaster pushing Arsonist Heaven into a higher tier 2D indie title. At least it’ll give you more time with your jetpack and flamethrower though, and that’ll be no bad thing. Disappointing.
Images were taken from the Arsonist Heaven Remastered Steam page.
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