Dull and repetitive cartoon-style shooter
While the premise behind H.E.D.Z sounds intriguing and which offers a few inventive ideas, it ultimately turns out to be little more than a standard actioner with only fairly limited appeal. It's reasonably fun while it lasts, but it's not going to linger on anyone's computer for very long thanks to its lacklustre gameplay and generally undeveloped feel. Players take on the role of an alien who has the rather useful ability to swap out its head for different versions and which confer various weapons and abilities, like speed boosts and the like. The goal of the game is simple and just requires you to engage in combat with other aliens, killing them and then collecting their heads to add to your arsenal and with the ultimate aim of collecting all 225 heads and racking up the best score. You have a backpack which holds five heads and can swap freely between these, while there is also a store to hold any others collected but which requires you to spend points in order to access them, thus affecting your overall score. There's little else to the game to be honest and it simply consists of various deathmatch-style arenas to run around. Visually and aurally, H.E.D.Z. isn't actually bad, with a nice line in bright environments and sprites to enjoy and some slick tunes and effects to back up the action. However, while it is fun initially, as you find the new heads and check out the variety of weapons, the action soon palls as it becomes apparent that there is nothing else going on and there is little variety to be had. Even the younger audiences at whom the game is obviously aimed at are likely to pick up on this pretty quickly, so unless your requirements are very low, this is best skipped.
