Helskate REVIEW
There aren’t many projects dedicated to skate culture, and there aren’t any games at all that add dashing action to tricks and driving along power lines. And it was the unusual genre combination of Helskate that caught our attention – the concept of a skate-action roguelike sounded very intriguing, and the reviews from early access were mostly laudatory. But there’s a nuance: what is quite forgivable for a project in Early Access, no one will forgive in a full release. Let’s see how much the game managed to retain its positive qualities after release.
Helskate’s slightly awkward but charming introduction introduces us to the game’s protagonist, Anton Falcon. He’s a simple skater from Wertheim who aspires to simple skater things: recognition, fame, and the opportunity to wipe the nose of Garland, the arrogant ruler of Wertheim. But on the hero’s path to realizing his ambitions, there is an insurmountable million-point bar, a humiliating defeat right in front of the local ruler, and a skateboard broken in half. The latter serves as a catalyst for awakening the power hidden inside Anton, which will help him reach the desired heights. But first, he will have to prove his coolness over and over again in many runs. Each run has a typical roguelike structure and borrows different elements from colleagues in the genre. But two main sources of inspiration for Helskate are especially clear. For example, the mechanics of increasing the overall difficulty in sync with the time in the game are clearly taken from the Risk of Rain series. The principle is this: the longer you are in the run, the more difficult the overall process is – enemies get stronger, deal more damage and get more powerful abilities. And in order not to encounter a completely tooth-breaking challenge, it is worth pushing.
The overall process, leveling, progression and reward system in runs clearly resonate with Hades and other similar projects. The development of the hero consists of permanent improvements that can be issued for resources obtained during forays, as well as obtained from the boosts collected during the runs themselves. The first category includes, for example, tattoos: Anton can get, say, a heart, which increases the maximum health reserve, or lightning, which will increase the available supply of dashes. You can also improve the current skateboard or buy a new one, which will provide the hero with a new weapon with a different principle of use – for example, fast shurikens or, conversely, a more solid heavy hammer. But whatever weapon choice you make, success will largely depend on the assembly within the run.
There are many different upgrades offered during the forays: there are wardrobe items that add elemental power to attacks, and VHS tapes that attach an additional effect to a certain trick, such as launching homing missiles or tornadoes. Also scattered around each arena are additional sources of skating prowess: stickers and magazines. By sticking, say, “Eagle Eye” on your skateboard, you will increase the chance of a critical attack, “Happy Locust” will increase the damage from poisonous attacks, and “Hooligan Exterminator” will increase the damage to enemies with health above ninety percent. “Gloss” can both increase the level of tricks in a certain category and increase the number of points for a specific move.
Increasing bonuses from tricks is a fundamental necessity, because in almost every arena the main goal will always be to collect a certain number of points. With each new level, the threshold for passing increases, and in order to keep up with it, you need to properly master grinds, flips, manuals, grabs and slides (including on walls). And even better – learn to perform long combos consisting of different tricks in order to evenly increase both the base number of points and their multiplier. This part of the game is implemented perfectly: there are enough movements of varying degrees of complexity, and the process of learning, testing and combining them is exciting.
The combat system is much simpler: light attack, heavy attack, dash. There aren’t any intricate, deadly combos, and the combat isn’t particularly challenging, but when combined with the speed and the need to maintain a series of tricks (defeating enemies gives you a temporary shield for combos), the fights provide a certain amount of fun. And at some point, they also expose a lot of the game’s fundamental problems.
Helskate is a really fun game, but it has its share of problems. For example, it is not polished enough for a full release – here and there you can find small bugs or graphical roughness, which, although not critical, spoil the overall impression. It is annoying when a series of tricks breaks because Anton, instead of sliding along the wall, simply falls through the building; or when our hero suddenly flies into space after contact with an enemy.
In principle, most of the project’s shortcomings are hidden in the combat system. More precisely, in the battles themselves – primarily because the camera in Helskate is not very well configured. As soon as you start a battle, it starts to shake wildly, so much so that it can literally make you sick.
By the way, bosses in Helskate are also a significant problem. Battles with them turned out to be a very unsightly and incomprehensible mess, in which it is quite difficult to even just navigate, not to mention reading the enemy’s attacks (this is partly true for ordinary opponents) or understanding the possibilities for an increased onslaught. Even the basic principles of such clashes are resolved frankly lousy. For example, the battle with Sean, a giant skeleton on a monstrous skateboard, went like this: the boss constantly jumped away from Anton at a respectable distance, and so often that as soon as Anton managed to get there, Sean was already making a new jump, not giving even the slightest opportunity to inflict damage on him. An absolutely unfair and tiring fight, during which there was a distinct impression that it was not tested at all.
In any case, none of the mini-bosses pose a real threat, and once you understand the basic principles of Helskate, hardly a single run will take you more than twenty minutes (ten of which will be taken up by the stupid fight with Sean). And here comes the other problem – the game quickly, very quickly for a roguelike, exhausts itself. Playing through the same levels over and over again becomes boring, following the development of the story is uninteresting, and the entire park of tricks, techniques and abilities will be studied inside and out in five hours or less.
But despite all the shortcomings, Helskate can be called a unique game (because there are almost no analogues) that combines elements of action and roguelike, bringing nostalgia of arcade games. Despite all the shortcomings, such as problems with graphics and controls, it offers interesting gameplay that can attract the attention of skateboarding and action game lovers. It is a relatively short experience, but it has a lot to offer and has a cool aesthetic that will probably make you come back to the game more than once.
