Review: Hellpoint

What we liked!

• General gameplay groove: Normally, I tend to find introductions horrible/boring, but this tutorial map was an absolute challenge. It got me dying multiple times, and took me a full 45 minutes to actually get through. I must admit though that I am not the best RPG player around, but I am just not familiar with this sort of game. It has this Dark Souls vibe, where your every move should be more thought through than a normal “I run and slice my way through here”. This surprised me in an amazing way.
• Smooth continuation: It feels as if Cradle Games put some extra effort into making sure that the game feels amazingly smooth and stunning to play. Every animation is well thought out, and it just shows that they paid attention to detail.
• Game progression: During the game, you pick up multiple items and currency objects which you can use to gear out your character for battle, or to upgrade its statistics. A basic system you can expect in these games. But it adds in extra Dark Souls elements, and an item system like some of the bigger games around. Also, something I did not expect, is that going through the different item menu’s went very smoothly.
• Help call: If you do have friends who play Hellpoint as well, then you can “call in help” during the game. This basically means you invite your friends to come and play co-op with you in the level you are in at that moment. This feels like a nice touch. Sometimes it feels like you even need your friends to help you out, and having that option can make for an amazing moment of friends dying to bosses.

Somewhere between

• Controller only: On the Steam home page you get warned that the game “strongly recommends the use of a controller” which was rather obvious during gameplay. I attempted playing a little bit with mouse and keyboard, even with modified key bindings, but it is just 50x more intuitive to use a controller. Whilst that XBOX controller or PS controller is connected, you just feel one with the spawn you are in game. Great controller support I must say, but would have loved some more mouse and keyboard action since I’m a die hard mouse and keyboard user.

What we disliked

• Game difficulty: This game IS NOT SIMPLE. It’s honestly really hard if you are not used to these games. So, if you are an impatient player, I would not recommend this game. What could be a nicer touch, is Cradle Games allowing you to pick a difficulty for the single player part, so it’s simpler to play through.