Upon booting up Hellpoint for the first time I distinctly remember uttering the words, "Oh, it's a Soulslike." I enjoy Soulslikes for the most part. Most of FromSoftware's output is usually highly entertaining. Even 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Sekiro, which might be my least favorite of all their Souls-y titles, is still a blast. But at this point, the genre has become surprisingly oversaturated with tons of developers all taking a crack at their own versions of a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dark Souls game. EA even made 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:a Star Wars-flavored Soulslike! You know a genre has cracked the mainstream when Darth Vaderꦜ shows up.
It's quite easy to be a bit burned out on the standard formula. The people at Cradle Games did try to stand out from the pack by infusing their game with some dark and creepy sci-fi elements. But aside from its setting, Hellpoint doesn't really do much to make it worth choosing over the litany of other Dark Souls clones.
Praise The Black Hole
Most of these projects tend to be dark fantasy games with dragons, castles, sun-worshipping knights, etc. Hellpoint instead goes for a look straight out of Event Horizon. You play as a newly created human - apparently known as a spawn - who is made by a being known as The Architect to investigate a derelict space station positioned perilously close to a black hole. Everyone inside has been turned into mindless, growling, shambling space-zombies. It's up to your character to explore the station and figure out just what the hell happened here.
The setting of Hellpoint is undeniably its best feature. I was incredibly unnerved by the alien feeling of this world. It's dark with occasional flashes of disturbing fluorescent light. Some creatures look like they've come from some kind of insane space cult or they're the result of an experiment gone wrong. Everything is fleshy, gooey, and weird. This feeling is intensified by the sound design of the space station. It creaks and drones on with otherworldly noises. It always feels like there's something making raspy moans right around the corner (mostly because there usually is.) Dark Souls games often had some aspects of horror, but Hellpoint reall𒀰y wants you to feel tense and anxious while you cautiously wander around.
That being said, Hellpoint isn't always an audio-visual marvel. Some of the enemy designs are pretty unimaginative or derivative of other creepy science fiction properties. Some even just looked like regular Dark Souls baddies with a sci-fi redesign. This isn't helped by the game's animations, which occasionally make these otherwise frightening monsters look incredibly goofy. One of the most egregious examples I can recall was an early boss called the Celestial Beast, which must be this game's mascot considering that it shows up during Tiny Build's logo at the start. It looked like a giant lizard-dog with a cobra head and was prone to awkwardly spinning in circles and getting caught on the walls. A lot of enemies tended to act glitchy and stiff, which negated a lot of the eerie vibe that the game sets up early on.
The sound design is all over the place. While it did a good job of making the station feel haunted, there were a lot of sound effects that seemed like they came from some royalty-free website. A lot of enemies had familiar-sounding cries and the weapons effects sounded flimsy. When your character dies they don't let out a mournful death rattle. It sounded more like an irritated groan, which was what I was often making when I died as well so I suppose it was appropriate. There were also times when the sound effects just wouldn't play when I was attacking or being attacked, which led to moments where combat was oddly silent.
They Forgot To Put The Soul In This Soulslike
Hellpoint is a Soulslike, and that's pretty much all I need to say about its gameplay. It follows the formula to a tee. Instead of souls, you have things called axioms. Instead of bonfires, you have rifts in time and space. Instead of an Estus flask, you have a weird needle that you inject into your neck (which has a goofy, stilted animation of its own.) There are even the common multiplayer components you find in most Souls games. The attacks feel the same, the menus look the same, the way everything works is the same. It's a sci-fi horror Dark Souls and it plays exactly how you think it will.
But to its credit, it does do the Soulslike formula competently and it has some original ideas. You have a device called an Omnicube which can perform helpful tasks like teleporting you back to the nearest rift or leaving little nodes of light to indicate where you've been. There's also a crafting system where you can make weapons or even special abilities. There's a dedicated jump button so you can make it across gaps easier (although platforming still feels as uncomfortable as it usually does in a Soulslike.) It even has split-screen co-op, which is a feature I never knew I wanted in one of these titles.
Honestly, though, I'm not sure I would want to grab a friend to play this together. Hellpoint just reminded of an unpolished version of a FromSoftware game. The framerate would dip during large-scale fights which made combat feel like a slog. The enemy A.I. was incredibly erratic. Sometimes they'd spot me from across the map, while other times I would be standing right beside someone and they wouldn't even notice. It wasn't hard to figure out an enemy's attack patterns, but some would have a huge health bar. So I would just have a prolonged battle that would drag on because of how much HP they had.
There's a certain charm to a good Soulslike game and Hellpoint doesn't quite have enough of it. This feels like a cover band playing the hits. They might do them all adequately and maybe add a few flourishes of their own, but they're just repeating something that someone else did much better.
Hellpoint-less
When it comes to Soulslike games, Hellpoint is far from the worst I've seen. There are plenty that are downright embarrassing in how much they try to rip off FromSoftware and how badly they fail. We've gotten some good stuff like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Hollow Knight or the teeth-grindingly hard 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Nioh franchise. We've also gotten a whole heap of trash Souls knock-offs that clog🌟 up Steam on an al🃏most daily basis. This falls in the middle. Not bad enough to despise, but not good enough to recommend.
Cradle Games at least tried to make something that was somewhat original in its tone and presentation, which is commendable. It doesn't do anything truly awful, and there are some unique features that aren't present in a lot of these titles. Plus, this has now made me desperately want a split-screen co-op Dark Souls game. Beyond that, Hellpoint is simply another Soulslike that might be an alright diversion if you can't wait for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Elden Ring to finally materializ🎃e but is otherwise forgettable.
A PC copy of Hellpoint was provided to TheGamer for this review. Hellpoint is available on PC, �🍷�Xbox One, and Playstation 4. A Nintendo Switch release is expected to come later this year.
