It feels odd to describe Helskate as 'fiercely original' when it is so obviously two games mashed together, but I'm going to do it anyway.𒀰 That wasn't the start of the article, just a practise run. Everyone ready? Okay, great. Helskate is a fiercely original game. Skating into Hell and firing blue serpents summoned by my heelflips into the eyes of demons is an electrifying experience that builds on nostalgia and hones it into something new and powerful. Though the early acces✨s version of the game is not without its issues, everything I've played just makes me want to melon, nosegrind, and party like it's 1999 - or should that be 666?

Helskate is brought to us by director Steve Swink, who worked on Tony Hawk's Underground, so while it does borrow liberally from the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tony Hawk's series, there's some shared history there. 'Borrow' doesn't quite do it justice though. It is Tony Hawk's, just with added Hades. I played this last summer at Gamescom and Swink even remarked that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:he could see the muscl👍e 🎉memory in action as I launched into a variety of tricks. There were times playing Helskate when I was off in the corner trying for a high score then as I landed and tried to revert, instead launched into a spinning✱ blade attack and 🧜remembered I was supposed to be slaying demons.

Tony Hades...

I'm sure if Helskate gets anything close to the level of success Palworld did, there will be discussions over how much it leans on the THPS formula, and whether Swink's presence should be a mitigating factor there. I'm less sure tha♏t developer Phantom Coast wants every discussion of Helskate to start with 'it's like Tony Hawk's', but being similar to THPS is not a criticism. It's not even 'well we're not getting THPS 5 anytime soon so this is the next best thing'. I see the familiarity not only as a core selling point for Helskate, but as a foundation to its uniqueness.

We didn'🐻t get Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 back in 2015. You're mistaken. You imagined it,🐭 along with Scrubs Season 9.

We've had a lot of skateboarding games recently, but most of them come from the Ska📖te school of thought, where realism and technical perfection offer far greater satisfact🐓ion than landing a 1080 Japan into a Muska Nose Manual before launching off a new ramp for a 360 Varial McTwist. I prefer the arcade feel of Tony Hawk's, and Helskate channels that and builds on it perfectly.

Here's why I don't care about Helskate using the Tony Hawk's system. When making a skating ga🔯me, you essentially have three options, albeit with thousands of variables. You either devise a way to get the realistic feel of skating distilled into a few button taps, you invent your own arcade system, or you use THPS. The third option, th♏e one Helskate uses, makes things much easier for players. When I learned of this blue serpent I could summon with a heelflip, I already knew how to do a heelflip. It means players don't have to learn the complexities of movement and can just enjoy everything Helskate adds to the formula.

While you can debate over the ownership of mechanics in this way, most popular genres exist because a bunch of games copied what one game did first and it became the norm. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:My main issue with Palworld was that it lacke♌d a visual language, and that's not a problem for Helskaওte.

...Pro Satan

So, what does Helskate add to the formula? That's where Hades comes in, and here the inspirations are far looser and come with a lot of originality. The task before you is to skate all the way through the depths of Hell to challenge the king of Hell himself, and ask why you were condemned. To do this, you need to make your way through a roguelike challenge where you slay monsters and choose which arena you take on next, banking on a higher risk for a higher reward, searching fo💎r specific loot, or taking the path of least resistance. The early access version only has the first world (of a planned three), but gives you a taste of the experience.

In order to slay the demons in your way, you unlock new attacks to do various types of damage, but it all comes down to a quick attack, a powerful attack, and a dodge. Stringing these attacks into combos makes them far more powerful, so you're encouraged to see the skating and slaying as one entity, rather than skating separately to generate coins and then attacking in the traditional way. It's a♐n excellent union between the two ideas, and only flows so smoothly in the first place because you're adding to the THPS mechanics you already know rather than learning something new.

In some ways, it's limiting to have the expectation that your players will au𝔉tomatically know how THPS works, but there's likely to be a large amount of crossover, and it is not a difficult game to learn in the first place. Though you'll have teething problems as a newcomer, you'll make sense of it soon enough, and we see a lot of games dilute their values to appeal to the largest possible audience. Helskate instead sets its stall out with a vision, and the commitment to that vision makes it far stronger.

The Bails

Helskate has shot up the list of my most anticipated games of the year, but it's still not perfect. Early access games never are, so that's to be expected, but I'd be remiss not to discuss the performance. Helskate is PC only and I have a so-so gaming laptop, and therefore am not always the best judge of these issues. PC is my least favourite platform to play on, mostly due to per🙈formance issues - whether caused by my own old tech or incessant fiddling required in the settings, I struggle to tell if it's my fault or a game's fault i💟f it doesn't work.

However, three of us at TheGamer struggled with opening Helskate. Oddly enough, it was always pretty fluid when in motion, but when booting it up or loading new levels, it chugged along for several minutes and sometimes gave up altogether. While it's not Steam Deck Verified yet, it's the perfect 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Steam Deck sort of game, so it shouldn't 🎃need top o🌟f the line tech to drop into a half pipe like this.

There's also less enemy variation than I'd like from a full game if this one of three world's represents a third of the entire experi♏ence, but there's enough variation to suggest more is to come, rather than just one type repeated over and over.

All in all Helskate is an excellent riff on the sk🔜ating genre that offers electric combat with nostalgic rhythms in a colourful🔥 and punk-fuelled energy drink of a game. It needs to fix its performance issues and tune up the variety, but I've seen enough to declare this my first hidden gem of 2024. I hope the early access period polishes it into an impressive shine soon.