The bosses follow the Souls-like formula: the player fights them and gets a sense of their attack patterns and animations. When it comes to the core of Souls-like games, that is, the bosses: they’re overall visually intriguing and mechanically well-done. There isn’t a massive equipment selection, but the moderate variation of weapons types combined with the quality of the existing weapons gives the current selection much weight. This gives the player a sense of owning a certain playstyle and having a signature loadout. Equipment can be manually upgraded with increased stats and mods but dealing damage with a specific weapon will give it further stat upgrades and unlock its special active abilities. What ultimately sells the combat system is the weapon progression. These controls initially felt floaty as compared to the grounded precise movements in Dark Souls titles, but became second nature after a few hours of gameplay. The system incentivizes player aggression as healing items are charged based on the amount of melee damage done by the player, thus, supporting more skill-based progression. The dodging is generous, giving the player a good amount of iframes and made more powerful by the responsiveness of the player character. Combat and GameplayĬombat mechanics will be familiar to Souls-like veterans where the core gameplay revolves around carefully weaving light and heavy strikes in between enemy attack patterns. However, its combat, map design, and visual elements do somewhat carry the experience. The game does not make a great first impression due to the lackluster narrative. The visual design of maps and bosses do make a commendable effort in pulling the narrative weight through visual storytelling, but I would have loved to see something more substantial. Hellpoint’s deep atmosphere was great at raising questions, yet the lack of clues resulted in feelings of frustration. This type of storytelling attempts to create mystery and suspense, yet, only ended up starving the player of ample narrative motivation to continue with the game. Now, it’s your job to move forward and face the cosmic horrors around the corner with the goal of understanding what’s happened.īeyond this point, there are only a handful of dialogue and computer entries that give any tangible story for the player to hold on to. Some further dialogue reveals that something terrible has occurred, everyone is dead. With little idea of where or who you are, you’re given vague instructions by an omnipotent voice. In the beginning sequence, the player is plopped like a baby from a mechanical pod into a dingy abandoned space station. The game understands the genre appeal of fair but challenging gameplay, however, lacks the polish that other Souls-like games possess. The title meets nearly all the gameplay elements one would expect from a Souls-like: slow and precise combat, punishing death mechanics, sparse save points, and challenging enemies foreshadowing an inevitable boss battle at the end of a short, but hellishly dense labyrinth of a map. Hellpoint, by developer Cradle Games and publisher tinyBuild GAMES, has the player trudging through its sci-fi-inspired take on the Souls-like genre.
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