Helskate answers a question that I don’t think anyone asked: “What if you could kill demons in between long trick combos in Tony Hawk Pro Skater?” The answer, it turns out, is: “It would be pretty rad.” Its energetic art and soundtrack call back to those 2000’s-era skate games triumphantly, and really nails the simple inputs and focus on big moves versus minute technicalities. That said, things get hellacious, and sometimes unwieldy, when you attempt to meaningfully combine the combat and the rogue-lite elements with all the grinds and grabs.
You embody the partially feathered frame of Anton Falcon, notorious troublemaker and talented skater, who just wants to tear up some half pipes in peace. And by “in peace,” he means traveling beyond the limits of the hell he and his cohorts are trapped in as defined by its supreme ruler, Garland. But for someone like Anton, this purgatory is more like a skater’s paradise, and with the ability to fight through Garland’s monstrous enforcers with magical weapons, he’s adventuring to places previously unexplored and finding bigger and scarier resistance as he persists.
Every stage in Helskate resembles the kind of messy urban detritus that doubles as excellent obstacles to trick on. But where the Tony Hawk series’ levels were more grounded in relative reality, Helskate’s looks at what is possible in real life and makes that the floor of potential. Grinding on hand rails and short barriers are where the action starts, but you’ll frequently be using highway signs dozens of feet high as walls to ride, or grinding on telephone wires. Tricks are as easy to execute as hitting short directional inputs followed by the right button for grinds, grabs, or flips.
And then there are the monsters, which come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Some are stuck to walls and harass you with lasers from distances, others take the fight to you directly and chase you around the stage. Others still may actually double as a rail to grind, becoming another line to ride should you be so inclined. These monster mixes do just enough to keep you on your toes, especially as you get deeper and deeper into the helskate itself, and you must defeat them before you can progress. But I found the dearth of health pick ups throughout the run to be the biggest factor in my demise. Longer runs become wars of attrition, making what little health you have last as long as you can, occasionally boosting it a bit by increasing your max health as part of a reward for clearing the level.
Besides killing enemies with unlockable weapons like a katana or ninja stars, each stage has a list of sub goals that earn you more currencies to unlock and upgrade more stuff. Finding the letters and numbers ‘HELSK8’ strategically placed around the map or performing stage-specific actions like grinding up this crane is where the game feels most like its most obvious old-school inspiration. Combat, though easy to grasp and ultimately fun, lacks the depth of its most obvious character-action inspirations. The skating and chopping doesn’t always mesh well together either. Occasionally, like when you pick up tapes that make certain tricks give you combat buffs after successfully nailing them, you can really get into a synergistic rhythm of popping a quick trick for a damage bonus and then crushing a baddie in one blow, for instance. Most of the time, though, I felt that just quickly smashing the enemies first and then tackling the actual skating challenges felt like the most productive way to stay in the game. Treating these like almost two halves of the same game was easy to do, since there’s no time limits hurrying you along to the next encounter, but it also felt antithetical to the spirit of the thing. To be able to bust crazy maneuvers AND kill the bad guys efficiently feels like reaching for a skill ceiling that my three-ish hours of runtime so far has not put me anywhere near.
Helskate’s roguelite elements seem sound, so far. At the end of every section, you can choose from up to three different rewards as goals for the next section, letting you choose the one that’s best for your interests at the current moment. There seems to be no way to really manipulate how often certain types of rewards pop up, a la Hades, and it’s not apparent to me so far that possible future rewards have any relationship with the ones currently in your inventory. Gear and stickers, the former being wearables that give Anton’s tricks and abilities additional powers and the latter providing more passive buffs, do feel strong and have lots of potential to stack and combo effects for consequential results. I just often felt like I was going with the flow instead of picking abilities with any intentionality.
Even when it’s messy and doesn’t feel like all the systems are fitting together perfectly, every bit of Helskate makes it obvious that I’ve never played a game quite like this before. Its unique cocktail of procedurally-generated progression, skating games of yesteryear, and beat ‘em ups is fun and frantic, and the brief time I spent with it has me very curious about what other tricks this one has in its arsenal. Lucky for me, I won’t need to wait too long to hit the Helskate again, as it’s set to drop into Steam Early Access on February 15th.
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