Hellpoint borrows many elements from The Surge and especially from Dark Souls, however, also attempts to copy Dead Space, first with the environment and second, the horror/suspense genre (something where it completely fails).
Everything happens in a space station, but there are no scary moments and mostly no suspense at all (at least it didn’t have that effect on me). In Hellpoint, you will find hundreds of monstrosities; you will get lost a hundred times, and last but not least, you will die another few hundred.
Like many souls-like games, the start is full of unknowns. You wake up in the middle of nowhere and have to escape from whatever threat is keeping you locked.
Hellpoint
Developer: Cradle Games
Price: $34.99
Platforms: PS4, PC (reviewed), Xbox One and Switch
MonsterVine was provided with a PC code for review
All the fights against bosses occur in very closed pits (with almost no room to run away) leading to having to kill the boss before he corners you instead of an actual duel of the survival of the fittest. This happens for two reasons; the collision with walls in this game is awful, with it being very easy to get stuck next to a wall, and once you are cornered by any monster with enough health you’re most likely dead.
If that wasn’t enough, I’ll add that most of the bosses are just bigger and stronger versions of monsters that you will face a dozen times before and after, which means that there is a sizable lack of diversity when it comes to the enemy variety.
However, defeating each one of those bosses will give you a proper reward according to the difficulty and one of the rewards is a save point. The areas that you unlock once will remain unlocked after death, allowing you to move further on in the story. Control points are very important and many times exploring the environment will allow you to add shortcuts to these.
What is usually known as a bonfire, in this game is called a breach, which will allow us to level up, increase or decrease the entire surrounding difficulty (all enemies included) and last but not least, teleport to other breaches. Anyway, everything comes with a price which is a certain material to connect one breach with each other and AKIONS, a currency (but not the only one) that will allow us to level up our character.
In order to get most of the items, farming is enough, but sometimes crafting will be necessary. Blueprints, weapon upgrades, modifications, and dismantling will allow your character to grow even stronger and survive the hardest challenges.
There are a lot of explorable environments and all these crafting mechanics really help to enjoy exploring; using this crafting system will increase in a vast way the damage the character does to enemies in comparison to just leveling up a single stat.
The greater the risk, the greater the reward… with all the similarities of other games, it was time to see something innovative, something different. In this case, Hellpoint adds something original: The Black Hole.
This system, based on real-time, will change the behaviour of the environment and all their enemies, increasing or decreasing both the amount and danger.
The game has very low requirements to run properly, and I could max the settings with a 1050ti. However, in terms of performance and graphics, there is nothing to highlight. There are many bugs and glitches that can affect the performance and most of the scenarios use dark colors with slightly to no details.
As for the camera and the movement of this one, together with the setting of objectives targeting, it should be noted that when a crowd comes together it is very difficult to set the objective we want.
The co-op is one of the biggest promises of the game, and I experienced many problems until I played with someone else. (had to join a testing version)
To play with someone, you need a 8 digits combination that the host must give to the companion in order to join the party.
First, my code started appearing, disappearing, and changing every time I was opening the menu. After giving the code to a friend, both our games crashed.
Any kind of interaction can make one of the two players invisible, causing the same with any enemy.
Mortal Shell, an upcoming title, did right most of the things in their beta that Hellpoint did wrong in their release.
The Final Word
Hellpoint is not the best game of the souls-like genre, but it makes a fine job trying to accomplish that task. I believe it would do a better job if it aimed to meet the requirements of a roguelike. The game is already fully released, out of Early Access, and with many silly glitches and bugs that affect the experience in a sad way for both consoles and PC versions.
MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average
