Helskate is the kind of wild genre-fusion design I love in videogames. Tony Hawk Pro Skater’s arcade score-chasing, combined with the roguelite progression and drip-feed of supernatural drama that Hades redefined the genre with, topped off with a dash of Risk of Rain’s escalating combat challenge and frantic character-building. It sounds too good to be true, and so I wouldn’t disappoint myself—I decided to hold off playing this one until it left early access, just so I could experience it at its best.
Unfortunately, its best is scrappy, messy and sadly scuffed up, despite making some good early impressions. Set in Vertheim—Valhalla for skater dorks—you play as Anton Falcon (get it?), a recently deceased pro skater stuck in an endless loop, skating his way to the top time and time again to challenge disaffected skate god Garland for his freedom, piecing together his backstory over dozens of runs. Basically Hades on skateboards, and with about the same number of magic swords. And really, who amongst us hasn’t thought that pro skating couldn’t be improved with a little magical violence?
Feeling younger in my mind
If you’ve ever played a Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game before, you already know how to play 80% of Helskate. That classic arcade formula—more platformer than simulation—is mimicked impressively well, with the cobwebs falling off my brain after just a few minutes. That familiar rhythm of grind to flip trick to Manual to keep that combo chain going until the next obstacle. Much of Helskate’s difficulty comes from the addition of combat layered on top of that core, adding a basic semi-homing attack button, a heavy attack (on a lengthy cooldown) and a dodge with generous invincibility frames to the mix. Not too much on paper, but it does crowd the controller a little.
The maps aren’t randomly generated, but the order you tackle them changes a bit each run. Enemies spawn in with increasing strength and regularity the longer you spend on a given run, very similar to how Risk of Rain handles it, and once you clear the score target for a given area, you also have to throw down with a mini-boss, usually a larger, tankier version of the regular roster of skate-themed monsters.
There’s skater-hating mall cop goblins, giant stomping shoes that send out shockwaves that have to be jumped over, rude skater ogres that barrel through you, and giant serpents that can be ridden like grind rails. And mercifully, hitting enemies grants you a few seconds of combo protection, giving you a brief grace period between fighting and skating—one of Helskate’s smarter design decisions.
Pretending I’m a superman
The monsters are a cute and creative bunch, but I never found a sweet-spot for combat difficulty. Either my build was a dud and enemies were barely taking damage, or I got a synergy going quickly and everything died in a hit or two, bosses included. And that’s the tragedy of Helskate: Where the disparate ideas meet, the game creaks.
Adding Risk of Rain’s endlessly stacking perks onto a skating game sounds like it could be a laugh, but I quickly found that once I had any halfway capable build going (surprisingly easy once you identify what’s really busted), I could win every fight and maintain a stunt combo just by mashing buttons wildly, and this was before unlocking permanent Hades-inspired perks that made it even easier on future runs.
And that’s the tragedy of Helskate: Where the disparate ideas meet, the game creaks.
A lot of the fundamentals feel under-tested, too. The scoring system (a key part of the game, as you need to clear a score target to unlock the next area) can be hideously abused, and once you’re able to chain a couple of Manual tricks it’s possible to rack up scores in the hundreds of thousands easily (or even millions) when the game is only asking you for a few thousand. And because those tricks can be done on any flat surface, it’s all too easy to clear a level’s score target in under 30 seconds before even leaving the room you spawned in.
Being able to break a game’s mechanics isn’t the worst issue that a roguelite can have. It can be pretty satisfying, even. Anyone that has played The Binding of Isaac can tell you the joy of getting an unstoppable character build going that threatens to melt their CPU while deleting every enemy on-screen. Less forgivable is the game just breaking. Which I found Helskate does if you so much as look at it funny.
Growing older all the time
In the first hour, I clipped through ledges and into the void outside six times. On several runs, the UI completely freaked out, drowning the screen in overlapping, repeated messages, half of them being an ominous demand to ‘FIND THE EXIT’. Sometimes my character’s skills just would just stop working, and I’d drop from instantly one-shotting bosses to tickling them to death. Sometimes an attempt to wall-ride would send me sliding in entirely the wrong direction. Sometimes moves would just fail to register or arbitrarily break combos, or post-combat slow-mo would stay on well past its due.
In just a handful of hours I experienced so many bugs, it would take half this article just to document them all. While it’s just speculation, judging by Helskate’s total user review count on Steam (barely over 200 at the time of writing), I’d hazard a guess that money and resources dried up quickly. The game’s time in early access gave them a chance to wrap up the main story and rework some structural stuff, but this does not feel like a game that has had nearly enough time in the oven or user feedback. And that’s tragic, because I love the idea of Tony Hawk’s Risk of Hades.
Don’t get me wrong, I had fun with Helskate, but was never able to shake the sense that it’s an audacious and chaotic blend of ideas that could have resulted in something magic. Instead, it’s a bit of a mess, with flashes of brilliance. The music is great. The character designs are fun. The level designs are impressive, offering criss-crossing non-linear webs of grind rails, rideable power-lines and bonus-packed rooftops accessible through multi-jumps or abusing wall-rides worthy of a true Tony Hawk.
There are all the parts here for a potentially excellent game. But sadly, Helskate needed a lot more testing, and more time in early access. I’m hoping for some big patches further down the line, but not expecting them at this point. But I’m still glad that Phantom Coast tried to make this weird genre mash-up work at all. That takes the kind of energy normally reserved for folks willing to hurl themselves down a flight of stairs on little more than a sheet of plywood with some wheels on.
