Hellpoint Review

As odd as it may seem, until this game, I’d never played a Dark Souls style game. Nope, not one. After Hellpoint, I don’t think I’ll bother.

I understand the draw of the genre, but this is one to miss.

The game starts as you, “Spawn”, pour out of the bottom of a machine and onto a pool and then form into a very Giacometti-looking blank-faced geek who spends the whole game looking a bit bored with it all. From here, a mysterious voice tells you to take it easy for a sec and get healed before wanting to meet you at the end of the embassy corridor.

Welcome to sunny Irid Novo

Eventually, you discover that this glorious interspecies space experiment named “Irid Novo” which orbits a black hole has gone horribly wrong and… yes, you guessed it, opened a gateway to hell. As to the rest of the plot, well you’ll be familiar with the “show, don’t tell” mantra by the end of about 20 minutes of gameplay but you’re not going to be able to tell what the Clive-Barker-bondage-nightmare is going on or why. Just accept that and enjoy smacking the bad guys about.

So there’s poor old Spawn, wandering the halls, levelling up generic stats, picking up new toys and armour and weaponry with which to smack about the space zombies, floaty ghosts, beasties, demons and hoofing great bosses and more. With random green handprints on the walls giving hints as to plot and game mechanics but it all has about as much depth as a televangelists smile.

You will see this a lot

The AI (and I use the term loosely) can be a total pain in the behind too. Sometimes a mob will charge clean across a map to get you, others will let you stroll past them and not even blink. Or the ghost that spawns after you die, that little green scumbag will spot you, howl, and sprint after you until you smack him down and get on with the incomprehensible task of progressing on with the plot.

Of course, I’m assuming there is a plot, I couldn’t find one beyond the “zombies, hell, hit things and level up” back of a beermat special.

As for the actual hitting things with weapons made of scrap that is the combat… wow. Clunky, the animations can’t be interrupted at any point so if you suddenly realise that big old uber combo was a bad idea and the wannabe Cenobite that’s eating your face is going to send Spawn back to the breach he last stabilised, well you’re out of luck pilgrim.
On the topic of the breaches, which are the save points in Hellpoint, there aren’t enough of them. Nowhere close. In the first three hours of playing the game, I found… one. And that was within seconds of starting the game.

There has been a brace of patches since the release of Hellpoint, but not one has been able to fix the central issue to the game. That of it being a confused mess.