Using a Breach to level up does not respawn enemies, but dying or fast travelling to the Breach does. Here you spend Axioms to level up your stats, or can polarise or regress the universe with certain items, which makes the game harder or easier respectively. You save and rest at Breaches, some of which can be synchronised to allow fast travel.
#HELLPOINT REVIEW FULL#
I should also point out that the run back to the bosses from the checkpoints are often far too long, and reaching them with full health and healing items is hard. It was kind of a weird fight, and not nearly as grandiose as I suspect Cradle Games think it is. When I got their shared bar down to half, the melee guy just dropped dead, leaving me to pick the other one off with zero trouble. I was expecting an Ornstein and Smough experience, where one gets stronger when you kill the other, but that wasn’t the case.
I don’t even remember their names, but one hurls magic at you and the other attacks with a huge censer. Take an early pair who work together against you. There are a few that steal the screen, but overall they don’t do an awful lot to stay in the memory. After a few attempts to learn their patterns, you’ll likely succeed. This is partly because most of the bosses are fairly straightforward fights. They don’t talk or drop meaningful loot beyond passports or keys to the next area, and killing them doesn’t have the satisfying sense of gratification that it should. Even the bosses follow no real pattern and seem to just exist for you to fight. There’s a sense of familiarity to it all that can feel a little rote, which is jarringly juxtaposed with the game’s unwillingness to just open up and let you into its story. The problem is that we’ve played this game before. Hellpoint is fun to play the action feels immediate and responsive, and mappable weapon skills (again, later on) give you a few cool offensive options. Combat is pretty standard, featuring light and heavy attacks, a shield parry, ranged and magic options (later on) and a lot of walking forward slowly with your shield raised. The rest of the time you’re facing off against the usual assortment of trash mobs and occasional big shielded brutes, magic-hurling demons, or savage beasts. And it’s only at certain points and in certain areas that they really make a difference. These storms are Hellpoints primary unique feature, but like everything else there’s little explanation as to why they occur or what their purpose is. As it rotates in its orbit, the cycle causes “Accretion Storms” to wrack the shadowed halls and spew hordes of zombie-like beasts and powerful demons into our universe. Hellpoint is set on a space station called Irid Novo, situated close to a black hole. Your nameless, classless, nondescript Spawn simply goes forward because the corridor behind is empty, and so do you, forging on for no good reason other than that this is a Soulslike and that’s what’s expected.
You may well be hurling yourself against bosses and traps over and over again for no discernible reason, but that may be point of it all. That being said, Hellpoint remains oddly compelling. I’m all for letting the player fill in the blanks, but when it’s all blank and the player has only a brush made from bits of old pipe and metal shards, it’s difficult to paint much of a picture of anything. There’s no context for anything there aren’t even journals or codex entries to peruse, and even the flavour text seems to be copy/pasted from a batch of really grimdark fortune cookies. And for further reasons, you’re born at the beginning and are immediately happy with strapping on armour and smacking the ever-loving snot out of anything you come across.Ī lack of direct storytelling is a staple of this genre that’s now beginning to feel a little forced, and Hellpoint is almost the pinnacle of it. You play as a “Spawn of the Author”, an artificial lifeform created for reasons that Cradle Games almost bullheadedly refuses to directly explain. The enemies are difficult, checkpoints are further apart than the magnetic poles, and everything you meet wants to rip your synthetic warrior into little bits, just because. Hellpoint, from Cradle Games and tinyBuild, is very much a Soulslike.
0 kommentar(er)
