Helskate offers up a very daring premise indeed: What if you were to combine a roguelite like Hades with the score-based trick systems found in skating games? Frankly, it delivers so well in its blend of precision combo-ing and perk-boosted hack-and-slash combat that it really makes you wonder why this hasn’t been attempted before.
In my brief demo of Helskate (which you can try for yourself over on Steam), I went from a blundering warrior strapped to a skateboard to a precise and cocky trick demon in a matter of minutes. Partly, this can be attributed to just how close the skating mechanics match those found in the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games. Grinding down pipes or along edges has a wonderful stickiness, meaning you don’t always need to land directly onto rails, manuals (riding on two wheels) are used to string together tricks, and there’s a familiar pace to the way combos and traversal meet. If you’ve dabbled in the Pro Skater series, you’ll feel right at home here - something that will really help ease players into what is, on paper, quite a hectic blend of different play styles.
Where Helskate starts to set itself apart from the skating games it's using as its foundation, is in its combat. For example, with a press of a controller’s shoulder button, you can dash in any direction. This can be used to string tricks together, change direction, and zero in on enemies. The dash is surprisingly transformative, allowing you to pull off combos and dart around a map in ways that you simply can’t in a pure skating game. There’s something of a eureka moment when you realize that you can dash into ramps to gain a huge air boost, and when you use the same sharp movement to completely change your trajectory.
Tricked out
All of the elevated movement options tie in neatly with the attacks themselves. You have a precise slashing attack that automatically sticks to enemies, as well as a spinning slash that can be used to do damage while maintaining your current course. This is somewhat awkward at first but after just a single run things really start to click into place.
Clearing enemies is the main goal as you progress through small zones in a sequential run-up to a major boss fight, but there are plenty of other objectives to keep you busy as you move around. Like in the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series, there’s a list of tasks to complete while you’re skating. These range from collecting individual letters to form the word ‘HELSK8’ to purely score-based combo targets.
Helskate clearly borrows from classic skating games with its trick system and mission structure, but it also stitches things together with elements from Hades. This is most evident in the art style of the various merchants and characters you meet as you go. One character serves as a shopkeeper who’ll chat with you before you venture through a boss gate. Another, the tournament overseer King Garland, sits on a throne and watches as you take on his team in a score-based competition, jeering you if you fail to top the board.
A better build
At the end of each phase, you’re given a choice between a few items that will serve as your reward for completing the stage ahead. These consist of gear items that add elemental effects to certain actions, tapes that apply effects to specific tricks, gold for spending at shopkeepers, and health that can be vital depending on how your run is going so far.
By choosing carefully, you can start to work towards certain builds. Do you focus on critical hits in your standard attacks? Or do you play it safe and make sure there’s a health kit at the end of the next trial? This is where Helskate gets particularly interesting, teasing a deep and highly variable way to get you to replay levels.
On one of my Helskate runs, I focused on bolstering my individual tricks. By landing an Indy grab, I was granted a massive 600% bonus on my next attack. When paired with the critical hit bonus I had applied to my manual tricks, I hit extremely hard on my first strike (granted I could land a combo beforehand).
It’s in this space that Helskate’s two major mechanics unite in perfect harmony. Skating and combat are so well intertwined, that the lines between them become completely blurred. A slash attack becomes a proto-manual, allowing you to keep your combo meter ticking, and grinding is sometimes used as a way to get onto a worm enemy’s back for maximum damage.
Skate and slash
My Helskate demo ended with a boss fight against a powerful giant birdworm. This quickly became a mix of bullet hell projectile dodging and skating trick trial, as I strung together the tricks that I knew would give me the boosts in damage I needed to take the boss down. To do any damage at all, I had to grind along its spine, in a battle that started to echo those against the hulking colossi in Shadow of the Colossus.
In carefully choosing the games it stitches together, Helskate does feel genuinely new. There’s a good deal of nostalgia baked in, however, particularly in its punk soundtrack that transports you back to days sitting in front of the PlayStation 1, grinding it out on School 2 in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2.
Every moment I had with Helskate, right up until defeating the first boss, offered a lot of promise. My main concern thus far is in enemy variety, though I believe it’s likely that there’s a lot more beyond the brief slice currently on offer in the demo. I’m interested to see just how wacky builds can become, and whether or not Helskate can continue the scale and variety of its boss fights. For now, I’m tempted to load up one more run, to strive for first place in the competition, and to show that pompous King Garland who’s boss.
Helskate launches February 15, 2024, on Windows PC and MacOS. For more on this year’s new games, be sure to check out our upcoming games schedule.
