Hellpoint is not one of those games. Everything in Hellpoint feels like it was either directly lifted from Dark Souls or is a direct response to Dark Souls. Sometimes the developers couldn’t quite compete with FromSoft, but sometimes they knocked it out of the park.
As a game that closely mirrors Dark Souls even for a Souls-like, I probably don’t need to go too deep into the basic gameplay. It’s a third-person action RPG with enemies that hit hard, animation locking, stamina-based combat, a single currency that is dropped upon death and lost forever if you die again before picking it up, bosses locked behind fog gates with massive health bars at the bottom of the screen, and so on and so forth. Got it? Good.
Hellpoint’s first major departure from Dark Souls: you can jump! That’s right, no longer can you be foiled by the Chosen Undead’s greatest nemesis, shin-high walls. There’s a world where jumping plays a major part in combat, but that’s not the world of Hellpoint. It’s used mostly for non-combat platforming and exploration sections, with the ability to move vertically and cross gaps allowing for more intricate level design. This also results in Hellpoint having many, many more bottomless pits than Dark Souls, which is particularly strange when you consider that Hellpoint takes place in an enclosed space station, but I digress. The platforming is functional, but suffers from the same typical issues of 3D platforming. At least it’s not first-person.
The weapon system in Hellpoint took me a bit to wrap my head around, but once I did—I legitimately think Hellpoint has the best weapon upgrade system I have ever seen in this type of game. In Dark Souls, for the uninitiated, weapons can be upgraded, increasing their parameters, and infused, changing the damage type and scaling. Upgrades are obviously needed to scale your damage throughout the game, while infusions allow you to tailor a weapon to your build (for instance, if you’re playing a magic build, you can use infusion to create a sword that deals magic damage and scales with the magic stat). However, both of these processes require certain consumable items. While obtaining enough materials to keep your main weapon upgraded is rarely a problem, the issue (as I’ve discussed before) is that it becomes difficult to switch weapons later on. If you want to use a new weapon, you’re faced with the dilemma of when to upgrade it. If you try it out without upgrading, you’ll be using a gimped (for your current progress) version that is difficult to evaluate. If you just go ahead and upgrade it, you’re essentially making a gamble since if you don’t actually like the weapon you may not have enough materials to try upgrading another. So the base Dark Souls system is fine for just picking a weapon and sticking to it, but doesn’t allow for much variety or experimentation—and why have all those weapons in the game if I’m not going to be able to use them?
Although it’s not presented that directly, the core and brilliance of Hellpoint’s weapon system is that upgrades are freely transferable between weapons. Every weapon has a slot for a “conductor,” and it’s not the weapons themselves that are upgraded but the conductors. So if you upgrade your conductor to +5 and stick it in your sword, you now have a +5 sword. If you find a cool axe and want to try it out you can move the conductor from the sword to the axe, and now you have a +5 axe. If you end up not liking the axe, just move the conductor back to the sword. You just got to try out a new weapon without actually spending anything. Amazing!
Dark Souls’ infusion system is also rolled up into the conductors as well, since there are different types of conductors that effectively have the same effect as infusions. So if you plan to do a plain strength character, you’d upgrade a “Strength Melee Conductor,” which goes into melee weapons and boosts their power based on your Strength. But if you’re playing a magic character, you could use an “Induction Melee Conductor,” which adds induction (fire) damage to a weapon, and also causes it to scale off Foresight (the stat for magic).
The system is balanced by the fact that you need to upgrade individual conductors, so you can upgrade any weapon, but not all weapons. If you have one +5 conductor, any of your weapons can be +5, but only one of them at a time. So if you want to take multiple weapons into battle you are going to need to invest in multiple conductors, which requires a significant chunk of resources.
Another minor change to the weapon system that makes it much easier to try out weapons than in Dark Souls: in Dark Souls, if you don’t meet the minimum stat requirements for a weapon, you can’t effectively wield it at all—all animations will be sluggish. In Hellpoint, however, if you don’t meet the stats, your damage will be massively reduced, but the animations aren’t affected. At the very least, this allows you to see a weapon’s moveset before investing in the necessary stat points.
Of course, being able to try out weapons is nice, but it feels good to develop mastery with a particular weapon as well, right? Is it really fair if you can hone your weapon, and then someone else can waltz in, stick in a conductor to test out the weapon, and be just as damaging? Well don’t worry, because Hellpoint has a progression system for individual weapons as well. Rather than needing to invest resources, however, each weapon gains experience and levels up as you use it. As a weapon levels up, it’ll gain some stat boosts and unlock (up to three) special abilities. But these buffs are really just icing on the cake. The difference between an un-upgraded and +10 weapon in Dark Souls is night and day, but a “level zero” weapon in Hellpoint is still perfectly functional (as long as you have a decent conductor and appropriate stats). Also, weapon experience gained is based on damage dealt, so a new weapon will level up much faster later in the game than early, also allowing for “catch-up.”
(Also, the different “spells” in the game are just the magic weapons’ special abilities, so there’s no collecting spells or anything like that. You get a magic weapon, and then unlock its spells by using it.)
In short, Hellpoint has the best of both worlds, where you can both easily try out and switch weapons but can also progress and develop mastery with individual weapons.
In addition to health and stamina, there’s a resource known as energy that’s used for magic, firearms, and special attacks. Your max energy pool isn’t very large but you recover energy through melee attacks, meaning magic and firearm builds can’t just blast everything from a distance (which I felt made my Dark Souls run, where I played a mage, a bit boring), but need to choose which enemies are worth using their primary weapons on and which should be dealt with in melee to recover energy.
Healing charges also recharge by damaging enemies, although the rate at which energy recovers is quite generous, while healing is not. There are actually multiple types of healing you can equip, but only two of them heal health (technically there’s a third, but it’s coop-focused), so it’s a neat idea that didn’t actually have much content put behind it. Another slightly weird thing is that your healing doesn’t recharge at checkpoints, but monsters don’t either so I guess it’s a bit of give-and-take. (Both come back when you die, though.)
While the weapon system is phenomenal and the combat mechanics seem fine on paper, in practice they're a bit lacking. Combat is totally functional, but the animations and handling lacked the polish and weight of combat in AAA games like Dark Souls and Monster Hunter. The fact that we played co-op didn't help much either. While co-op integration is fine (which I'll discuss in more detail later), the encounter design and enemy AI did not seem built to handle multiple players. In the starting area there were some big enemies that required coordination and teamwork to beat, but after that we could easily breeze through all combat encounters, either bursting down weaker enemies or using the simple strategy of "the player being targeted by the enemy dodges while the other player attacks." The simplest co-op strategy yet one which almost every enemy falls prey to. That includes bosses, which did not seem to have a health pool that contemplated a constant assault from two players. I'm not sure how Hellpoint is as a single player, but in co-op the game was not a particular challenge (which, to be clear, is not inherently "worse" than more difficult games).
The game world and aesthetic is also not quite as fully-realized as Dark Souls. Hellpoint is dark. I mean that literally—the flashlight is probably the single-most useful item in the game, but you don't start off with it. But to the extent you can see them, the levels feel like video game levels, not actual locations. There's the fancy gold level, and the fungus-covered purple level, and the run-down grungy level, and that's basically how I remember them. While they're visually distinct to a certain extent, it's difficult to tell why they're structured the way they are and what role they served within the world of Hellpoint. Each level is also separately instanced, which makes it difficult to understand how they fit together. Compare this to, for example, Bloodborne, which features a dilapidated seal-off old town, a cathedral ward filled with ornate church buildings, a reclusive college buried deep in a spooky forest filled with snake creatures, and an austere castle that serves as the home of vampire( analog)s. Each of these areas has a relatively organic design and serves a clear purpose within the world of Bloodborne. (I intentionally chose Bloodborne for this comparison because Dark Souls takes place in an entire kingdom, which I think could be used as an excuse for why it can have such varied levels, but Bloodborne takes place in a single city. So if Bloodborne could do it, Hellpoint should have been able to as well!) As video game levels Hellpoint's stages are fine, filled with plenty of secrets to explore, but they just don't have that organic polish.
The fast-travel system is also a bit strange. The checkpoints are known as breaches. You can "synchronize" a breach using a consumable item, and can fast travel between all synchronized breaches. When playing the game for the first time, you don't know which breaches will be important or how many synchronizers you'll get. This also means you need to manually run to any location far away from a synchronized breach, which is compounded by the fact that it's tough to make a mental map of the Hellpoint game world (since the locations aren't distinctive and are individually instanced). You can easily find recommendations for which breaches to synchronize online, but this still doesn't feel like great design.
Hellpoint, like Dark Souls, features plenty of esoteric quests and secrets. If you like investigating those sorts of puzzles yourself (and like those puzzles hard), you'd probably enjoy this, but finding them all will likely require a lot of time, or just looking up the answers online.
The technical co-op system itself is another area where Hellpoint manages to improve upon its idol. In Dark Souls, co-op is clearly meant to be a crutch for individual levels, and not a method to play the entire game: you need to be in the same area as someone to play with them, and you're booted from the host whenever you beat a boss. In contrast, in Hellpoint you can join anyone's game from anywhere, and play the entire game together. Rather than a mark/summon system, you just enter a code and get connected. (Occasionally it didn't work, but restarting the game fixed this.)
When in multiplayer, the guest character is clearly a second-class citizen, for better or worse. If the guest dies they can be revived by the host (at cost of life), but if the host dies both players respawn at the last breach. Additionally, the guest can never lose their resources, while for the host Hellpoint follows the typical Dark Souls mechanic of forcing you to retrieve your money upon death. Enemies target the host much more frequently than the guest, but there are many switches and buttons that only the host can interact with. (If you wanted to maximally take advantage of this, you could have the guest play a melee character and the host a ranged character. Naturally we did the opposite.) Both players receive a copy of every item each player picks up (with the exception of certain plot items, which only the host can pick up and receive a copy of), which is the most generous way to structure a co-op loot system.
Of course, there's a bit of jankiness as well. Highlights include me getting stuck in a room because the door closed behind me and (as a guest) I couldn't interact with the button to open it, and a weird bug where I could neither damage nor be damaged by the final boss. All in all, however, the co-op mechanics were straightforward and functional.
To round out the review, I'd like to talk about the story, but... I can't, because I don't know any of it. This isn't a typical Dark Souls excuse where there is a story but it's implied through lore rather than explicitly laid out. As the guest player, I couldn't interact with plot elements (such as information terminals and NPCs) in any way. The game takes place on a space station, and we are some sort of mass-produced android, and there's demons and gods and black holes and a whole bunch of nasty stuff that wants to kill us but heck if I knew what was going on. My friend said he understood and liked the story, so take that as you will.
So, as I said at the beginning of the review, it's Dark Souls in space. That should give you a pretty good idea of whether you'll like Hellpoint or not. I don't think this will win anybody over to the genre, but if you like Dark Souls and sci-fi then Hellpoint is probably worth checking out, and doubly so if you have a friend who does as well.
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