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?Īlthough it’s not presented that directly, the core and brilliance of Hellpoint’s weapon system is that upgrades are freely transferable between weapons. 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. 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 want to use a new weapon, you’re faced with the dilemma of when to upgrade it. 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. However, both of these processes require certain consumable items. 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). In Dark Souls, for the uninitiated, weapons can be upgraded, increasing their parameters, and infused, changing the damage type and scaling. 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. The platforming is functional, but suffers from the same typical issues of 3D platforming. 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. 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. There’s a world where jumping plays a major part in combat, but that’s not the world of Hellpoint. 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. 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. Sometimes the developers couldn’t quite compete with FromSoft, but sometimes they knocked it out of the park.Īs 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. Everything in Hellpoint feels like it was either directly lifted from Dark Souls or is a direct response to Dark Souls. Of course, at this point Souls-like is a subgenre onto its own, meaning there are games that take only the most basic trappings of the “source” and then do something completely different and original. At its most basic level, Hellpoint can be summed up with four words: Dark Souls… in space! Obviously that’s reductionist, but that’s what you get for four words.
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