Hellsplit: Arena - VR Gameplay Valve Index
44Well deserving of the Mostly Positive reviews on Steam however I do wish there was more to it than just the arena fighting. This very polished combat would translate to a great Dark Souls style VR title and the world seems primed for it.
Lets tackle the negatives first.
Comfort settings: There are none... If you're not comfortable with slide locomotion without a vignette or any of the other comfort options your used to with a standard title, you wont want to pick up Hellsplit. In late 2019, this isn't really acceptable for a significant VR title like Hellsplit
Once you break that $20 price threshold you need to have a certain level of expected, standard features.
Bugs: I found one. It was slightly comical and not really game breaking but still frustrating. Not too big a deal. Hopefully it gets patched out soon. Mostly polished overall though.
Waggle to win is a thing.... Sadly. I tried to waggle at an enemies head with the club and it was far more effective than I would have liked. Less effective than a solid swing but still effective enough to be worthwhile. At least on lesser opponents. I admittedly did not try on heavily armored enemies. Still, waggle to win is a pretty unforgivable sin in my eyes.
I would list difficulty under the negatives as well. It was fairly easy. I didn't have to try very hard more often than not. The rare occasions that I died it was less the enemy skill level increasing and more my own carelessness and casual fighting since I wasn't being challenged. Hopefully hardcore provides a higher difficulty curve with more intelligent enemies that block and parry my attacks. Or at least, on the cheap side, something with neck armor!
That's pretty much it for negatives and some of that in the grand scheme of things is pretty minor. The waggle to win can be ignored for more satisfying play styles and afaik there is no online competition so someone else cheesing something doesn't really impact you. Dumb shambling corpses are still fun to dismember even if they don't know how to block a sword swing or walk straight into traps... The major issue is the comfort settings. Hopefully that is something Deep Type Games will recognize and add into the game.
Positives!
The game is beautiful. In an ugly death sorta way... The textures, models and animations were all pretty great. Sure the first boss was a reskin... but the fire cracked bone looked cool as hell.
The animations especially need to be called out. The ragdoll animation blending on hitting the enemies occasionally did some weird things to their attacks but it looked so great when they were in mid swing and I poked them in the ribs with a club and they naturally just stumble backwards. The way they stumbled to the side after being hit in the knee. So good.
The audio and voice overs were also spot on. The background music was subtle but definitely got you in that mortal kombat sort of mood. The sound effects maybe could have been a tad better for things like clanging my sword on my shield but overall did a good job at helping convey impact. I'm very happy with the voice overs of both characters we've 'seen' so far.
Gameplay wise... We're friggin dismembering undead hoards one arm, leg or neck at a time... You're damn right it's fun! The combat works very well. It's got it's quirks but it's definitely one of the better physics based/mimicing combat systems in VR. There appears to be a decent equipment based progression line though I'm not entirely sure on how to determine stats for the weapons other than bigger is obviously betterer!
I would love to see a larger game from Deep Type Games with this combat system.
At the end of the day, Hellsplit: Arena delivers exactly what it promises and it does it a fun and entertaining manor. Big thumbs up.
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