Skating games are basically a genre unto themselves at this point, far outstripping the ‘sports’ or ‘extreme sports’ designations that they often received in the 90s. Of course, these games have also gone through various waves of popularity, from the heyday of the “Tony Hawk’s” games to the re-invention of the genre with EA’s Skate, to the recent indie efforts from Session: Skate Sim and Skater XL. Lately, the genre has seen a few different blends, and with our Helskate review, we’ll be looking at one such blend of rogue-lite combat with original Pro Skater-style arcade skating.
What Is Helskate?
Helskate is a skating rogue-lite from the folks over at Phantom Coast that sees you skating around maps completing objectives, pulling off tricks, and occasionally taking down hordes of demonic entities that spawn in to kill you. The rogue-lite aspect pairs well with the early Pro-Skater style, meaning you’re typically spending a few minutes in relatively short levels with arcade-style objectives before moving on to a new map. As you go, enemies and challenges get tougher, but you also earn greater rewards, and then when things get too tough and you die, you head back to a hub area to buy upgrades.
It’s like a match made in heaven. The short bursts on each map mean that you don’t spend too long anywhere that you don’t like, and the randomized nature of the maps you encounter means that if you have a bad run, there’s not much of a penalty in taking a dive to see if you have better map pulls on a second go. Of course, what it all comes down to is whether or not the skating and the combat work well enough to carry the game.
Get Skatin’
As you can probably expect, the gameplay here is relatively similar to Tony Hawk’s PS1/PS2 era. You pull off tricks by tapping three of the four face buttons, with your fourth making you ollie. There’s also the classic balance meter that pops up whenever you grind, stall, or manual, and you earn points for each trick you pull off with the amounts and multipliers popping up at the bottom of the screen. In short, it’s very much an old-school Pro Skater game, but with the highly stylized visuals of Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland and taken to the extremes.
Luckily, this means that the skating is just as smooth and fluid as it was in Pro Skater, perhaps more so when compared with the clunkier titles in the range. You can pretty reliably chain grinds, manuals, grabs and flips with ease, though personally I found that the D-pad tended to be more forgiving on the balancing meters, which is a bit odd. The points work on a slightly different scale, at least at the start of your runs, but honestly, you’ll hardly notice it once you get into the swing of things.
The Combat Crush
Obviously, the key difference in Helskate when compared with other arcade skate-em-ups is the inclusion of combat, and proper combat, not just battering people over the noggin with your deck. As you’re exploring the maps pulling off tasks and beating challenges, you’ll periodically be told a new group of enemies has found you. At this point, you need to chain together light, heavy and special attacks with dodging and your general array of skating tricks to take out the enemies before they can chip away at your health while you’re trying to ollie.
The combat has a hack-and-slash element to it that makes it feel like a good fit with the skating mechanics. At first, trying to chain together your various tricks with dodging and pulling off attacks will leave you fumbling and bailing, but honestly, if it’s been a while since you played a skating game, that was gonna’ happen either way. Once you achieve a sense of flow with the gameplay, you can easily slip between tricks and attacks in a way that makes you feel like a demonic skate god with a samurai sword.
With Rising Difficulty and Very Aesthetic Enhancements
While the runs do miss out on the actual timer that you would have found in an old arcade skater game, the feeling is kept by the constantly ticking difficulty timer. When you start out, the world is in an ‘easy’ state, but the longer you spend in each area, the greater the difficulty becomes, with a bar in the top right corner keeping you constantly updated on how long you have before things become tougher and tougher.
Luckily, you’re not completely on your own in this as the world is filled with vending machines and other opportunities to pick up stickers, VHS tapes, and other aesthetic trappings that add bonuses to your trick scores, extra attacks and effects to your arsenal. These bonuses are a cool addition too as your physical appearance and that of your skateboard change the more of them you have, but don’t get too attached, because they disappear at the end of each run.
Rogue-Lite Progression with Style
In terms of more permanent enhancement, Helskate doesn’t leave you wanting. When you land yourself back in the Mall, which acts as your hub area between runs, you can get upgrades to your deck, which affects the weapon you’re using, or you can get yourself inked to increase your own stats and abilities. Both of these are great ways of handling upgrades in a skating game, and both have some pretty fun designs to select from. The only real downside is that the tattoos don’t seem to show up on your body in-game, even when they should peek out from under your clothes.
These permanent upgrades are what keep you pushing further and further into the endless void of street skate spots. The upgrades do a decent job of getting you to live longer and experience more of what the game has to offer, though honestly, you might get a bit bored of experiencing the same areas with the same missions/layout that you’ve experienced 50+ times before now. All-in-all, a full run of Helskate only takes a handful of hours, but there’s certainly something of an incentive to replay more than once due to the game’s rogue-lite nature.
The Verdict
Helskate is a great game for anyone who wants to relive the glory days of the early THPS series’ when it could have accurately been described as an ‘arcade skating game.’ The rogue-lite additions have mixed results depending on what weapons you’re using and whether or not you’re fed up with fighting the same enemies over and over again. It’s a relatively short experience, but it has a lot to offer and a cool aesthetic that should keep you coming back. A few minor bugs aside, this is an easy recommendation to any hardcore skating fans who also want to beat down monsters as they skate.
Developer: Phantom Coast
Publisher: Phantom Coast
Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, PS5
Release Date: 20th January 2025
Gaming Respawn’s copy of Helskate was provided by the publisher.