Helskate

My first reaction to Helskate was genuine excitement: a skateboarding roguelite where chaining kickflips and nosegrinds powers up your sword swings sounds like exactly the kind of deranged crossover the genre needs. The pitch holds up on paper. You play as Anton Falcon, a one-winged demon trying to escape the underworld city of Vertheim, and the core loop asks you to skate short arcade-style levels, rack up trick combos, kill monsters, then return to the 'Mall Jail' hub to spend currency on permanent tattoo upgrades, new decks, and better gear before diving back in. The roguelite bones are solid: each run mixes weapons, tapes, and board stickers into different builds, and a difficulty timer in the top corner steadily escalates the threat level the longer you linger in any zone, keeping the pressure on in a way that echoes Risk of Rain more than Hades. The skating itself is the strongest argument for buying in. Controls are pure arcade, ollie, flip tricks off three face buttons, manuals on landing, wall rides, grinds with a balance meter, and when the flow clicks, you really do feel like a demonic skate god sliding a samurai sword off a rail into a crowd of monsters. The D-pad reportedly handles the balance meter more forgivingly than the analog stick, which is a minor quirk worth knowing if you are bouncing between input methods. Weapons at launch include quick swords, heavy axes, and shuriken throwers, each with light and heavy attacks, and building synergies between your deck stickers and weapon modifiers (electrocute on sword hit, fire burst on jump, poison shurikens into explosive charges) is genuinely clever. The boss encounters against the so-called Gods of Skating are the highlight, particularly a fight where you grind up a towering deity to reach its weak points. Here is where I have to be straight with you, though. The game shipped out of Early Access in January 2025 with a mixed reception, sitting around 66% positive on Steam. The friction is real and it comes from the same place in every critical review: skating and combat fight each other rather than fusing cleanly. Heavy attack wind-ups interrupt your line, the dodge throws you too far and kills your manual chain, and the combo window on landing is tight enough that some players feel the game is running faster than their inputs can keep up with. Community feedback also flagged geometry clipping, occasional soft-locks that force you to abandon a run, and frame pacing issues at higher settings. The 1.0 launch did add a full story through playable Memory Tapes, a second world called Grindgard with new enemies and tile sets, and quality-of-life improvements, so it is meaningfully more complete than its Early Access build, but several players who bought at launch noted it still feels like it needs another pass of polish. For the sports-and-skating crowd specifically, this one is strictly singleplayer and PC or Mac only, so forget four-player couch chaos, it is not that kind of game. A controller is close to mandatory; multiple reviewers bounced hard off keyboard and mouse before switching and found the game opened up immediately. The soundtrack leans into early-2000s skate-punk energy and consistently gets praised even by critics who found the mechanics rough. If you loved the original Tony Hawk Pro Skater games and you also have a soft spot for roguelite build-crafting, there is something genuinely novel here that no other game is doing right now. Just go in knowing the seams between skating and combat are still visible, and that patience through the first few runs is required before the build variety starts to reward you.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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