Helion

I respect a small studio swinging for the fences on an online tactical shooter, but I also respect your time, and those two things are in direct conflict here. Helion pitched itself as a role-based, team-coordinated third-person shooter built in Unreal Engine 5, with three distinct roles - Assault, Recon, and Support - each carrying their own loadouts and abilities. On paper that's a workable framework. Energy rifles, plasma grenades, cybernetic gear, map objectives across alien landscapes and space stations. The ingredients exist. The problem is that the kitchen closed a long time ago. The dead-on-arrival population problem is the first thing that kills this kind of game, and Helion has it bad. Steam shows a single-digit review count even after aggregators like Steambase roll up off-platform data. That tells you everything about concurrent player numbers before you ever boot the game. No players means no matchmaking, which means ranked mode - the whole competitive ladder the developers advertised - is functionally inaccessible unless you coordinate a private lobby yourself. The custom server option and LAN co-op support are genuinely smart inclusions for a tiny indie, and if you can fill a lobby manually they do work, but that shifts the burden entirely onto you. To be fair about what's actually in the box: the Holdout mode (capture and hold a central point for a set duration) is a clean, readable objective format that suits small team counts. The bot-enabled training mode across multiple maps means you can at least fire weapons against something. The map design spans alien terrain and interior space station layouts, which gives you some variety in sightlines and cover geometry. The low-poly art style is consistent and runs light, so performance on mid-range hardware should not be a concern. A weapon viewer lets you compare stat sheets before locking a loadout, which is more than some shipped games bother with. What is a real concern is the development status. Steam's own page flags that the last developer update was over two years ago. This is still listed as Early Access, meaning the game shipped in an incomplete state and has, by all available evidence, remained there. No post-launch roadmap appears to have been followed through. For a multiplayer-only title, a dormant developer is effectively a death sentence. There is no solo content to fall back on, no ranked ecosystem to climb, and no visible community momentum to suggest a revival. If you have five or six friends who are specifically looking for a low-cost, low-frills sci-fi shooter to run private matches in, Helion technically supports that scenario. The role differentiation adds at least some tactical texture over a flat deathmatch. But anyone expecting to queue into live games against strangers, progress through a ranked ladder, or receive content updates going forward is going to be disappointed. The netcode and tick-rate quality remain untested at any meaningful player volume, so I cannot tell you whether the shooting actually feels good under real server load. That alone should give pause.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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