HELLFRONT: HONEYMOON

My first instinct with HELLFRONT: HONEYMOON was to clock it as a novelty - tiny indie, weird name, budget price. Two hours later I was still arguing about turret placement with the person next to me, which tells you something. SkyGoblin, a three-person Swedish studio, stripped real-time strategy down to its absolute skeleton and bolted it onto a twin-stick shooter. The result is a top-down arena brawler where every match lives on a single screen, every round runs two to four minutes, and the only two structures you can build are barracks (four troops spawned every ten seconds) and turrets (short-range automated guns). No economy, no resource trickle, no tech tree. Construction is free; the only currency is map control. You capture honeypots - glowing hex tiles scattered across the arena - and decide fast whether to drop a barracks for long-term troop pressure or slam down a turret to punish anyone pushing into your territory. Get a turret adjacent to an enemy barracks and it melts in seconds. Stack two fresh turrets next to each other and they blow each other up. That rock-paper-scissors loop, combined with destructible terrain and random alien swarm intrusions that erupt from destroyed buildings, gives matches a chaotic rhythm that rewards aggression over passive play. The shooter half is functional but deliberately limited. Each marine carries one weapon - a short-range automatic rifle with bullets that vanish within a tight radius, forcing close-quarters engagements. There are no weapon pickups, no loadout options, no ability unlocks. Reviewers across the board flagged this as the game's main ceiling: the combat loop is readable in minutes and never gets deeper. For a shooter specialist, that sting is real. There is no ranked ladder here, no movement tech to unpack, no TTK meta to theorize about. What you get instead is pure spatial pressure - controlling ground matters more than aiming skill, which is a reasonable design choice for a party game but underwhelming if you showed up looking for competitive depth. The campaign runs across three worlds with 75 missions total, playable solo or in two-player co-op, online or local. The content volume is respectable for the price. The problem is difficulty calibration. The first world eases you in cleanly, but the second world oscillates wildly - you can grind a single map for thirty minutes then breeze through the next four. Some maps give the AI a structural head start that feels less like a puzzle and more like a coin flip. The three-star time ranking system and global leaderboards add a speedrun angle that gives solo play more legs than it would otherwise have, but the single-player mode is clearly the warm-up act. The real game is deathmatch. Up to four players, local or online, best-of-seven rounds, maps purpose-built for maximum chaos. This is where HELLFRONT earns its keep. Orbital building drops that can crush your own captain, alien swarms that punish overbuilding, the constant tug-of-war between expanding your honeypot footprint and defending what you have - it clicks hard in a group. Framerate can hiccup when explosions stack up, and the visual noise occasionally buries your marine in the mess, but neither issue is a match-ruiner. One genuine concern for PC buyers in 2025: the Steam player base is thin. With only 64 Steam reviews on record, finding online matches through matchmaking is unlikely without a pre-arranged group. Treat it as a couch game with an online fallback for friends on the same friend list, not a live-service shooter with a populated lobby. Fred, Scout Team