HELLMUT: The Badass from Hell

I'll admit the title had me skeptical before I even loaded it up. Names that try that hard to signal attitude sometimes belong to games that forgot to bring any. HELLMUT: The Badass from Hell is, thankfully, more self-aware than its marketing suggests, and once you get past the opening setup, the actual mechanical hook is genuinely clever in a way that separates it from the pile of Enter the Gungeon-adjacent shooters it so clearly admires. You start every run as a floating skull and spine, which is both the story's setup and a quietly clever design choice: your default form is fragile and awkward, so the game immediately pushes you toward your Transformations. These mutations, each with their own health pools, weapon sets, and special abilities, function as a lives system with personality. The Rat King bounces projectiles off walls; the Stitchmonster hurls massive hammers and can charge groups. Each run lets you carry up to four at once, and losing one hurts in a way that generic extra-life systems rarely do. Challenge rooms on each floor can add temporary mutations to your roster mid-run, and completing a full campaign unlocks one permanently for future runs. The catch is that only your skull form's death ends the run outright, which creates a specific kind of tension: burning through forms recklessly feels wasteful, but hoarding them while your skull form eats hits is equally dangerous. The procedurally generated levels cycle through twelve floors, with bosses scattered throughout on a randomized schedule. There are only four bosses in total, which means veterans will learn their patterns fast. The level rooms themselves follow a familiar loop: enter, wait for spawns, kite enemies while managing the loot drops and gem pickups that vanish quickly if you don't stay close (or spend gold on a magnet from the in-game shop). Enemy variety does improve as floors progress, with late-game enemies that dash and teleport instead of simply charging. Special weapons found in chests and the shop behave more like limited-use power-ups than a proper arsenal, with no ammo refills, which makes them feel best saved for boss encounters or especially punishing rooms. A Space Invaders-style arcade cabinet sits in the shop as a small diversion; it earns you coins and red soulstones, though it's more quirky decoration than compelling side content. Gauntlet Mode adds local co-op wave defense for two players, and a Tournament Mode gives friends the same procedural seed to compete on equal footing. The pixel art leans hard into a Doom-adjacent gothic aesthetic, and it earns the comparison without embarrassing itself. Chunky sprites, gore that lingers on the floor until a room is cleared, and particle effects that manage to stay readable even when the screen gets chaotic. The music sits in an interesting middle zone: not the hammering metal you might expect, and some reviewers found the audio mix a little quiet, but there is a memorable quality to certain tracks that sneaks up on you after a few sessions. Controls are tight and twin-stick friendly, with a cooldown system on your attacks that keeps the pace from becoming completely mindless spray-and-pray. The honest criticism is that HELLMUT plateaus in ways that matter. Once you have a few runs under your belt and know your preferred mutations, the difficulty curve flattens, and the formulaic room structure starts to feel like a loop rather than a challenge. There is no meaningful meta-progression for failed runs, so if you hit a wall early, there is nothing to show for the attempt except practice. The transformation-switching mechanic, which is the game's strongest idea, occasionally gets undermined by clunky form-swapping under pressure and enemy spawns that can punish you unfairly the moment you step through a door. For a short game, those friction points sting more than they would in a longer, more forgiving experience. But for someone who wants a couple of hours of focused, absurdist demon-slaughter with a genuine mechanical twist on the twin-stick formula, HELLMUT delivers that with enough craft and self-deprecating humor to justify the time. Kai, Scout Team