Developer – Exalted Studio

Publisher – DearVillagers

Platforms – Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC (reviewed)

Review copy given by publisher

Big Helmet Heroes is a light-hearted 3D side-scrolling beat’em up where you take on the role of 2 warriors from a roster of close to 30 characters. Once you have selected your heroes you will fight your way through waves of enemies and defeat bosses in an effort to collect all of the hidden warriors throughout the lands. The nice thing is you can adventure alone or with a friend with couch co-op in order to tackle the stages with varying difficulties while trying to reach new heights by achieving higher scores.

The game itself is quite simple, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that Big Helmet Heroes isn’t fun. This is your standard beat’em up game, where you can do different attacks with your character, perform ultimate abilities, and collect different usable weapons to clear out the foes on each stage. While there are quite a few different characters they are mainly broken up into what I would call template characters.

So far there are basically 4 different templates broken up into about 7 different characters for each class. What I mean by this is that if your character is holding a staff, the move set for that character is relatively similar to the others also wielding a staff. The main difference between them is their special ability which requires energy to utilize, these are very powerful attacks that absolutely destroy the enemies you are fighting. I don’t really have a problem with this because that means if you have a character you really like and what to have 2 of the same style characters you can. 

The templates are as follows, you have The Warrior, The Brute, The Rogue, and The Monk. The Warrior is a balanced offense and defensive character with both a sword and a shield to utilize and they have a decent survivability. The Brute on the other hand is a much more powerful but slower attacking character that can perform heavy smashing attacks. The Rogue is dual-wielding daggers and can quickly take out enemies. Lastly, the Monk has a staff that has a flurry of attacks that is a nice mix of the Rogue and Warrior.

The level variety is nice, from arenas to deserts to the hills, and the plains. The levels don’t feel repetitive which is nice for this style of game. While on each level, there are additional secrets per level such as unlocking hidden characters (my favorite so far is a Pigeon-headed dual knife-wielding attacker). In terms of gameplay variety, the majority of the game is played the same, scroll from left to right, killing swarms of enemies as you go, but occasionally there are segments that play like a turret shooting gallery, or boss fights that require you to load up a cannon to shoot moving boss parts.

Enemy variety is plentiful and can differ per area, but they have basically the same move set much like the character templates, just designs vary like the enemy might be a knight, or maybe a mummy. The usable items that are littered on the battlefield are unique and fun to use as well. These can be weapons such as a crossbow, or a freeze gun, to something silly like a s’more that lights enemies on fire to an electric fly swatter to electrocute them.

The length of the game seems to be around 3.5-4 hours for an initial play-through based on difficulty, but of course, you can run through the levels again on harder difficulties and backtrack trying to find secrets you missed the initial run. Overall, it’s a fun game, especially if you have someone you can play with! Hopefully, the implementation of online co-op will be coming sooner rather than later to have an easier time teaming up with other warriors.