Big Helmet Heroes

‘Big Helmet Heroes’ is developer Exalted Studios and publisher Dear Villagers’ two-player local cooperative side-scrolling beat ’em up featuring a large cast of knightly heroes to choose from. I have a soft spot for this sort of game, a light-hearted little adventure with bit of cartoon violence and comic mischief for humour and really, lots of baddies to beat up with friends and family. Big Helmet Heroes accomplishes this to a tee, albeit with some glaring issues that make their way to the forefront over the game’s twenty or so levels.

Jump in for a cooperative adventure with lots of weapons, weird enemies, and heroes with cool abilities to pummel!

The many faces of Big Helmet Heroes. (Exalted Studios/Dear Villagers)

Helmet Crashers

I s’pose I ought to come clean for a moment—a 2D side-scroller where you fight an onslought of enemies big and small will always remind me of one of my most cherished Xbox 360 games: ‘Castle Crashers’. And in many ways, Big Helmet Heroes is a 3D Castle Crashers, offering players a variety of unique biomes for stages, extra weapons to pick up from fallen foes and other means, and (more importantly) a lot of unique baddies that fit the given situation. It’s two player havoc at its finest, though I will admit I was disappointed by the lack of a four player option. Considering the number of knights available in the game and the amount of baddies that overwhelm the screen, I had hoped I could also bring the rest of my family into the fun.

Big Helmet Heroes starts the player(s) off right into the action by giving you access to the first two knights—one whose ultimate is summoning a wave of screen-clearing sheep and the other fires off area-of-effect lightning bolts while avoid oncoming ground attacks. By virtue, many of the knights are more-or-less clones of one-another, albeit with variations in their main weapon and certain aspects of their ultimate abilities. Some do end up feeling stronger than others in certain ways, but as long as you’re mixing up your heavy and light attacks, you’ll have no issue making way to the next part of the stage.

Oh, but you don’t unlock all the knights right away. No no, you’ll need to find our caged friends across the games twenty or so stages, breaking them out of their gold-cage misery so that they can join your roster and party for the stage. What I like about this is that, when the hero you’re playing runs low on health points and there’s no food items to pick up, any heroes found in a stage can be switched to and doing combos with them heals all backrow allies. Very cool!

Finding these allies can be a small pain in the derriere, however. I’ll get to that in a moment. I would like to say that Big Helmet Heroes has a pleasant visual style and has great sound effects. Each knight you run into is filled to the brim with character based on whatever their shtick is and usually has some amusing little huffs and puffs to go along with it, such as Ray’s dual scythe-wielding shenanigans and the silent “hut huts” he has a tendency of doing.

Welcome to the jungle, it gets hectic every day! (Exalted Studios/Dear Villagers)

Big Helmet Heroes keeps itself pretty simple for most of the game. You beat up baddies, move to the next screen, beat more baddies, clear the level, and move full speed to the next level. Besides the occasional maze level and off-hand objective change, Big Helmet Heroes does very little to change up its gameplay. The levels might be short, but mashing X and Y will tire you out much faster than you think. There are about four major bosses you’ll encounter throughout that are fun little bouts, but like the other gameplay shake ups, they just take too long to get to. And even then, some of these bosses aren’t exactly all too fun to fight, such as the kraken (more on that in a second). The game also has a tendency to toss larger minions with chunky HP pools that do some serious damage—though I’ll happily concede that that is a “skill issue.”

Another problem I have with Big Helmet Heroes is that visibility can be a serious issue at times. The game does quite a bit with lighting and objects that frequently block the players’ viewport, making pick ups difficult to see or enemies outright hard to spot. The game circles both players with a red and blue highlight, but its not enough especially when enemies pile up and stage lighting falls back to harsh, dark colours.There are times where my sibling and I would sometimes get stuck trying to progress to the section of a stage only to realise we missed a little mook all the way behind us, stuck on geometry and all. The latter half of the stages were particularly awful with this and the idea of replaying them made us hesitate a bit.

Though visibility problems aside, the game is nice to look at! Animations are clean and enemy attacks are easy to read and combined with a lengthy dash makes avoid most attacks pretty simple. The world of Big Helmet Heroes is as cartoon-ey as it gets, with sheep making a mess of things, baddies and creatures goofing about in lava and grassy fields, you name it. Even the cutscenes have their charm points, these shorts giving a bit of an idea of what direction the story is headed. I’ll be honest, none of it made sense til the end, but the finale was amusing enough that I didn’t really care anyway. That fight was a lot of fun compared to the other boss fights in the game, one of which, the kraken, relies entirely on these shorts as transitions and broke up the gameplay pacing more than I would have liked.

No one likes shower rooms for a reason. (Exalted Studios/Dear Villagers)

Big Helmet Heroes is a charming little cooperative beat ’em up that’ll be a delight to smaller family members and parents alike. A lack of unique objectives throughout most of the stages might be a bit of a bore and visibility issues can sometimes frustrate, but there’s enough here for an amusing local coop experience. ∎