Our Hellion One Hour Review of Early Access

I’m not a person that suffers from anxiety chronically. I can usually be looked upon as a calm and collected person. So the first time I played Hellion, and was promptly sucked out of an airlock and into the void of space, with no way to save myself as I drifted further and further away until my oxygen ran out, I can admit to having a small panic attack. About twenty minutes of just trying to calm down after something that was entirely accidental. My heart was racing, and my breathing was elevated. I got way into the moment. This is our Hellion One Hour Review of Early Access.

Hellion is a new survival title, this time with the pitch of being set in space among the remnants of a failed space colony. With PVP elements, Newtonian physics, and of course scavenging and maintaining certain things for your survival, it instantly tries to set itself apart from the ‘walking simulators’ that have been dominating the genre for the last few years.

One Hour In The Darkness

Okay, so my first few moments started out -very- badly. I took it much slower when I respawned this time. A fresh spawn has the option of spawning on an isolated station, or one that is much closer to the action. I wouldn’t suggest the latter, as any time I did so it resulted in a very quick death; the server I was playing on seemed to have the life support on that one disabled resulting in very quick deaths. So, with the isolated spawn being the only feasible option I spawned in a second time.

Emerging from cryosleep, I took a bit more time to get acquainted with the controls and the small station itself. Survival games are notorious for being unforgiving, and generally clunky in terms of their controls. Hellion plays much smoother once you figure out the ins and outs, but this early on in Early Access before the tutorials start flooding out, you really are left up to trial and error as you try to come up with any sense of what you’re doing. The current keybinding list under settings too also omits a lot of need-to-knows of the controls, keeping the aspect of trial and error alive and well, and of course ruthless. The basic forward, backward, left and right, those are all easy enough to come by. It’s engaging and disengaging your helmet and jetpack, finding your inventory button, those all took quite a bit longer than it should’ve. Even just a basic in game tutorial would be welcome. That goes for the gameplay mechanics as well.

Even in infancy, Hellion is rather intricate in the way it handles itself. O2 managment not just for your suit, but for the stations you’re on as well. The more players in a single area, the quicker the O2 drains. Power management is also a must, you’ll be deciding what systems to keep up and what to disengage if you’re dwindling on the ability to meet your power requirements. You may very well go dark, long before the oxygen runs out. I stumbled around the starting station, exploring the nooks and crannies as I tried to salvage anything I thought would be of use. Then came the time to attempt to go back outside once more, and onto the exterior. And just that quickly, I was drifting off into space again. OR I would have been, if I wasn’t able to quickly grab onto the exterior. I never did quite master the jetpack, but that was progress as I crawled towards an inactive solar panel, trying to reactivate it. It all looks like a lot typed out, but really what did I accomplish in my first hour with Hellion? Not a whole lot; but I certainly had fun.

Final Thoughts on our Hellion One Hour Review

I felt like I was playing out the movie Gravity, only it was actually me just bumbling and stumbling trying to not float away. I had a very rough start, the game does force you immediately out of your comfort zone and saying that it doesn’t hold your hand is an understatement. I’m eager to hop back into it, but I think the majority of people interested may want to wait until some well versed tutorials start to flood the internet. In the meantime, I think I’ll hop back in and see if I can actually progress past this first station!

Check out our other One Hour Review for MERC.