Big Helmet Heroes Review (Xbox Series X) – The Silly Co-op Adventure

The Beatemup genre has seen a bit of a resurgence in recent years especially in the indie realm. A stalwart of arcade and early console gaming for its easily adaptable gameplay and fun way to play co-op with friends. The amount of hours I spent as a kid Between Super Nintendo and various arcades playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time or the The Simpsons: Arcade Game is utterly countless. Exalted Studio attempts to capitalize on this by taking their characters from a PVP Idle Mobile game and transporting them into the console and PC 3D space. Big Helmet Heroes takes the tried and true gameplay formula and combines it with even more amusing antics and a treasure trove of silly weapons. Unfortunately, the game does have some technical drawbacks, which mires the experience. Resulting in something that may grab your attention for a few hours with a friend, but perhaps isn’t a game you’ll keep returning to over and over again.

Game Name: Big Helmet Heroes
Platform(s): PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S (Reviewed) & Switch
Publisher(s): Dear Villagers
Developer(s): Exalted Studio
Release Date: February 6, 2025
Price: $24.99 (USD), Deluxe Edition: $29.99 (USD)

Hand-Drawn Hilarity

As is the case with most Beatemups, Big Helmet Heroes has a base narrative that it follows up on as you journey through the various levels. Although it essentially serves as a thin line to connect each major moment together, the developers decision to tell the story through child-like drawings proves tremendously effective. The game’s characters don’t speak directly, instead they quickly deliver the overall tone of the game with gags and rifts on established tales. For example, after winning a major battle, the Knight character cannot lift a Sword from a Stone as easily as they expected. The culmination of said vignette left me chuckling at its playful nature, which truly permeates the entire adventure.

Beatemup Gameplay in 3D

Big Helmet Heroes features 28 different findable characters throughout the game. These characters fall into four archetypes: Warrior, Brute, Monk, and Rogue. So, each character that’s discovered after the initial four, all behave rather similarly with the light attacks mirroring them exactly, whereas the heavy and special attacks are unique to each character.

The special attacks in particular are mostly either in the camp of being silly, cool, or perhaps a bit of both. For example, the initial Knight character’s special attack sees him send a stampede of sheep towards enemy characters, while the a later discoverable Samurai turns ablaze and encircles everyone, burning them to a crisp in the process. Furthermore, the initial Brute character grows into a giant version of himself and stomps through the entire area taking out any foes in his wake.

Everything in the game has this humorous tinge to it, never taking itself seriously and wanting players to just enjoy its copious amounts of encounters. Thankfully, Exalted Studio understood the assignment and drops the most random assortment of weapons you may ever see in a video game. One section may contain a burning marshmallow, a toy hammer, and a broomstick, while the next section could have a freeze gun, a canoe paddle, and a bunch of bombs. This consistent refreshment of what’s available to clobber the myriad of adversaries on offer is actually what carried me through the game. I looked forward to the next area because there might be something I’ve never seen before that could be my new favorite armament.

Other Standout Elements of Big Helmet Heroes

Its quite evident that the draw of Big Helmet Heroes is supposed to be the further unearthing of its complete set of champions. Something that will take multiple runs to actually achieve. However, aside from the aforementioned wacky weapon variety, it was actually its world design and gameplay alterations which kept up my curiosity.

Every so often throughout its 20 levels a wrinkle is thrown into the mix whether that means a change in perspective to make traversal an isometric puzzle or the sudden appearance of a random ship mini-game. Since the game establishes that virtually anything can happen in this world, it all works to its benefit. Providing a nice break from the base gameplay as well.

This also meshes well with the diversification in its multitude of backgrounds and settings. One group of levels could feature the backdrop of a medieval town full of onlookers, while the next could feature a moonlit desert. Despite its limits in exploration, there are still pockets where players can go off the beaten path a bit, or suddenly find a slew of sheep ready to give out flowers that result in extra weapons or health power-ups. Discovering special items hidden away in boxes or enemies appearing out of nowhere as I navigated through the stage provided plenty of welcome distractions.

The Unfortunate Truth of Big Helmet Heroes

Sadly, it isn’t all coming up roses for Big Helmet Heroes. Although it is quite possible several of these issues could be worked out with patches, I have to be honest about its current state. The camera does present its fair share of problems, the biggest one is that it frequently switches to showing you vacant spaces in the middle of a fight or enemies will go off-screen. Quite a few times throughout my playthrough I couldn’t progress because an adversary was stuck and I had to strike the air in random directions until it suddenly appeared and then I could move on to the next section.

Boss battles also have this issue where the camera will tend to zoom in on the characters making it a bit more difficult than it should be to see attacks or the attacks themselves push the bosses off-screen forcing these fights to take longer because of the awkward positioning. I would describe these previous situations as minor annoyances that rear their heads at random times.

One Major Issue

However, I did run into a major issue with really bad frame drops during the multi-layered Kraken boss fight in the aforementioned ship level, where the last section of it totally crawls and I was forced to repeat the level five times, twice because it crashed the game, twice because the frame drops were so bad that I just could not find a way to hit the kraken’s legs. Finally, I was able to go into this last part with a special move stored and I got through it. Thankfully, this was the only instance of this that I encountered, but I did feel I needed to be transparent and bring it up.

Lastly, there’s the limitation of not having online co-op at all and furthermore, local co-op is limited to only two players. Obviously, online co-op is more important in today’s world, but this also changes the scope of the game if its included. The head scratcher for me was more so the lack of four player co-op, especially considering the size of the hero roster, which seems to indicate it was perhaps planned, but either due to time or technical issues it could have been scrapped.

The Verdict

Ultimately, I enjoyed the majority of my time with Big Helmet Heroes. It offers a great flashback to gaming of yesteryear where you’d gather with a friend and just hang out while playing a game. The tremendous weapon variety extends the gameplay perhaps much more than having a few extra attacks would do. While the insertion of random mini-games, bundle of gags, and terrain changes provides just enough to mix things up. Unfortunately, the camera issues may wear out their welcome with many players, which also makes it hard to recommend for everyone. If you enjoy Beatemups even with all of their usual hazards, Big Helmet Heroes may be worth giving a shot.

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