#van hellswing

Van Hellswing is an intense FPS with incredible movement and verticality, where you blast Draclua's minions in a dark abyss!

Downloaded a demo for something called Van Hellswing during one of the previous Steam demo events, basically on the name alone. I saw clips of a grappling hook gun and gothic environments and decided I was sold.

A retro shooter (a, ugh, boomer shooter) mixed with a bit of Castlevania or perhaps Bloodborne flavor? And a grappling hook? I was primed to fall in love.

Tonight, I finally gave it a shot.

Unfortunately, it's a Devil Daggers sort of game where you're locked in a tiny arena and just go for score. I am one of the rare few people on this planet that just did not like Devil Daggers. I thought the aesthetic and monsters were rad, but being trapped in a single tiny room forever did not appeal to me, no matter how well tuned it was. Ergo, Van Hellswing immediately gave me a sour taste.

It does give you a little more space to move around in, and a little more to look at, but I'd argue it's a lot more one-dimensional than Devil Daggers. It's also a demo, so maybe more variety is forthcoming, but right now the only enemies I ever saw were bats of varying color and ability. Some move faster than others, some shoot at you, etc. But they're all the same bat. And all you have is a single charge-up shotgun.

And unlike Devil Daggers, where you're this tight, well-oiled machine that can elegantly glide around the arena, Van Hellswing makes you slow, heavy, and floaty, like a bat-blasting wrecking ball. I was starting to scratch the surface of some of the more fun weight-based tricks you could do with chaining bunny hops and grapples, but my first impressions were not great.

Also the very, very first thing I noticed was the textures.

Van Hellswing sells itself on a retro art style that looks pretty alright as long as you don't stop and stare. Whoever is making the game does not actually seem to know how to have real, genuine retro textures in their games, so what it appears they're doing is taking pixel art and scaling it up to modern texture resolution. If you really look up close, this gives surfaces this strange half-step of looking like pixel art but still getting filtered and compressed. It feels really hack-y and makes it look double gross in a way that isn't retro.