Helix Review

BY Rabie Hassoun | POSTED: 20 September 2008

Who said you cannot have fun with two Wiimotes?!



My arms feel kind of sore right now. After spending the summer doing basically nothing, Helix knocked on my door and gave me a rude wakeup call. A dancing rhythm game which requires the use of both of hands, my arms did not see this one coming.  With a solid collection of songs on hand, Helix from the outside at least looks like a solid Wii Ware title for you to download. With a ton of AAA quality downloadable games out this summer however, how does this one stalk up against games such as Castle Crashers (XBLA), Flow (PSN) and Super Mario RPG (Wii Virtual Console)?

Helix is a music rhythm game in which you are required to move in sync with a robotic character on the screen. The movement in this game involves moving your arms, so its best fit to be played using 2 Wiimotes (One in each hand if you did not figure that one out!).  The movements are based on the beats of the song played in the background. You will actually find yourself guessing the next move at times without looking at the character on display. You have a bar on the right hand side of the screen that informs you about how well you are doing. The more notes you mess up on, the lower the bar will go until you lose out and have to restart the song. Other important elements you will notice on the screen while you are playing are a combo counter and the overall score box on the top.

The moment you start the game you will notice how simple and uncomplicated it is. The menus are clean and straight forward. Once you pick what difficulty level and song you want to play, you are good to go. The difficulty levels are actually interesting and do make a difference gameplay wise. The first level, easy, is actually the ideal way to go the first time you run the game. Medium, especially on songs you unlock later on, gets a bit tough and you actually have to concentrate to win. Playing on hard you will be dancing and jumping in your room like an idiot, but that doesn’t matter since you will be having a ton of fun and losing some calories as you do so. 

There are 26 songs for you to choose from, each song posses a different challenge and test. Keep in mind that with 3 difficulty levels on hand, that’s 78 different sets for you to play. That might sound a bit low compared to other music rhythm games on the market, but remember that this is a downloadable game that costs 1000 Wii points and not a full retail game.  When you first start you will have only a few songs to choose from, but as you complete each song the rest will unlock eventually.

There is a diverse set of hand movements you can perform here. You can make a full swing, move your hand straight, up in the air and so on. The one problem with the game is that sometimes it registers a correct move for you even when you mess up. The robot on the screen might be moving his hand up to the right as you go straight to the left but you will still get the points on occasions. Come to think about, especially on harder levels, the game will get impractical if you have to follow every order accurately. We feel this “glitch” (if we may call it that) actually helps with the game’s long term value.

The graphics in this game are nothing to brag about. The animations and graphics overall are as simple as it gets and are actually comparable to some PSX games from back in the days. That is ordinary with music rhythm games however; graphics does not affect the core gameplay in any way. Still it would have helped if the robot moving on the screen looked a tad more alive.

After playing the game for some time we arrived at the conclusion that Helix is an average game that you can download for your Wii. The gameplay elements are fresh to the genre, but we have countless motion capturing games out for the Wii already. The game is still fun and with so many songs on hand, you will actually be playing it for a while. With the standard of downloadable games set so high this summer, Helix might struggle to keep up with the big stars. Either way, if you are music oriented gamer that enjoys rhythm games, giving this game a shot will not hurt you or your wallet.