Hop and Slash Your Way to the Top in Hoppenhelm

Visually, Hoppenhelm carries a retro aesthetic that takes me back to my childhood days of 16-bit games. The game is completely in 2D with a pixel art style that serves as a fantastic homage to SNES games and the like. Despite the pixelated look, Hoppenhelm manages to pack in a lot of finer details, such as textures to indicate crumbling platforms that you need to watch out for. Character models are all unique and distinctive, and the enemies have their own behavioral patterns as well. Animations are smooth and fluid on my iPhone 8 Plus, with no issues of lag or choppiness. To top it all off, Hoppenhelm has a fantastically eerie chiptune soundtrack that fits in perfectly with the game's environment, and the sound effects are delightful.

Since Hoppenhelm is a twitchy reflex arcade game, there are no levels or anything of the sort. Instead, it's an endless game where you test how far you can go. In Hoppenhelm, you control a knight who must hop through a dungeon environment while also attacking and defending himself from various enemies. Each hop counts as a step, and your score is essentially the number of steps you took.

The game's one-touch control scheme makes this incredibly playable anywhere, anytime. There are three large buttons towards the bottom of the screen. The biggest one is in the center, and that's the button to hop forward one space. To the left is the button to perform an attack, and to the right is the button to defend with a shield. While the game sounds easy enough with such simple controls, things are actually challenging and can get pretty tricky.

With Hoppenhelm, you must time your hops carefully if you want to make it to the next platform before the crumbling one dissolves underneath your feet. Enemies also attack you, so you have to take them out before they get a hit in on you, or block with your trusty shield. There's also moving spikes, coins to collect, and other deadly hazards to watch out for.

There are multiple knights that you can unlock in Hoppenhelm. If you have collected enough coins, you can unlock the next character. The price goes up as you get towards the stronger ones, but they're worth the cost. Each knight has a special ability, such as being able to take more hits before dying or dishing out more damage to foes.

Additionally, there are also weapons to unlock. Again, the price is more for stronger ones, and these also include unique traits, such as the chance to land critical hits. With the combination of knight characters and weapons, you can end up with some interesting play styles.

Hoppenhelm is a fresh take on arcade platformer games. While there are many twitchy arcade reflex games, there aren't too many that have the platforming aspect, so it's nice to see. The graphics of the game are top notch, as it's a great homage to the classics. The chiptune music is done well too.

The controls are intuitive and easy for anyone to pick-up-and-play. But don't be fooled — the game proves to be rather challenging when you factor in all of the dangers that await you. Plus, there's many possibilities of character and weapon combinations, so you can find a play style that fits you.

Mostly everything about Hoppenhelm is good. However, just keep in mind that this is a freemium game, so there are occasional ads that pop up every so often. However, it doesn't happen too frequently and is not super intrusive. Like other games, there's always the opportunity to watch an ad to double your coins though. If the ads bother you too much, then there is an in-app purchase that removes ads, but it's completely optional.

As a fan of twitch reflex arcade games and platformers, Hoppenhelm is a nice mix of both. I'm in love with the graphics and chiptunes, as they make me feel like a kid again. The one-touch controls make the game easily accessible for anyone with a touch screen, but the challenging gameplay and unlockable content keeps you coming back for more.