Big Helmet Heroes Review (PS5) – A Big Helmet Won’t Save You Here

Ahhh, I hope 2025 is the continuing rise of co-op fun. Big Helmet Heroes strides into the fray in a cartoonish fast paced beat ’em up. The title is a neat re-introduction to the side scrolling brawler, we older (cough) gamers have loved from day one. Along with its roots, Big Helmet Heroes is full of charm, chaos, clanking metal and a lot of frenetic combat, but does it swing and miss? Or pack a punch?

Battle Ready?

Big Helmet Heroes has you controlling a heavily armoured warrior smashing, slashing and crashing through enemies in side scroller fashion. The combat is simple yet satisfying, either by button bashing attacks, or mixing up your melee attacks, dodges and special abilities, all of which keep things lively. The combat, whilst simple, is incredibly fun. Many items drop on the ground to be used at your disposal for enemies, whether this be a stop sign, an electric fly trap, or a piece of cheese. All emitting an electrifying blow, a poisonous odour, or a flaming fist blow. It’s incredibly easy to pick up the combat styles, and whilst the game tries to encourage combos within your custom style of fighting, it works just as well bashing buttons for those who want to pick up something fun and easy.

Big Helmet Heroes draws its sword and ink upon a cartoon art style. Exaggerated physics and over the top animations with your custom weapon make every clash with enemies a fun one. Vibrant backdrops make up each unique environment in the stand alone levels, with flowers acting as your collectible, and more armoured allies to unlock in each level via the medium of hunting for locked cages to free them. There’s a mixture of different worlds, from the desert sands, Kraken-infested seas, and of course your royal castles. The sound of Medieval guitar flows fill out the levels, blending the adventurous presentation with the period it’s creating in mind.

Once an ally has been unlocked, you can switch between the characters for a different playstyle. Some armoured allies will dash, have different speeds, utilise stealth, have different attack animations, and every single armoured friend has their very own unique ‘ultimate ability’. For some, this can be a flurry of sand turning all enemies on the screen into dust and others lasering enemies to their end. Some are stronger than others, whilst other allies also offer a mixture of help to you or your teammate by powering up your ability. This adventure can be played solo or in co-op so it only makes sense to bring in Miles for the full co-op experience. I guess first we will start with mine:

Kat’s Impressions

First impressions were initially very positive, I loved the simplicity and the idea of it. It felt easy to jump into for a few levels. I loved the art style I think it’s a really pretty game, the vibrancy of the colours and environment mixed with the expressive animations was a high. I can only speak for myself when I say my initial jumping in of Big Helmet Heroes felt exciting.

What didn’t feel exciting was the led balloon that eventually dropped a few levels later where we were faced with bug after bug, infuriating enemy types, consistent stun lock and just a metaphorical fat slap across the face of our fun being had.

The first few levels is the high standard and example of how much fun this game could have been – if kept at the same consistent quality. Eventually, you’re just met with latency issues, audio issues, level design issues that require you to reset the whole level, resulting in a game that just about lures you into button bashing and hoping for the best whilst experiencing the worst.

It isn’t until much later too, that you start to get checkpoints so should you be at the last quarter of the level and something happens – you have to restart from the beginning. Whilst that’s okay for the first few times, when the cause of restarting isn’t down to you or your co-op partner’s gameplay, it starts to wear thin.

It’s a shame because the idea is there, we never reached saturation in the difference of weapons we could yield.  It was fun to explore, test and take a liking to our favourites; before finding new ones to practice with. A variety of environments are there, as well as a variety of enemy types too. It’s just a shame that they eventually feel bullet spongey, and have attacks impossible to counter. It increasingly starts to feel like skill or practice effects take no effect as the level just pummels you with enemies. In the end, it doesn’t become satisfying to get through the hordes, it instead feels more like treading through treacle to just get the chicken to the other side of the road.

The collectibles sort of don’t make sense, as you just randomly are given flowers every so often and there’s just a bunch of sheep you can pet? I mean… I love random I went with it. Finding and destroying the cages felt reminiscent of the original Rayman games and I was kind of excited to 100% the game. I could see it in my grasp initially that this would be a fun and enjoyable completion. Like Pokemon collecting them all, all I collected were glitches.

Miles’ Impressions

For the first five or so levels, Big Helmet Heroes was a real blast of fun. Firing it up and rapturously charging into the fray with Kat was excitement, a child-like sense of glee enveloping the clashing of swords, or electric fly swatters. There’s a lot I liked within the first hour or two, namely the lovely cartoon graphic style, classy animations and bashing through waves of entertaining enemies. The level design early on is to a good standard, and the promotion of silly, over-the-top action, complete with hugely overpowered ultimate moves, is great.

We reflected on those early levels with a nice sense of satisfaction and we were eager to see more of this jolly little co-op hack-and-slasher. Unfortunately, past the fifth level, almost every positive aspect falls apart. Fighting through a ten-minute level only for a frustrating boss to glitch and force a restart of the entire thing? Rage inducing. New enemy types that prioritise aggravating stun-lock animations with little to no telegraphing? Awful. Unbalanced waves of increasingly spongey cannon-fodder tedium? Mind-numbing.

It’s a desperate shame, as the cuirass plates of Big Helmet Heroes are sturdy and impressive, only for every other piece of its armour to rust and fall apart. By a dozen or so missions, I was completely checked out. Restarting the same tedious slogs through endlessly uninteresting waves of enemies became too boring, even by my trophy grinding standards. All of the fun, all of the zeal, all of the charm is sadly driven right through the heart like a stake. That’s not to say that there’s no fun to be had here, but when the challenge equates to time wasting, I can’t help but feel my time is better spent elsewhere.

As Kat mentioned, the art style and graphics are genuinely excellent. The variety in locations is great and it channels the visuals of popular indie games, which does a lot of good for it. Big Helmet Heroes can also be a feast of slapstick action, with dozens of foes all thwacking and smacking at once. There are parts to appreciate, but when you’re bulldozed back down to Earth thanks to the 29th visual or audio bug, it’s hard to maintain the optimism for what it gets right. I actually there’s scope for a sequel to be a heck of a lot of fun, if the experience from this entry is taken on board and the issues adequately addressed.

Sadly, the present experience of Big Helmet Heroes is more defined by its irritations than its more creative elements.

Well, there you have it. At the moment Big Hero Helmets offers more style than substance. It’s not to say that these won’t be fixed in the future. I would very much like to return one day to this entry. But for now, I will hang up the helmet.

Big Helmet Heroes is available now on PS5 (review platform), Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series S|X and PC via Steam.

Developer: Exalted Studio
Publisher: Dear Villagers

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

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