Regardless of your opinion on the type of game it is, I suspect most of us can unanimously agree that Big Helmet Heroes is adorable. Essentially, take a much quieter version of the minions whose speech is limited to random giggles and karate grunts, dress them up in medieval-ish battle garb, and shove them through a massive variety of silly but gorgeous levels, and you have everything Big Helmet Heroes is and strives to be. And while the casual, goofy nature of it isn’t likely to satisfy more hardcore gamer tastes, those looking for a cute and easy-to-pick-up co-op experience could do much worse.
Big Helmet Heroes’ story begins with regular heroes who have regular-sized heads and wear regular-sized armor. That is, until the horrific accident that changed everything. Okay fine, I made that all up. The setup of Big Helmet Heroes is you are heroes. Your helmets are rather large. You have a princess to save, or something. We’re not here for the plot. What we are here for is a casual beat-em-up that looks great and feels satisfying to play, and this game immediately delivers that. It can more or less be summed up as “Castle Crashers but prettier” and that wouldn’t be unfair. But for everything it lacks in originality, Big Helmet Heroes makes up for it in charm.
You’ll start each level by picking two of a couple dozen or so heroes, most of which will need to be unlocked by freeing them from cages within each level. While each hero looks visually distinct and, again, oddly adorable given their thirst for cartoon violence, all of their moves follow the rules of one of four distinct classes. You have the sword-and-shield-carrying Warrior, the slow-but-powerful Brute, the fast-and-deadly Rogue, and my personal favorite, the staff-wielding Monk who can float in midair by rapidly spinning their staff around like the world’s cutest helicopter. Given that each hero follows one of these templates, it’s tempting to say they play mostly the same. But the biggest difference is that each has a distinct special attack that can be activated by pressing the Y and B buttons together, assuming you’re on Steam Deck or using an Xbox Controller.
And these special attacks are not created equal, leaving me to gravitate to certain versions of each class over others. Playing in single-player mode means choosing two characters to go into each level and being able to switch freely between them, while playing in the game’s local two-player mode means each of you gets one character, with the option of switching to another if you’re able to find and free them in the course of a level.
The gameplay here is about as simple as a beat-em-up can reasonably get, but I don’t mean that negatively. You have a button for a quick, standard attack, another for a slower, heavier attack, and can mix and match the two with both each other and the jump button to perform a small variety of combos. You’ll also have a button to pick up enemies and throw them at each other or off a cliff (or hell, throw your co-op partner, I’m sure they’ll love that), or to pick up the wide variety of silly weapons that can be found around each level. And that variety is really wide – I’m talking crossbows, ice guns, electric fly swatters, Molotov cocktails, torches, bombs, hilariously large squeaky toy hammers or even just a couple of carrots that can, of course, be dual-wielded.
Taking itself seriously is something that Big Helmet Heroes has no interest in, and despite the lack of spoken words throughout its 4-5 hour campaign, silliness flows through every fabric of its being. A level that would normally appear to be a medieval magical forest suddenly turns into a bowling alley for some reason, while a level filled with red hot lava everywhere will gradually become more of a water park where you’ll jump down lava slides on inflatable tubes. Best not to think about the science behind that one. Certain levels will also have minigames to play like a soccer game or turret shooting sequence, but these are fairly few and far between, adding welcome variety but not sticking around long enough to make an impact. There are also some segments where the game decides to opt for an overhead view and have you navigate around a large labyrinth defeating enemies along the way, and these are… mostly fine except when they’re just too big and you get lost and keep going in circles and take a really long time to find your way out. I will accept any and all criticism if getting lost in these is just a me thing, I really will.
While Big Helmet Heroes appears to be a co-op game at heart, I spent significant time playing both single-player and co-op modes, and each has pros and cons that left me ultimately torn on which I preferred. Its co-op mode is restricted to two players and local only, meaning anybody looking to play online with a friend will have to stick to Steam’s Remote Play Together feature – which is nice but sometimes a bit laggy depending on your connection. But while its two-player co-op is great fun, camera issues and an occasional overabundance of chaos on screen added some clunkiness and confusion to an otherwise good time. Big Helmet Heroes’ camera is functional enough but tends to be zoomed too far in and occasionally obscure important details like, oh you know, who’s attacking you and from where. In levels that require you to dodge obstacles like giant boulders or runaway minecarts, the camera is often zoomed too far in to have any hope of reacting in time before getting hit.
This issue gets worse in co-op as it’s sometimes not quite sure which hero it wants to follow and the zoomed-in nature can restrict movement of both heroes if you’re not always on the same page about which direction to walk. And while there are blue and red rings circling each character to help you stay oriented as the screen gets busy, occasionally there was just so much going on at once that we would tend to lose track of our heroes anyway. None of this ever downgraded our play sessions from a good time to anything less than that, but resulted in a few minor pains nevertheless.
These issues were much less prevalent in the game’s single-player mode, where the camera did a mostly good job of keeping up except the small handful of times it failed horribly and a little less chaos on screen kept me consistently well-oriented to my surroundings. While the solo mode on its Medium difficulty spends a lot of time being fairly easy, the difficulty ramps up in surprising ways that rely on you to strategically swap out characters when one is getting hurt and needs to heal. Characters can be swapped out at will in solo mode, and doing so will often be a key part of a winning strategy. It forced me to think about which characters would complement each other well, and feels like a smart addition to keep the solo mode at least as interesting as its co-op counterpart. So, despite what it looks like, both solo and co-op modes are perfectly valid ways to play Big Helmet Heroes and you won’t be missing out on much if you choose to solely stick to one without touching the other.
In either case, every one of the game’s 20 levels feels distinct enough in its enemy variety, environmental design, and steady ramp-up in difficulty that it’s hard to notice how simple the whole thing is. I do think it needs a few minor fixes, though, with some bugs like an enemy being able to hit me through a wall and enemies getting stuck on scenery here and there. But it feels like a complete, mostly polished package and a labor of love.
Because I still need to talk about my favorite part of Big Helmet Heroes, which is its stellar presentation. This is a game that’s advertised as a cinematic beat-em-up with movie-quality animation as per its Steam page, and I would say that is very accurately advertised. Big Helmet Heroes looks absolutely beautiful, and a huge aspect of that is both its delightfully smooth and charming animations, and stunning environmental design. Each level looks different from every other, and its environments continued to surprise me with just how lush, vibrant, and colorful they all were, aside from a couple of later-game levels that seemed to attempt something more stylized but instead made me question if the HDR support had gone wonky. The animation is consistently excellent, though, with the developers successfully making an abundance of cartoon violence look as innocuous and slapstick as possible. The music and sound are also no slouch, with the grunting and various giggles of heroes and enemies alike lending a lot to the light-hearted vibe, while the music serves as a fitting background even if I’m not going to be pulling up the soundtrack for personal listening anytime soon.
The game also runs great for how pretty it is, with a playable frame rate easily achievable on the Steam Deck depending on how willing you are to compromise the visuals, and ultrawide resolutions being well-supported right out of the box.
You’ll probably know very quickly if Big Helmet Heroes is your kind of game. If complex loot systems, skill trees, and in-depth mechanics are your cup of tea, this game is likely to leave you a little bored. But if you’re looking for a casual but very fun romp through a variety of gorgeous scenery, especially if you have a co-op partner in mind, Big Helmet Heroes may very well be exactly what your next game night needs.
GREAT
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