Review: Hellbreachers – PS5, PS4

Hellbreachers is not a good game. You can leave now and save yourself a couple of minutes reading, or you can stick around and find out why this one had me yawning.

Hellbreachers is a very simple game with very little effort required to beat it. If you’re after a quick platinum trophy or 1000 gamerscore, Hellbreachers is a safe bet that won’t annoy you too much in your quest to grow out your e-peen. But really, do we buy games for their trinkets, or for a fun time to kill away the endless lockdown hours? It’s the latter, and Hellbreachers doesn’t do a great job, but it’s not so bad that I want to run to my local pub and lick the bathroom floors.

You have three characters with their own flair and gameplay style. Upgrades are in, though they’re really simple and honestly, you can run and jump your way through the game without ever looking at them. You don’t even need to be one of those weird kids who can run through a game in seconds; the levels are short and some can be completed with just a couple of minutes. You could hang around and kill all of the enemies and collect all of the gems, but even then, you’re only really adding a couple of minutes to the running time of each level.
I didn’t really pay much notice to the monsters unless they were directly in my way. For the most part, you can just skip on by and not kill a single critter and still get the reward of hitting the end of the level. Simply run from the left side of the screen to the right, hit jump and double jump as required, rinse and repeat until you hit a boss level.

Boss level’s don’t really bring the game up out of the gutter, unfortunately. Instead, they’re right in there with the rest of the game. The bosses are really simple and you can literally just jump around them, spamming your attacks, and within a minute you’ll be on your way to the next overly simple level to start the cycle again.
The game may have over 50 levels, but it only has a couple of tricks to turn and they won’t keep you entertained through to the halfway point, never mind the end of the game. The combat is dull, the exploration is almost pointless, and the boss levels are purely awful. Avoid.