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Starting with the main focus of the game: the action. There are three characters to play, each with their own playstyle and starting stats (hp/mp).
You have the main character, Divico, who can cut through swaths of enemies with relative ease. Boasting high damage and high health, he can really brutalize the oposition with his straight forward gameplay and satisfying feedback on each hit. Mechanically Divico is the simplest character to play as and my personal favorite thus far.

Following our main character is the fox person, Renart. They focus less on raw strength, and more on their agility. Renart can parry most incoming attacks in two flavors. There's a regular parry to dish back a fair bit of damage to anyone immeditely in front of you. With better timing they can initiate a perfect parry and inflict damage on everything around them. Players with good reflexes will enjoy mowing through Helvetii's range of enemies with Renart's speedy attacks and flurry of parries.

Finally, we are left with the most technical character, Nemeios. Nemeios has her staff to bonk close up enemies away, her bird that is ready to fight anything around them, and a high mana pool by default. She plays by the rules quite a bit differently from the other two characters. With her bird ready to do her bidding, she fights ranged. Each mash of the attack button sends the bird into combo string that extends until it can't physically go further. This requires a bit of patient attacking on enemies that won't juggle, or are up close. Between attacks it will return to Nemeios allowing her to restart the combo at a closer distance. She can also use her mana burst to boost her abilites at the cost of draining mp as its active. Combining the potentially tricky attack strings and deeper MP management makes Nemeios, in my opinion, the trickiest character to play and definitely the most unique of the trio.

With the variety of playstyles, players should have no trouble picking their favorite one and keeping the game fresh when you decide to switch.

With Helvetii being a roguelite style game play, each run you will run across chests offering random abilities such as a chance for an attack to hit twice at the cost of your hits becoming weaker. Or more character specific items that can boost certain attacks like Divico's ground pound. You will also come across shrines that allow you to make pacts with gods at the cost of total hp. These gods act as summons, each coming with two different abilities that are explained to you before accepting the pact. You can spend health to randomly reroll for a different god, or spend your health to accept the pact. Upon accepting you are granted MP-costing abilities from your god and a random passive buff. If you find more shrines you can spend more health to upgrade a summon two more times for a total of 3 passives. All that talk of spending max hp for a little summon sounds risky, but luckily the friendly owl merchant Bob will sort you out. Bob offers a variety of food and other items to spend your hard earned coin on. Foods will offer buffs such as increasing max hp or mp, and foods that increase your other stats. Bob will also offer non-food items to aid you, such as keys for chests and fake dice to help you win big money gambling between levels.

Finally, during your run you can acquire another type of currency after your rank in each fight of the level is tallied up to spend on permanent upgrades. These upgrades can affect your whole team. For example giving each character +5 total starting health. Or through playing a character enough you can do character specific upgrades. These upgrades are optional as shown by the options menu that lets you disable this if you're more of a purist.

Next up is the amazing art of Helvetii. The world is absolute beautiful with the hand painted art style. There are moments that feel as if you're playing a living painting. The backgrounds are very pleasing to the eye. Staying beautiful even as the rot takes over more of the scenery the further you progress. Most of the enemies are all fairly unique to each other. Ranging from imps/fairies to more monstrous bipedal wolves and steel ball swinging behemoths. Between stages you can relax and take in a cozy camp scene and see what the other characters have to say with their humorous banter between each other. You will undoubtedly find yourself taking moment to appreciate the world of Helvetii and all the little details you get to adventure in.

To complement the gorgeous art is an equally skilled soundtrack. Each level has its own set of music to match the different vibes. The starting forest leaves you with a tranquil piano between fights and a bellowing symphony as the combat kicks in. Each piece of music is a tasty treat for the ears. One of my personal favorites at the time of this review being Bob's shop. Dale North (credited on River City Girls, Wizard of Legend, Rakuen and much more) did a fantastic job composing songs matching and uplifting the world of Helvetii. Many players may also recognize the voice of Emi Evans along side the wonderful music.

All in all, Helvetii is the amalgamation of the developers' passion. Each different piece comes together to give you the player a wonderful gaming experience. Truly worth any roguelite fan's time or people who run-based games to challenge theirself into doing better each time. Also perfect for the working gamer who enjoys doing bite size bits of gaming, being able to get through a run in a very reasonable amount of time if you choose to. I know I keep finding myself exploring each time because I can't get enough of the environments!

There's squirrels, topias and bomb. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Bombs. Squirrel/10 would acorn.

Allies weak.
Axis strong.
Dino cannons.
Dino waifus.

Microraptor/10