Helium Boy

We all enjoy a trip down memory lane from time to time, but it’s a cobbled road that may make you long for power-steering and tight suspension.

Helium Boy is an attempt to modernise a template laid out most memorably in Nintendo’s Balloon Flight back in the mid-'80s.

Taking the floaty but precise 2D platforming of the Nintendo original, Helium Boy transplants that gameplay into a 3D gameworld, but whether it was worth a ride is another question altogether.

Taking control of the titular whippersnapper, you’ll be guiding him in the pursuit of stars, dozens of which are scattered throughout each of the game’s eight levels.

Making use of the lifting power of cartoon balloons, you simply tap the on-screen button to take your boy higher and higher. Stop tapping and the boy slowly descends.

After a few minutes of cack-handed ineptitude, this control setup begins to make sense, and you start to get a feel for the boy’s drift and weighty momentum.

Even with a solid grasp of the controls, though, collecting stars can be a real problem. With a 3D world and a fixed view on the action, it quickly becomes clear that judging the relative depth of objects in Helium Boy is next to impossible.

It’s telling that Helium Boy’s standout moments are those that do away with the third-dimension altogether, affording you the opportunity to do some fun, precision platforming in a couple of pseudo-2D levels.

The world of Helium Boy is an attractive one, full of bold primary colours and rippling waves, but these cheery graphics hide a far nastier side.

There are spiked surfaces everywhere, the boy is stalked by deadly ninjas, and those rippling waves are always ready to swallow the boy should you mis-float.

In other words, problems with the game’s perspective don’t just lead to the odd missed star - they also lead to the odd drowned boy, as the game seems intent on repeatedly testing your ability to judge the position of various fast-moving insta-kill obstacles.

This wouldn't be so bad if the checkpoints were generously spread out, but they're not. They’re simply placed too far apart, and there’s no sign that any consideration has been given to their position in the level.

Lose a life while navigating a particularly challenging arrangement of spiky things and the game rubs salt in the spike-wound by respawning you at a spot you passed several minutes ago.

Whilst some players may enjoy a stiff challenge, in this case the difficulty is too often down to weak design. With levels that can clock in at over ten minutes each, forcing you to retread large sections of a level seems unfair and ill-suited to the platform.

In fact, the game often feels like a slightly odd fit for smartphones, completely ignoring the demand for bite-sized chunks of gameplay in favour of over-long slogs.

While Helium Boy does have some visual flair to offer, and a pleasing sense of weight to its balloon-boy physics, there’s really not much in this update to recommend it above the '80s original.

Its primary inspiration offers an immediacy and pace that this update just can’t match, and after a couple of levels of Helium Boy I realised I’d rather be sat behind the wheel of Balloon Flight.