Apathy Blogs

Helix: The Post-Apocalypse, High-Tech, Fantasy, Western RPG is the first game I’ve been given a free review copy of. This excited me and I really wanted to return the favor with a good review, but I must be honest in my opinions. While Helix has a lot of buzzwords in the title, I can sum it up in one: amateurish.

Looking at the credits I see the lack of an editor and it shows in the product. My advice to anyone truly interested in the game is to certainly wait until a revised edition before buying a print copy. For the publisher of the game, I suggest you pay a freelance editor to go over your book at least once before sending a product to print. Sentences like: “You are getting sleepy until you are asleep” do not belong in the rules. If there are grammar mistakes on every page, you need to do more proof reading. A template for monster statistics should be used; I’ve seen “Hite Points” and other typos plus inconsistent ordering of attributes.

Art in the book is about the level I would call high-school doodle art. The sort of art a high-school student might have drawn while bored. If they never took any art classes in college, that’s about the quality you see in this book. There’s a reason good artists study anatomy, so they know how to make a human figure that doesn’t somehow look wrong. I also highly recommend ditching all the pictures of people who look like bad LARPers. Some of the art has pencil smudges and eraser marks that should have been cleaned up in Photoshop.

The rules themselves are relatively simple. Skill rolls use a d6 roll under skill method, attribute rolls are d12 roll under stat. Nothing terrible, but nothing exciting or different. They try to promote themselves as “d12′s aren’t useless anymore.” I hate to say it, but I’ve played several better games that use the d12. Advanced Heroquest or Everlasting are the first that come to mind. I found it odd that a variety of damages were given for unarmed combat that included nearly any body part you’d want to hit someone with, but no reason mechanically for why anyone would do anything besides kick, which does twice the damage of anything else. Unless you are a martial artist, in which case double kick is twice kick damage. Why not just give a single unarmed damage that lets the player describe a kick, punch, or headbutt to accompany it? As it is the only reason to not perform max damage would be aesthetic and role-play reasons.

The over abundance of unneeded skills reminds me of many games I played in the 80′s. As was pointed out in my RPG club’s discussion of the game, there are too many similar skills. Does the game need both seduction and erotic dancing as skills? A tighter list of skills with optional specialties is often a better choice mechanically. The explanation that many skills lets a player customize their background more isn’t helpful if it muddies the game rules too much. The difference between filch and pick-pocket is too nit picky for most people.

The only thing that could have made this worthwhile is a fantastic setting. Instead I think they tried to do too much. The magic system reminds me of the Matrix, or more properly Mage’s Virtual Adepts. It does have a unique shamanistic look at the “computer code as magic” idea though. The game is supposed to take place in the wilderness areas between big cities, but I think some descriptions of the big cities would be nice as well. One of the things I really liked from the original Gamma World boxed set was the poster map of what was once the United States. Expanding more details about the setting would have really improved the product. Come to think of it, I would have preferred this as a setting book for an existing system like True20. There are some interesting ideas in the game that could use further development, but overall it seems to suffer from trying to use too many genres instead of creating a unique new world vision.

I will give them credit for continuing to update their site with extra content. The updates have the same quality of art and editorial oversight, but at least they are trying to give good support to their customers. I wasn’t too impressed with their forums though. The forums are hosted by a forum company, and being asked to click no to a bunch of mailing lists is not an experience I enjoyed. I highly recommend they invest in their own domain so they can operate their own forums and announcements. I wish them luck in their future endeavors, and hope they have learned much from this release.

Apathy Rating: 1/5.