Helix very early thoughts. Let me compare it to other rhythm games I've played. Play is watch-and-repeat. Not quite PaRappa style, though, since you may be performing one action while watching to see what the next one is--or next three are, in higher difficulties.
The top video
on this page is a good demonstration of what you'll be doing. With a wiimote in each hand you'll be performing various hand actions. Punch forward, uppercut, curl like with a small weight, rotations, raising above your head. Left and right version of each, and sometimes you'll be doing motions with both hands near each other. You won't be quite ready to join the Elite Beat Agents, but this is really the type of thing I've been wanting to see a rhythm game on Wii try for a few years. I haven't yet tried faking out the system much to see how much of it it can really tell apart with the wiimote data and how much you can cheat. It does have a calibration mode for it to gather data on how you perform different actions, for more accurate motion recognition.
Setup is pretty simple and reminds me a bit of some DDR games. Once you pick your profile and get in the game you scroll through a list of songs from which you can pick Easy, Medium, or Hard difficulty, then play the game as your robot avatar dances about in front of visualizer effects. Doesn't seem to be any sort of lives or "three rounds to get a total score before credits" thing, though, just you playing and setting high scores or losing however pleases you. Only a few songs start out unlocked, but it seems each time you finish a song (or maybe only finish a new song; I didn't replay any), another unlocks.
Easy is really easy. Medium kicks things up a bit, but still usually it doesn't make things TOO tough. Things often come in mirrored sets of three. Left punch, right punch, left punch. Right rotate, left rotate, right rotate. I only tried Hard once, and lasted longer than I maybe thought I should've, but didn't complete it. It starts mixing things up a bit more. Right punch, left punch, right punch, left punch, right uppercut, left uppercut, both arms out, both arms out.
I've left the worst for last, though. There are 26 songs, and it's not that they're bad, but to my ears they seem very samey and repetitive. Again I'm reminded somewhat of DDR, but only of a subset of its styles. I want to call it techno, but after seeing some music arguments in the OT it may be best to not start ascribing names to things outside my area of expertise. There's a
track list available, though I didn't recognize any names from it. Understandably being a low budget game from a tiny developer there aren't exactly big names.
In short: seems pretty cool so far, but it'd probably last longer with more aural variety. From a quick glance at an interview it seems like they'd like to do sequels, so maybe there'll be some more different stuff there.
