It’s been some time since we last covered a game from different cloth; lilt line we found to be extremely simple and yet addictive and refreshing. But helicoid doesn’t really reach the bar that lilt line set; sure, it’s a different experience altogether but one that doesn’t have the atmosphere or character that the psychedelic, acid washed predecessor has. Is it a bad game because of this? No; but one that’s extremely short lived.

The game consists of rotating your device first slowly, then building up speed fairly quickly, in order to move a little white circle around circles drawn by a thin white line in the centre of the screen. As the line draws, smaller circles appear from it, and by rolling your circle over these circles you trigger a musical note, or drum hit. Shaking your device begins this process again; if the line completes a rotation you lose the game.

Variation in the game boils down to changing the colours every stage and sometimes reversing the direction of the white line, but that’s it. It doesn’t even come with a soundtrack and that’s a shame, because the music could have been cleverly combined with the acoustic guitar and percussion to create some kind of mood. The game does allow you to play your own music but we couldn’t fit any of our own tunes to go along with the sound effects.

helicoid feels too much like an alpha build; the idea is really good and for those first few minutes you will enjoy playing it but the experience is not fleshed out. The game isn’t attractive, nor deep, nor atmospheric enough to make playing it through worth your time, and we’d love to recommend it if only the developer added something, anything to make the experience worthwhile. Like lilt line was.

Media gallery

• 
• 
• 

More by this developer

lilt line, C

Review by Ben Briggs, April 30, 2009

Why not try...

---

• 

  R TYPE

• 

  Squareball

• 

  Space Invaders Infinity Gene

• 

  Lunarcy