My only previous experience of Hellboy is the 2004 movie starring the excellent Ron Pearlman (a lanterned-jawed man so fugly that the Hellboy makeup actually improves his looks considerably) in the title role. I’ve never read the Dark Horse comics from whence he came, so I didn’t know much about the character, but there’s a full bio >here< on Wiki if you want to know the full story. Basically he’s a red-skinned monkey-like demon, raised in the U.S.A. from infancy after being conjured up by the Nazis during a satanic ritual that opens a portal to hell, who grows up to work for the BPRD (the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defence) as a defender against the forces of darkness. Yep! - it’s your typical everyday story of an all-American, super hero Nazi-ass-kicking kind-hearted demon all right... Oh, and he has an oversized right hand made out of stone, a prehensile tail and he’s sawn off his demon horns to make him look more ‘normal’... Mmmmkay?
As you may have gathered from the title, this isn’t a game of the movie that’s currently doing the rounds (Hellboy II: The Golden Army), more of a ‘companion’ to the Hellboy series. The plot of this game is that while Hellboy is on the trail of a crazy witch, he uncovers a fiendish plot for world domination and must rush to defeat the crazed Hermann von Klempt before he can exert his evil will on a hapless world. Needless to say this involves a LOT of punching, grabbing, throwing and shooting of enemies. The controls are simple, X is punch (well, more of a “smash” really), Y is heavy attack, A is jump, R trigger is grab/throw (you can pick up or break off all kinds of objects to use as bludgeons or missiles). Once weak enough to be grabbed you can also perform finishing moves on enemies like pulling their exploding heads off and using them as grenades or just strangling them with their own tongues – nice! If you don’t want to get so up-close-and-personal then the L trigger fires Hellboy’s big-assed Samaritan handgun. Hellboy’s gun also uses various types of ammo, and some kinds of enemy are weaker or can only be killed with certain types of ammo, which adds a hint of tactics to your ammo management.
Basically a scrolling beat/shoot ‘em up played with a fixed camera, Hellboy: SoE plays a bit like the Devil May Cry series, it’s nowhere near as stylish or polished as Capcom’s chart-topper but has a fine sense of humour and there are plenty of corny one-liners for Hellboy throughout. Combined with a “mostly easy” difficulty setting this keeps the game dynamic and attractive to play, and fighting your way through hundreds of lookalike enemies has seldom been more fun. There are several different types of enemy and their attack patterns vary, but a game is never going to be too hard when the hero’s health regenerates over time, and Hellboy can also perform a handy grab/jump/ground smash combo attack that kills the enemy and replenishes his life force.
There’s a fun co-op mode too, where another player can take on the role of either of Hellboy’s friends; Abe Sapien (an amphibian humanoid) or Liz Sherman (a pyrokinetic). You can play split screen or online, although games do seem hard to find at the time of writing. The split screen mode plays well despite the view being a bit too zoomed-out for comfort, but will likely extend the life of the game to multiple play-throughs, and certainly makes it more fun.
Hellboy SoE isn’t a bad looking game either. The fixed camera mean that there are never any frame rate problems or tearing, and the screen(s) can get quite busy with 10 or more creatures attacking HB (and friend) at a time. There are some impressive boss characters and the occasional pleasant view, one level looked like a depressingly grey and misty return to the stunning castle from Ico, and another Japanese level was truly pretty to explore. The water ripples and splashes and grass and foliage sways as HB brushes by it.
Hellboy could have been more fun and played better; you’ll be baffled as to why you have to throw away a swanky weapon in order to replenish your gun ammo and the overly precise positioning required to make some pick-ups is just plain annoying. The action, characteristically of the genre, is despite varied levels and enemies very repetitive, but as long as I played it in short bursts I still found it more appealing than DMC4. Hellboy: Science of Evil is unlikely to appeal to anyone but comic book aficionados, but fans of on-screen mayhem and games that don’t take themselves too seriously could do a lot worse.
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