I had some high hopes for this game when it came up in the dice rolls. After all, the trailers looked amazing and promised some solid demonic combat. But it didn't take long for the game to dash my hopes of anything good being here. In fact, I knew I was in for a wild ride before I even finished setting the game up. It became obvious quite quickly that this is the kind of game I play so you don't have to.
Story: Meet Desmond. On the surface, this is man who has it all. His father is the CEO of one of the top conglomerates of the world, Pearce Enterprises. He has a gorgeous girlfriend he is madly in love with. He even has a very successful career in the underground fighting scene (a man's gotta have some hobbies, right?). But not everything is peachy for the man. For one, he has recently made a terrible deal that threatened the company (and his father blames him for completely, adding family drama like few should know). He's also been having apocalyptical level nightmares. Nightmares about demons running around burning cities, and a connection to them which only one who is demonic themself could possibly have.
Most of this intro will be shown to you in-game as you start in one of these nightmares before the most important two days of Desmond's life. First, the night he proposed to his girlfriend and second the day and night everything came apart.
To start with, the fight was an absolute disaster with "The Saw" absolutely ruining Desmond. Nor did he have any good news when he got home. Rather, he came back to find his new fiancée in the arms of his best friend! Suffice it to say, he did not take this well. And in a fit of rage, he hit the petal to his car as hard as he could right into the side of a bridge, ending his life and damning his soul.
Not that he was unexpected in Hell... in fact the devil himself requested to have an audience with him and had an offer in hand to get back to Earth: Work for him as an Executor, a demon who's job is to find and collect the souls due to Hell and bring them back. He even sweetened the deal by making his first mark that friend who's betrayal clearly marked him for it. And of course, Desmond took the offer.
From this point, the best way I can explain the game is that someone decided to make this after reading Spawn and thought they could do it better. It just exudes the same energy and outline of a damned soul agreeing to return in a form that reaps souls for Hell, only to tell both Heaven and Hell to fuck off and do his own thing, potentially changing the balance of the war between them forever in the process. But the meat on that outline sadly is not nearly of the same quality. This is much more ham-fisted when it chooses to make story beat then Spawn (a 1990s comic, I should remind you) ever did.
But hey, it's at least consistent, right? It keeps it's points clear and doesn't contradict itself, right? Nope! When you watch the cutscene where Desmond got home to find his girl and friend together, the positions suggest a very comfy cozy feeling between the two, suggesting she was cheating, When the day before that friend had asked if she would be at the fight, that might even suggest he was hoping the plan was still on that night. But later in the game, this was suggested to be a rape scene... so either the dev-team subscribe to the "modern" line of thought that if the woman has regrets later that changes what happened that night, or they changed their minds about what happened that night and didn't check their previous work to make sure it matched. Either way, it's an amazing show of inconsistent writing and plot-holes they are capable of ignoring.
Not that that should surprise anyone considering the rest of the writing quality. The last real mission will have you hunting a McGuffin that was appearantly always there, but only suddenly matters or was even mentioned (or the fact that everyone wanted it at all or what it did) in the last 2 chapters, even though the character involved is a specter over the entire game... one you only ever hear from once early on saying to find him... then you don't... ever.
But hey, at least you finally get to meet this guy right? You get closure? You at least get an ending of any sort, right? Once again, NOPE! It may be an unoriginal and fairly uninspired clone of a much better story, but it would at least be a finished unoriginal clone of a story if it completed it's tail, but it doesn't even do that! Instead it literally ends with Desmond, the fiancée, and the friend driving off into the distance with the dreaded 3 words "To be continued" and NOTHING resolved. Total waste of time.
4/10
Graphics: Honestly I have to say this game looks surprisingly good all things considered. You will control Desmond from an over-the-shoulder view as you wander through several locations, from the burning city in his dream, to his home, to a graveyard, and even Heaven's HQ on Earth and Hell itself, and all the environments will look amazing during their time on the screen. There is very little to complain about there.
And the same goes for your less human characters you face. These are big, menacing, and brutal creatures who just look cook as hell when you see them. If anything, my only complaint here is the variety, or lack there of. Pretty much everything in Hell amounts to humanoid creatures with horns and charred from the fires in which they spawned. There is enough variance to let you know what is what, but nothing stands out enough to wow you by the end of the game. It all kinda blends together, even if each piece looks awesome.
Sadly, Heaven doesn't fair as well simply because their forces look human, and these modellers just couldn't do humans especially well. Don't get me wrong, the form is fine, and they move pretty well. But almost to a rule, faces just don't work so well. They look ok for stills, but they are expressionless... almost dead. Really the only ones I remember looking natural in this regard are Desmond himself (in some cutscenes) and Sawyer, who's hood hides his eyes pretty much all the time. This is something they could have used some serious work on to just finish making the game look from really good, to truely something great.
8/10
Sound: Sound is a lot more of a mixed bag then the graphics, I'm afraid. Don't get me wrong, the environmental work is actually REALLY good. It does not just use this for what you see, but often in forshadowing as well as finishing the scene by engaging an extra sense. Dare I say, this game can get quite cinematic when it wants to. But the quality of those sounds are really nothing special so much as used very well. Not a big deal, I mean we have reached a point in game design where even standard sounds are often all you need, but it is worth noting I am praising their use specifically.
Music, however, I can not. Really there doesn't seem to be a lot, here, and most of it is so undernoted you won't notice it for any purpose at all. Other then that, you will basically hears bits of generic metal music when in combat, which can sound awesome once in a while, but it's not just the greatest selection they could have used. At best it sounds like it's trying to sound like Doom 2016, but those are few and far between, often just sounding like the devs found something royalty free.
And sadly this is one of those times where voices are NOT going to be anything to star. Desmond sounds ok, as does Lucifer and most of the named characters... but not all. Desmond's father, his girlfriend, even his friend are generally done terribly. It just feels like for the most part the voice acting this time was armature hour, and while it often isn't terrible, it's just not great either.
6/10
Gameplay: And this is where literally everything falls apart. Devil's Hunt pretends to be a Devil May Cry clone, but it really fails at it for the most part. When you are in combat, you are looking at the most akward controller layout I have ever had the displeasure of using. Rather then place any of your main attacks on the face buttons like you might expect, you use the bumpers and triggers for it: right side for attacks, left for defense. You only get two of these attacks: a quick punch and a strong one, while the other side basically gives you a parry button if you can time it to the enemies. Unfortunately you may not realize this right away since the game doesn't explain this so much as put the button over the head of the enemy attacking and hope you get the hint. Rather your main buttons are reserved for your special moves, making things awkward right away as you have none besides a dodge right away, so you will do alot of it by mistake.
And to add insult to injury you really can't do anything to make it easier on yourself. There is no way to remap the buttons to fit your playstyle at all. Rather you get to choose between two layouts... and the game will never let you see the second one OR give you queues to match it, rendering this option basically useless. Nor is a keyboard and mouse going to save you this day... for the camera control is independant from where you are aiming, making most of those specials just suck all kinds of ass to aim like that.
When not in combat, things don't get much better, due to both the amount of walking you will do, and a sever case of "do everything button syndrome" in one of the worst ways. You will find yourself climbing over, pushing through and sliding around lots of obstacles, all of which will have a single "interact" icon you will hit the button for to get around it. This gets even more rediculous when it's simple things like climbing up something you could basically step over or down from... but Desmond needs permission to jump up and down like an idiot. Even worse there are crossbeams you will need to basically give him permission to let you walk across it... no risk involved and no backwards movement. These mechanics just seem to exist to slowdown the game.
Which it needs no help doing. You will spend a lot of the game in areas where you can do literaly nothing but walking around as the game tries to setup the story for you with massive spaces between missions you will actually fight anything in. It's simply put a slog with awkward controls and absolutely insane levels of jank.
3/10
Bugs: I can't even really say this game ran flawlessly. In fact I ran into some rather insane issues when playing this game: some bugs, and some SERIOUS design flaws.
- The Settings! They Do Nothing! (until you select a game profile to play): While trying to get this game setup so I could record it with OBS, I stumbled on the most obnoxious settings decisions I have ever seen! Outside of the resolution itself, any graphic setting you set will only apply to the saved game you are in. You would think a game with multiple profiles so multiple people can continue their game on the same machine would save graphical performance settings for the whole installation so everyone can have the same best settings for that machine... but no, each profile saves it's own. In fact the ONLY setting that runs regardless is the resolution the game runs at... and I only figured that out trying to run this on much less powerful hardware in the form of my media center since it became clear early on I was gonna play this with a controller.
- Hope you don't have a non-standard sound setup... Another issue I found while trying to play on that media center was more sound-based, but to explain I need to explain my setup. In my living room I have a media center PC which I tend to use when I want to play on a controller, mainly because it puts that controller with my couch and main TV. It's a very comfortable setup and for ingame communication, I plug a single-ear headset into the controller itself. The TV still plays all the sound I expect why my headset is dedicated to any conversation via Discord, XBoxLive, or whatever the game uses. This never happened on my gaming rig where the headset is a much more standard setup, but about half the time while trying to get this game to work on the media center in a way I could record from the TV, the game would randomly play it's audio through that earpiece. It sounded like trash and should NOT have happened according to the Windows settings, but this game just ignored all logic.
- Falling through the floor: I can not even say once the game was running it ran perfectly. There is one level where you are escaping the HQ of the angels where one of the corners of the room had no collision on the floor. Walk there, and fall to the floor below. Thankfully this was one place you didn't actually need to go, but yeah... falling through the floor is always an issue when it happens.
- Do NOT continue once you've finished the game: This one caught me off guard when I was trying to show the game off for an Extra Life stream, but using my saved game (so I wouldnt have to change graphical settings live on stream), I found selecting any given chapter will let you play that chapter and ONLY that chapter.... so I got curious and clicked to continue since the main menu still offered it. This will crash the exe file reliably, leaving the videos it started (which are the end of the game and end credits) to play silently until you click "ok" in the error message.
- Glitchy behavior when you max out Desmond: It is not only possible, but very easy to max out your character's abilities since you can gain souls of enemies you kill or even find them again... but it seems to have wierd effects on the game. Small things like audio stutters that were not there the first time and the ability to even use the menu option to select and equip your stuff breaking down. Be warned, this is definitely a "one and done" game if you even want to bother.
Score: I wish I could say this was a good game, but it was not. Frankly this is a terrible pile of jank trying poorly to clone a much better game along side a lackluster clone of a much better story. I can not recommend this game and while it wasn't so bad to drive me away from finishing it, there is just nothing here to be worth your time.
3/10
System Requirements:
- Intel i5 Quad Core
- 8 GB RAM
- Any GPU with 2 GB of VRAM
- 26 GB hard drive space
- Windows 7/8.1/10
System Specs:
- Ryzen 7 (5700X) 3.4 Ghz
- 32 GB RAM
- AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT (8 GB VRAM)
- Windows 11 (64 Bit)
- PDP DX Wired Controller (Crimson)
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