Genre: Action, Adventure, Indie
Developer: Layopi Games
Publisher: 1C Entertainment
Release Date: Sep 17, 2019
Price: $34.99
Devil’s Hunt is a third-person action game in the look and spirit of Devil May Cry. You play as some asshole (Desmond, because why not make of think of Assasin’s Creed, a much better game) that is wholly unlikable living in an approximation of some random American metropolis but where everyone speaks as if their dialogue was written by a remedial high school English class. You are a rich underground boxer who also helps run daddy’s multinational corporation on the side. Our hero is the sort of guy we can all relate too!
The idiotic story that feels more of a parody of games like Devil May Cry rather than something to be taken seriously
The game is action-focused and that part of the product is okay, but only just okay. What isn’t okay is the idiotic story that feels more of a parody of games like Devil May Cry rather than something to be taken seriously. The story isn’t helped by the fact that it jumps all over the place without much rhyme or reason right from the get-go. The game kicks off right into the action and sees you traveling through a ruined city as demons and monsters steal people away from the shadows. It’s a neat way to open a game but it also shows all its weaknesses right upfront.
You fight generic monsters from hell before fighting bigger monsters from hell. Combat isn’t made clear and you are pretty much left to your own devices to figure it all out. This is fine for the most part but narratively makes no sense. We get nothing in terms of character other than you are some dude with a devil arm that loves to punch. And punching it seems if more than enough to get you through this adventure. After the introduction finishes with you fighting a bigger monster the game totally shifts and lets you know it was all a dream. None of it mattered and it wasn’t even a good tutorial for what we can expect.
From that intense and fast-moving into, Devil’s Hunt slows to a crawl with longwinded exposition that makes everyone involved look and sounds like completely unrelatable assholes. Assholes for everyone! You walk around your house, you walk around your office, you walk around and talk like this is some godforsaken MMO only without these unlikable people giving you anything to do. Maybe you pick up an object and look at it, but that’s as exciting as the game gets for a good while.
From here it turns into a daytime soap with “shocking” moments happening out of left field, and by left field I mean they are telegraphed like the player is a child. You are going to propose to your girlfriend after a night of hot sex that looks laughably bad to the point that no one looks like they are enjoying it. It’s like two planks of wood being slapped and rubbed against each other. You wake up and propose to awkward facial animations, but you are a still a boxer (unsanctioned because Fight Club is still cool) and get up early for the big underground fight that everyone seems to know about, kissing your new fiance goodbye because she isn’t going to go see you.
This is where, in most games, the tutorial would kick-off, and it does seem like that was the original intention here. You head into your home gym that overlooks the ocean and are tasked with getting in some early morning training before the fight. But instead of explaining the combo system or how combat works at all, you simply push the punch button three times against the punching bag to complete your assigned task. You also do this while wearing jeans with chains circa 2001 and a leather jacket. Total cool guy alert and just how I look when at the gym. Imagine Steven Tyler in full Aerosmith gear on the heavy bag and you get the idea.
This is the first action since the intro dream which feels like over ten minutes ago at this point. Everything is so longwinded and feels like it’s just filling time. You also went to your dad’s office at one point in time during all this (maybe before the hot sex but it’s all a blur because I was beating my head for the game to get on with things) so he could fire you for losing them a lot of money in a deal that’s never explained and one that your dad backed you on. It’s stupid, a waste of time, and serves to introduce yet another unlikeable character. You yell at some dude that’s apparently your bestie on the way out because he also seems to know about your underground fighting match. None of this is coherent or makes any sense.
You then go to the fight where we are finally given control again only for us to hit the A button so we can change our clothes. It was at this point that I began to wonder if I was playing a walking simulator and not an action game. Gameplay is off the charts! We walk to the fight only to see our dad and some of his rich friends in attendance. You get mad about seeing him but the reality is that every damn person you’ve met has known about this super-secret fight club. We gain control and can finally throw the first real punch since in the game in what feels like ages. You beat up some rando for a bit only for some voodoo man to do some evil magic and make your opponent unbeatable. Again, you play for literal seconds before control is ripped from you.
EVERY CHARACTER IS LIKEABLE!
This is a no-win situation no matter how good you are. You get totally wrecked and stretchered off into the back. A doctor checks you out because no underground illegal fight club is complete without several doctors and EMT’s in full gear. You wake up to your dad saying that you embarrassed him in front of his friends because every character in Devil’s Hunt is absolutely charming. You drive home in yet another cutscene that you don’t control to meet your fiance of only a few hours because you’ve kind of had a shit day and could use a little support.
She’s in bed with your bestie from your dad’s office, having sex with your lady like two Barbie dolls jittering against each other. EVERY CHARACTER IS LIKEABLE! He runs off, you chase after, he hits you over the head with a brick, somehow you are totally fine. He drives off and you follow only to drive off a bridge because of the multiple concussions. The game frames this as suicide but who really knows as the facial expressions don’t work most of the time. I suppose we are meant to sympathize with the character as he is at his lowest point, but I couldn’t really care less about this rich asshole who did most of this to himself.
You make it out of your car and stumble onto the edge of the water only to find the voodoo man that we saw for about ten seconds during the last bit of actual gameplay hover over you doing that voodoo that only he can do to you. At this point, I needed a break and the game seemed to agree as it threw a fatal error at me and crashed. I checked Steam and it said I had been playing for just over an hour which felt off but I can’t make heads or tails of anything at this point. All I know is that in that time I had done nothing of value and barely played the game hitting the punch button only a handful of times.
Devil’s Hunt is madness from beginning to end in terms of story
Thankfully things pick up from here and do get better in terms of story. Voodoo dude sends you to hell and Mr. Potty Mouth takes it all pretty well considering, you know, he’s in hell and it exists. He gets about as weirded out as if he ordered a Coke and got a Dr. Pepper instead, but already left the drive-through and sort of just accepts it pretty quick as Dr. Pepper is still pretty good. You finally start fighting monsters and the game throws up button prompts at you because of how long it has been since you last experienced combat. You think Metal Gear is longwinded, the opening of Devil’s Hunt has it beat.
Giant douche canoe, after fighting a few monsters in hell, lets us know that we aren’t in Kansas anymore because the idea of comedy this game has isn’t really a comedy at all. Maybe if my grandfather was playing this game he’d get a laugh out of that reference that’s now 80 years old. From here the story gets weirder and tells the tale of a battle between heaven and hell with you, the giant jagg-off right in the middle. You complete tasks for Lucifer and earn powers and abilities along the way on your quest to make it back to the living to presumably kick that ass of the dude that borked your fiance which you do as the games first quest.
Devil’s Hunt is madness from beginning to end in terms of story. But here’s the thing; for all the complaining I’ve done of the first hour or so, I actually liked the story as a whole. Sure, everyone is unlikable and the writing is that of an 8th grader who hates the world, but it’s funny, even though I don’t think it intends to be. It’s like The Room of video game stories and you just can’t turn away from the disaster of it. I won’t spoil the story for you but there is enough going on to keep you going. It’s stupid and telegraphed a mile away but at least it’s entertaining. Well, at least it is when cutscenes don’t force a game crash.
I know I’m harping a lot on the issues, something I usually do at the end of a review, but Devil’s Hunt is just so halfway there it hurts. The game is really ugly while at the same time being quite pretty. The environments are well detailed and particle effects look great thanks to Unreal 4 tech. But characters and enemies especially look generic and feature facial animations pre-Xbox 360 generation. Emotions are always flat and it looks as if faces are pulled like a ventriloquist dummy and don’t move as a human would. This is made even worse when your characters voice actor tries to have some emotion behind his mostly monotonous delivery. Sometimes lips don’t even move. And don’t even get me started on terrible voice acting that drops out at random which is almost a godsend at times.
I quickly learned that after earning a few ranged special abilities I could simply spam the moves against most bosses and win pretty easily
Combat is where the game is made or laughed off, so if this was good then you can easily forgive the bad writing and joke of a story. Combat is simple, which I usually like, but in the case of Devil’s Hunt its almost simple to a fault. Now I understand why all the dialogue and mindless wandering sections happen because the combat gets incredibly repetitive very early. I don’t think I had killed more than a dozen enemies before I was wondering if this was all there is. You simply mash the trigger button to attack enemies with a light or heavy attack until the die. There’s not a whole lot of finesse to it. You can block an attack that is telegraphed much in the same way the Batman Arkham games do, only nowhere near as smooth or precise. You also get a dash to get of the game and that’s about it.
You can upgrade the few abilities along the way by collecting souls and using them in three different stances that look different but play the same, and you can assign three abilities to your controller, but they don’t do much to up the overall experience or add a layer of depth to combat. A lot of them are neat but I mostly found that punching the generic bad guys a lot did the trick pretty well. If the basic stuff works fine then the player doesn’t have that much incentive to play around with any of the deeper mechanics that a game might have. Why would I learn all sorts of long combos when punching and using a couple of abilities I like is just as effective against everything I come across?
The game also features a number of boss battles that could have been interesting, but these also just come down to punching a lot and simply using your dash skill to avoid damage until you enter a berserker rage mode that does massive damage. In fact, I quickly learned that after earning a few ranged special abilities I could simply spam the moves against most bosses and win pretty easily as the cooldown times are quick and you don’t use any sort of mana. Sure, I could have made the game harder by not doing that, but why would I when the game clearly makes it possible to cheese them.
But it makes sense that there isn’t a whole lot to the combat in terms of depth as Devil’s Hunt isn’t all that long of an experience. You’ll easily get through this one in under 10 hours at most, and that’s if you suck at action games. At least you can perform special kills that are always fun to watch if a bit repetitive after a while. And the worst part of all of this is that just when you get deeper into the story and feel like the game is leading to something everything just abruptly ends on a pretty annoying and insulting cliffhanger.
Devil’s Hunt isn’t a terrible game it’s just not a very good one either. It feels rushed to market and well undercooked. Audio issues abound with sometimes audio not playing or it playing far too fast. A bunch of patches have already dropped and the developers seem to be listening and supporting the game which I really dig, but there is only so much you can do. The game just never really knows what it wants to be in the end. It’s part walking simulator, part colectathon, part Devil May Cry wannabe, and it’s not very good at any of those things.
More often than not Devil’s Hunt is just a janky mess on PC with some serious optimization issues, so if you really want to experience this title I would suggest you do so on consoles when it drops later down the line. Even high-end machines are having issues running Devil’s Hunt, mine included. I’d wait until a few more patches roll out before diving into this one because right now it’s not quite ready for primetime. Hell, even watching the developer play the game on launch they were forced to reload because the game broke and audio constantly cut out during cutscenes.
Devil’s Hunt wants so hard to be a AAA caliber title but it cuts a lot of corners in its quest for mediocrity
Final Score: 2/5
*A Steam code was provided for this review*
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