Title: To Hell with Hell
Genre: Action, Indie, Early Access
Developer: Lazurite Games
Publisher: Deck13
Release Date: Jul 19, 2018
To Hell with Hell is a game designed to make you furious, but in such a way that you are going to want to keep subjecting yourself to its torture. Developed by Lazurite Games, To Hell with Hell is a brutally hard, top-down shooter that sees you travel the depths of hell on a mission to save Asmodius, ruler of hell. Oh, and he’s also your dad.
The game is a bullet hell rogue-like crawler the rejoices in your torment. The developers seem to have a perverse joy in finding ways to end your life and make progressing in the game a serious challenge. And while it was a nerve-racking experience, it was one that I kept coming back to.
Games like these interest me, but only because of their tenuous link to the SHUMP genre. What I don’t normally like about games like To Hell with Hell is that you have total freedom of movement on large stages. I know this sounds odd but it opens you up to getting stuck and/or trapped, especially if the game is poorly designed.
Thankfully To Hell with Hell isn’t such a title. I think what really helps the game is the setting it employs. Being in hell tweaks your brain as you go in expecting things to not only be hard, but the possibility of getting screwed every once and a while because, you know, you’re in hell.
Rendered in a wonderful pixel style, To Hell with Hell revels in tossing all manner of gruesome baddies at you each level. The developers have done a great job at pacing the game, ramping up the difficulty just enough to get you hooked. Beating a stage or two gives you this sense that you can handle what’s next, even though you probably can’t.
Where the game throws you for a loop is how it handles saves. During your adventure you have a limited number of save slots you can use after each stage. You can see how many stages there are, but you’ll have to weigh when to use a save slot. Do you bet your luck on that next stage and pocket a save until it gets harder or play is safe in case new enemies come at you.
All of this is built to challenge you, but To Hell with Hell offers up a neat twist to its powerups. The game is built around the use of various masks that you can collect throughout the various stages. Picking up a mask turns you into a creature from your nightmares.
Each of these masks gives you a health boost and comes with two special abilities that can make you quite the killer. The magic comes from being able to hold multiple masks at once and being able to switch between them at will. All of these masks are better than your weak base form, but knowing how best each works is the trick to lasting longer.
On top of the masks you’ll also be able to pick up weapons to make the killing a bit easier. You have tons of options from the basic shovel and sword, to machine guns and magic based behemoths. You’ll only be able to carry two weapons at a time and their ammo is limited, so you can’t just spray and pray all day.
As you play you’ll find health and ammo pickups from the enemies you kill and these drop at a pretty regular pace so you never feel like the game is totally against you. Even better is that in-between each stage you can select an ability card that gives you some sort of perk for that stage.
To Hell with Hell is a hard game but one that gives you tons of options and ways to attack a stage. Maybe you decide to pair your favorite weapon with a card that makes your shoots more accurate, maybe you have a strong weapon that has limited ammo and you choose a card that increases ammo drops, there are lots of options to play how you want.
Then there are the boss fights that increase the insanity and will probably have you pulling your hair out. But once you find their patterns, winning the battle feels extremely rewarding. You feel a sense of accomplishment that you just don’t get from more traditional games.
But not everything is perfect in To Hell with Hell. This is a twin-stick shooter so you’ll be at a disadvantage if you go at this with a keyboard and mouse. But the real problem –for me at least– is that ammo and health pickups don’t happen automatically.
You’ll have to hit a button to pick anything up, which isn’t a killer in most games, but when bullets are flying and the world falling apart around you it’s sort of hard to stop for a fraction of a second to get that health pack you could really use. More times than I’d like I simply ran over powerups even when I pressed the pickup button.
To Hell with Hell is a hard game, but there are ways that you can cheese the AI at times. If you have a solid weapon you often can trick enemies into filling into a corridor for easy pickings. Although I don’t hate this since the game is brutal and finding ways to cheese it are okay in my book.
Technically though there are some issues. I found the first boss to be a real challenge, but the second boss was a cakewalk since he got himself stuck in a loop thanks to having the card that gave me a helper characters. He just got stuck and ran back and forth without shooting. I managed to beat him on-handed while trying to find my phone to film it with the other.
And those that isn’t the only technical issue that cropped up during play. To Hell with Hell is a hard game, but a fair one, so when glitches happen to end your run it really sucks the life out of a lot of the fun, especially if you are deep in the game.
“A few annoying technical issues aside, To Hell with Hell is a hell of a bloody good time”
Final Score:
3/5
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