Hellboy: The Science of Evil Review

Mike Mignola has to be pretty happy. After making comics for other people for a decade, he struck out and ended up making a name for himself with his own character and after another decade of building up the Hellboy mythos, he managed to get it turned into a surprisingly great action movie courtesy of Guillermo del Toro, who has another one on the way. By his own admission, though, he doesn't play games, which makes me hope that he just had no idea how bad Hellboy: Science of Evil actually turned out to be.

The PSP version is a slightly different take on Mignola's universe than the console versions. It's an original storyline rather than something that mirrors the upcoming movie, and supposedly Mike (with del Toro, both of whom collaborated on a couple of animated movies between the live-action stuff) actually contributed to the development of the game. Again, maybe his unfamiliarity with games meant he didn't quite understand that almost every moment swings like a pendulum from being boring to insanely frustrating.

Whatever the reason, it's fairly obvious that Krome Studios and Big Ant Studios started with some basically solid tech and then had zero idea what to do with it. Science of Evil actually runs fairly well, usually hovering around 30 frames a second with dips into the teens and even a few moments approaching the silkiness afforded by 60 fps, but the more I played of the game, the more I realized that this was chalked mainly up to the fact that fog hid far-off draw in and the game's corridor-like linear paths kept things from becoming too expansive.

When just running from one enemy spawn point to the next, the game can actually seem downright pretty; solid texture work, plenty of variety and limited interaction with the environment in things that can be broken or picked up. As soon as enemies start scurrying into view, though, it all starts to fall apart. Things start to feel clunky almost from the first few moments of learning the light/strong attack combos. The attacks (both from Hellboy and his enemies) just seem to whiff through the air rather than connecting. Hitboxes are inconsistent; sometimes an enemy can register a hit when Hellboy is well out of range, and even when they do connect, there's no real sense that they're doing damage.

There were some obvious attempts to make the combat feel varied, too. Enemies can be picked up and thrown into one another (as can many melee weapons, blunt objects, and the grenades that are scattered all over the levels), and certain combos can produce extra bonuses like stunning enemies or having them cough up extra Rage Runes that fill up a limited-time, super-damage mode, but again, because there's no real sense of impact, the combat ends up being a limp, sluggish bit of button mashing -- often with the same moves used against the same enemies over and over again.

Boss/mini-boss battles largely consist of a single tactic: run around in a circle until the bad guy swings, get behind him and sneak in a couple of blows, then repeat until they're dead. There were a few battles that required throwing enemies into the bosses, but the game's wonky lock-on system made this a pain (though trying to do it without locking on is an exercise in anger management), and by and large the combat is so brain dead that there was no real reason to experiment. Even firing Samaritan, Hellboy's trusty pistol, is tedious and ammo is scarce enough that after a while I didn't even bother.

The fact that the game grades you on mixing up combos, hits, and damage dealt every couple of tussles, all to gain Spirit Shard rewards that unlock stuff like concept art, interviews, trailers and so on, just means that you're penalized for using what is ultimately the most effective attacks to just plow through to the next inevitable bit of stuck-in-molasses combat. I understand Hellboy's not a ninja or something, but he's capable of more advanced moves than this.

And maybe that's the crux of my dissatisfaction with the game: despite Mignola's supposed influence, I never really got the sense that the dev team even knew anything about the character. The dialogue is almost entirely without Hellboy's charming repartee (because the PSP version doesn't even have voices, I tried hearing Ron Perlman's delivery in my head, and almost every single line in the game just fell flat), and the actual story itself is horribly trite.

This is particularly true of the game's between-level cutscenes. The art style tries to copy Mignola's comic style, but the piss-poor approach to animating it all feels like a budget Flash project rather than compelling storytelling. Worse, because there are no voices, captions are the only form of dialogue, and there's no indication of who is saying what. Coupled with the dry writing style and pops of quick back-and-forth banter, it can actually be a little tough to figure out who is saying what.

When you aren't beating on Generic Demon #4592, there are some light bits of platforming and an overused need to bash down doors, walls, tendrils, and so on. The jumping bits aren't horrible, though even smallish jumps sometimes have Hellboy pausing for a second or two when he lands in a "cool" action pose that just slows things down. When the fixed camera is pulled behind him, some of the insta-death pits in the game can be hard to judge, leading to cheap deaths simply because there's such limited depth perception.

The game simply fails at every one of the fun things it's trying to do, and there are plenty of reminders of the game's lack of polish: enemies will get hung up on geometry and start wigging out, an attack will knock you down, only to have another enemy hit you as you're standing up (and because there's no block button, all you can do is take it) and combos get reset when enemies hit you but they don't seem to suffer the same handicap. There's even a moment where a boss shouts to nobody, "Get him!" ... and nothing happens.