Devil's Third review: Hell to play

Devil's Third review: Hell to play
Turret section

Devil’s Third is very definitely of a particular era, and so it should be no surprise to learn how fond it is of turret massacres. You’ll be granted emplacements in World War Two-style trenches, an airport, the gunner seat of a prop fighter and more across the campaign. As if it really were 2008 all over again, there’s also a risible driving bit, where you tumble down a snowy mountain in a truck that handles even less gracefully than the Mako from Mass Effect 1. Bar that mid-air battle, all are at least trivial and short-lived.

Presentationally, meanwhile, it’s a hot mess: grainy, low-res textures popping in to fill the backdrops around some fetishistically designed lead characters. There are a few fantastic settings – a Japanese castle town, a cosmodrome – but it’s never long before you’re back in war-torn streets or bland tunnels. And wherever you are, the frame-rate falls off a cliff every few minutes. It’s as if Valhalla placed a Gamecube game and 360 disc together in the teleporter from The Fly and then shoved the resulting mishmash straight into the Wii U’s tray.

It’s telling that boss battles, where more parts are on loan from Ninja Gaiden, are the most memorable bits. The SOD may be made up of poundshop action-figure villains, but at least they’re an endearingly weird collection of freaks. Many make a mockery of ranged weapon damage too, ensuring those light and heavy attacks and your dodge get a workout. But these fights lack Gaiden’s finesse, and also show Devil’s Third’s age terribly: they’re chock full of QTE stick-waggling, telegraphed instakill strikes, tediously long health bars and unblockables.

Multiplayer is a little better still, though it solves none of those base mechanical issues. At least with tiered arenas and opponents capable of traversing them, shootouts are finally more than grinding down a corridor into a battery of guns. Then there’s the incredibly optimistic free-to-play-style currency model. Dollen is your earned-through-play money, and there are also funds for clan upgrades, but premium Golden Eggs are spent on weapon attachments, on stat-boosting clothes, on being converted to ready Dollens and on the powerful ‘X’ weapons you unleash after racking up kills.

The Wii U version (a F2P PC release of the multiplayer component is coming) is not initially stingy with Eggs – you’re granted a carton for starting and another for enduring the campaign – but the fact you can buy advantages still rankles. The game modes themselves include a few charmingly madcap twists, such as lobbing watermelons into a giant smoothie maker, or the clan-based metagame, so there’s a certain low-fi fun to be found here, but there are countless better online shooters in 2015.

Overall, Devil’s Third is crude, then. The one place that seems intentional, the one level it holds together on, is tonally. In its star – laconic, chain-smoking hard-case Ivan – it embodies all the excesses of the ’80s action hero and places them at the centre of a straight-to-video plot. It’s this spirit you can ‘thank’ for the boss fight where you beat up a woman in lingerie, the relentless explosions and the comical geysers of blood that accompany heads flying off, which happens even when you pop a cap into a stomach or leg. Viewer discretion advised, but its tonal objectionability and wanton brinkmanship is not without some rough charm.

Ever the provocateur, Devil’s Third’s creator Tomonobu Itagaki has suggested that you need to play well to enjoy the rest of his game. But right up until the final boss (and his annoying ability to shrug off attacks), it was never deaths that bothered me. It was the lack of connection to the controls, the overripe mechanics and the dull AI. Devil’s Third is not a hateful slog in the way that Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z is, but even after – or more likely because of – half a decade and four game engines, it’s shoddy and ill thought out. It captures the strange magnetism that accompanies all still-smouldering disaster sites, but that’s about the best I can say.

I love Video games.First system i ever got was a Atari 2600,Ever since the first time i moved that joystick i was hooked.I have been writing and podcasting about games for 7 years now.I Started Digital Crack Network In 2015 and haven't looked back.

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