Looking for a way to pass some time? Or maybe a new, edgy game experience. Perhaps you are just looking for some old fashioned Gauntlet-style fun. Whatever you are looking for you will not find it in Todd McFarlane’s Evil Prophesy, where more was probably spent putting McFarlane’s name on the box than in actually making the game. What should have been a Hunter-like beat’em up with powers is instead an ugly and mind numbingly dull test of your endurance.
When you see Todd McFarlane’s name on a game you would probably expect for the character and monster models to have great detail and be in the over-the-top style that the man is known for. Not so in Evil Prophesy. You start with a stable of 4 characters that you switch through. These characters are basically a tower of meat, an Aryan princess with fishnet side panels in her leggings, a surprisingly butch mad scientist, and a guy from Africa complete with a ridiculous hat and a bone through his nose. While the game could have used the main characters to harken back to the pulp era they instead come across as stupid and cliché. But that’s not all that is wrong with them; they also look like they were ported from a PS1 game! They are low poly, have very muddy textures, and primitive animation.
They certainly fit into the world around them, however. Everything in Evil Prophesy is ugly. All the backgrounds are painted with a vibrant color set that is apparently composed entirely of brown and gray. Most of the monsters follow the same color pattern, and you generally only get two types of monsters spawning in a certain map. So you have same colored blobs on a muddy background swarming you for several minutes on end and it gets to the point where you could weep from joy just from coming across a crate because at least it breaks the monotony.
Maybe this would be ok if the game play was deeper than hitting the X button over and over. It’s not like the character animations are neat enough to make this amusing, it’s just the same basic combos repeated over and over. You can mix up the combos by occasionally hitting the jump button at different times but this doesn’t add much. There are also magical attacks that can be performed but good luck getting to ever use them. Your AI buddies love to use magical attacks, and your mana pool is a community object instead of personal, so it will almost always be empty.
Your AI buddies also do a lot towards making this game a miserable experience. They love to get stuck on items and end up left behind. Now your buddies don’t add just a whole lot to the experience so this wouldn’t be so bad except that every once in a while a monster will grip them. Once gripped they will whine for you to come beat the monster off of them and if you don’t make it in time then their relationship with you goes down. This means with a monster grips you they will ignore your pleas for help. You can always switch to a different character to free the previous one, but that doesn’t take away the annoyance you are sure to feel every single time this happens.
While the visual presentation is lacking, the audio presentation simply isn’t there. There’s next to no sound in the game. A bit of music at the beginning of levels and some generic roars and grunts of pain are about it. There’s no voiceovers for any of the characters, which makes already bland NPCs, who tend to exist to send you on inane quests, completely forgettable.
When I was playing through with the man from Africa, you know, the one with a bone through his nose, I came across a gun. Now the bonus weapons like guns and things are meant for specific characters, still I thought I would give it a try. He picked up the gun, informed me that he is incapable of understanding this strange thing made of metal, and ended up using the gun as a club. While I could probably come up with an even more damning example of how bad the game is than that, I don’t feel it’s necessary.
Don’t play this game. Ignore the name on the box, even a collector of all things McFarlane should stay far away from this title. It is offensively stupid, combining muddy graphics, horrible character design, sluggish controls, and miserable game play into a morass of anti-fun.
