Thinking of buying Hellboy: Science of Evil to get yourself in the mood to see Big Red's latest big screen outing? Let me guess, you heard that Mike Mignola, Hellboy's creator, and Guillermo del Toro, director behind both Hellboy movies had creative input on the game so you're thinking it'll be a nice segue to the movie? I bet you like punching things, and Hellboy is perfect for punching things, what with that massive stone hand, so what better way to get your BPRD fix than with this game? On the go no less!

I'm here to tell you that if you like Hellboy, nay, if you love comics' favorite demon with a heart, then you absolutely owe it to yourself to get up, run out to the store and buy anything other this derivative, boring, poorly controlled excuse of a cheap cash in. Hell, buy a red bell pepper, stick a cigar in its mouth and call it HellPepper as that will give you more excitement for the world of Hellboy than this game.

Where to begin? How about at the beginning of the game where you get a brief message during the loading screen telling you that Hellboy is chasing his quarry through the Carpathian Mountains. Or maybe it was the forest. What quarry? Who knows! I sure didn't. I even restarted the game to see if I missed an opening movie. I hadn't. No problem! I'm Hellboy, I can figure things out. Ten minutes later, when I get to a chest that can only be opened with "Earth Magic" and I have nothing in my inventory but grenades and scorn, I am officially stymied. Turns out, you get a Druid amulet later in the game, but before you do, prepare to be horribly, horribly confused. Then you fall down a cliff and magically you're in Japan. In the past. With no explanation.

Controlling the camera in third person action games sure can be a pain, huh? Lucky for you, you can't control the camera in this game. How convenient! No more fighting the camera! You just go along your merry way and hope that something doesn't spawn behind you. Whoopsie. Did something just spawn behind you? Yikes.

Don't worry though, as you have light attacks and strong attacks and combos and you can pick dudes up and chuck them! Ouch. Did you just have your combo broken by that guy hitting you? Yeah, tough luck there pal. Ouch, did he just do that again? And again? And again? Seriously, you should think about hitting him.

Well, you really should focus on combos because if you do combos you fill up your rage meter for rage attacks. Oh, you want to save your full rage meter? Yeah, about that. It's gone. Use it or lose it buddy! Don't worry though, because when you do combos you also get purple shards that give Hellboy even more, longer, impossible-to-pull-off combos. You also get video interviews with Mike Mignola, Guillermo del Toro and Ron Perlman, the voice of Hellboy! What, there is no voice acting in this game? You may think that the best thing to do in this game is to pick a guy up, throw him into the wall and then beat on him while he's stunned, because it's the only thing that's remotely effective, but you don't want to do that because you need those shards man! Nothing is as fun as hearing an actor talk about doing voicework for a completely different game! What a hoot!