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Hellboy: Science of Evil Review
2 out of 15
More like the science of awful.
Date: Monday, August 04, 2008
Author: Brandon “Red Right Hand” Cackowski-Schnell

Ok, ok, I hear what you're saying. Why would you punch things when you have the Samaritan with which to shoot them? Go ahead and try and lock on someone. Ha! I know, it's almost useless! See how when you do shoot, you stay in your shooting pose for a minute afterwards so that the guy can punch you? Here's the ironic part. As much of a pain as it is to shoot normal enemies, most of the boss battles can be ended in about ten seconds by just unloading every bullet into them. Ha! The only thing funnier than that, is trying to straight up punch the bosses and failing a dozen times before realizing that you can shoot them in a manner of seconds.

Well, luckily the environments are interesting. Look, a spooky forest! Look a desert, um, place. Here are some caverns, here's a graveyard. These places are all scary, trust me, made even scarier by the fact that you walk through many hallways and places with absolutely no enemies in them! Where are they? Are they hiding? Did something more evil and horrible eat them? Is it lunchtime? The mind reels!

One thing that is scary is the Flash style animated cut scenes apparently cribbed from the math notebooks of your friendly, neighborhood 7th grader. Hellboy has never looked so, so terrible. He's also mute too, as the voice actors were too busy voicing the other Hellboy games, the ones that cost twice as much. Money talks, hombre.

Thankfully, the game is nice and short. I know that when I put thirty bucks down for a game, four hours is right on the money as I have things to do, man. I'm like, important. Unfortunately that's still about three hours and fifty minutes longer than you'd want to play this game, but at least when you're done you can watch the interviews and look at the concept art, and maybe try and figure out how the concept art could look so good, but the game could be so bad.

Between the comics, the live action movies, the animated movies, the books and the action figures, there are literally dozens of ways to scratch your Hellboy itch without having to spend the time or money on this game. Even diehard fans should avoid it lest they see their favorite character brought low by such a poor representation. If I may mangle a perfectly wonderful Nick Cave song, it's one mediocre romp through uninspired lands, designed and directed by his red right hand.

Questions or comments? We'd love to hear from you .

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