A humerous twisted game thats just alright
User Rating: 7.5 | Shadows of the Damned X360
I had been waiting to play this game for quite some time until it got a bit cheaper.. The game has a basic although good premise, your girlfriend gets dragged to hell by a demon and its up to you to go to hell and go after her.. The game is very gorey in some of the cutscenes which are still entertaining, it has a goofy humerous vibe to the whole thing to however. Theres alot of dick jokes in this game, Your pistol is called a boner, gets upgraded to a hot boner, and a big boner!.. I thought alot of the humour was somewhat annoying but still somewhat funny.. You have a sidekick flaming skull that speaks in a british accent and is your transformable weapon.. The gameplay in the game is quite enjoyable but really wasn't anything incredibley unique about it.. The combat has a resident evil feel to it where you have to aim down the sights to fire and the enemies lunge at you like a zombie.. All your weapons are upgradeable throughout the game, the boner turns into a explodable wad fireing hot boner, the machine gun becomes a dentist gun which fires homing ammo which is very useful, the shotgun becomes a giant exploding skull firing beast of a weapon.. There is dark areas and regular areas, if you enter a dark area you cannot hurt any enemies within it and your health begins draining so its up to you to find a golden goat head to undo the darkness, or a fireworks launcher.. Sometimes these areas help you solve puzzles as only certain switches can be activated while in darkness.. I liked the storybooks you can find throughout the game, which are narrated by either Garcia or the flaming skull.. They tell a dark humerous story which all are interesting and some quite long.. One thing that somewhat bothered me about this game is the pacing of the game is very off, in the 4th act you go back and forth from a side scrolling game mode back to the standard 3rd person, and the 5th final act feels pretty unclimactic, theres a tetris style puzzle level where you must twist blocks to become bridges in that area.. Also if you want to get a very high achievment score without too much trouble you can get an easy 700 by playing through the game on normal difficulty. The graphics in this game are just about average, the character models and enemies are quite well designed and the enviroments all have a dark surreal nightmarish feel to them, but it still sort of looks like a standard 3rd person shooter to me.. The sound effects and music in this game are really quite good with a wide variety of different styles of music from metal, to slow ambient music, to the sound of screaming wailing demons. The voice acting in this game is all very well done mostly.. Overall I do recommend this game if you can get it fairly cheap, its really better as a rental since once you complete the game there really isn't much reason to go back except for achievments... I am a bit disappointed with the game but it was an enjoyable playthrough.
