I got this game for 3 bucks as part of a Fanatical "easter egg" mystery code promo. It's... fine? It's fine. I had to laugh at the game's undeserved sense of bravado, like "FUCK YEAH, 90s FPS GAMES ARE BACK!!!" 90s FPS games have been back for quite some time. "THIS GAME MIGHT BE TOO HARDCORE FOR BABY MODERN GAMERS..." It was actually pretty easy.

All that said, I think there's a level of competence and sincerity here that you can't take for granted now that there are a million boomer shooters to pick from. It's definitely not worth the full asking price of 15 bucks, but for three bucks it was a pleasant surprise. The shooting feels good, the movement feels good, the music is decent, the dialogue for the hero is endearingly cheesy (they LOVE saying motherfucker in this game), all-around the game gets the job done. A store-brand candy bar of a video game.

My lawyers advised me to say that i am not saying this is a scam, but it certainly has the feel of a game quickly slapped together to cash in on the boomer shooter trend. Awful in every way. Mercifully short, but naming the achievement for finishing the less than two hour game "That's It?" feel like an insult.

Doesn't even feel much like a 90's FPS it's proudly proclaiming to be as much as it feels like one of the shittier Painkiller expansions or one of those cheap 2000's budget FPS games made by a studio in Eastern Europe.

The worst part out of all of the things wrong with this game, and there could a laundry list if you really wanted to write them all down, is that there is legitimately nothing memorable about it. It is bog-standard in practically every measure: the music is generic, the protagonist is laughably cookie-cutter, and the only reason I know any enemy's name is cause I randomly got an achievement for one.

There are plenty of actually good boomer shooters that exist that are cheaper, more memorable, and worth more for a cheaper or similar price. Don't waste time on this one.

It's short, it's broken and it's overpriced. Stay away.

"A '90s shooter 30 years later! This game was made like in the '90s!", too bad it's an early 2000s shooter through and through, with very little to do with the '90s whatsoever. This use of buzzwords is nothing short of comical.

It's 1 hour long and sold for $15. Do I need to say more? I mercifully got this in a bundle, so no harm done for me but you shouldn't be suckered.

What little gameplay there is wouldn't be too bad if the game worked properly, which it does not: it has that annoying bug that so many poorly made UE4 games have in common, where one mouse click in 20 just doesn't register, which, in a game that requires split second reactions, is a massive problem. Nothing worse than perfectly timing a shotgun blast to the face of a charging demon, only for the gun to refuse firing, leading to an uncerimonious death.

Stay away from this overpriced waste of time.

Have you ever wondered what Doom 2016 would have been like if they would have kept it classic? Because Hellbound might be the nearest thing to it. Sure it is very short, so I am recommending waiting for a sale. I played through it in 83 minutes but the gameplay was intense. Maybe if you want to make perfect runs, beating it on the hardest difficulty or if you like survival arenas then you can surely get more playtime out of it. But what really matters is the fast-paced, action-heavy gameplay with a banger soundtrack. You really feel transported back to the 90s with coloured key cards, booming weapons and different enemies, although there could have been a bit more types. The boss is a bit underwhelming but serves the purpose. I hope that sometime we get another campaign.

They really do have some stones for putting a difficulty disclaimer in front of a game that isn't even that hard.

Look: everything about this game is pretty bad. The visuals are samey, don't look great, and run terribly. The music is too loud, too generic, and doesn't fit the atmosphere. The campaign is way too short to be worth $15.

But is the gameplay good? Well, yeah, kinda, but that flies in the face of what the game is actually trying to do.

The entire conceit is that this is a 90s throwback game, but with the exception of some passing resemblances to Serious Sam (which came out in 2001), it doesn't play anything like a 90s shooter.

It's not just that there's ADS, but the way that the levels are built, the ammo is provided, and the guns operate encourage long-range, ADS picking-off of valuable targets, like you'd do in a game from the '10s. Long levels, enemy engagement limits, and a rifle that fires as fast as you click makes slower, hands-off, cover based sprays far more effective than the close range run-and-gun of DOOM or Blood or whathaveyou.

So, it's a game that flops not just aesthetically, but artistically too. This isn't a 90s FPS 30 years later, it's a 10s FPS 10 years later.

A bit sad. I remember this getting announced in 2017 with the whole "A 90's FPS, 30 years later" appeal and thinking that was kind of cute at the time but it ended up releasing in 2020 and at that point Dusk, Doom Eternal, Wrath, Post Void, Ion Fury and a bunch of other stuff had come out. So I never played it until now because why would you play something that's self admittedly trying to be "Doom 30 years later" and nothing else when an official and really good "Doom 30 years later" just came out a few months before and there are tons of similar but way more interesting games releasing.

Hellbound itself is Doom again and nothing more. It plays the same, uses the same enemy types, the same weapons, etc. But it's also worse because performance isn't great and the overall aesthetic looks like an HD Doom Texture Pack or a series of stock assets rather than an actual Doom game.

It feels good to play at least, I beat it and had fun doing so but it always feels like a cheap imitation with no purpose. It even feels like the devs kind of knew this because it just ends after one episode, so if this was "A 90's FPS, 30 years later" it wouldnt be sold for £10, it would be free shareware.

I had fun enough with it to warrant the £1 I spent and I guess the short length is kind of a good thing since I didn't get sick of it but you could just install some free WAD's for Doom and get more out of it.

look, this one adds the simpsons: https://waltersgameboy.tripod.com/simpdoom/