This game is a technically unstable piece of jank. A very intriguing and sometimes very fun technically unstable piece of jank. The dialog is cheesy, the story makes very little sense, the graphics are weirdly good but the poor performance and animations make it feel like it's held together by cardboard and duct tape, and the gameplay is extremely awkward. Yet, I can't help but love this game. It plays its absurd story completely straight, yet it teeters on the brink of self-awareness.
The story involves Simon, an American World War 1 soldier who's fighting alongside the British in the Battle of the Somme. They did, however, take a few liberties with the World War 1 setting. The Germans are cartoonishly evil, the weapons and technology verge into World War 2 era technology, and there's one other minor thing that might make me question the historical accuracy of this game just a bit: demons and vampires didn't spill out of hell to fight both the Germans and allied forces in World War 1. This game has you going from the trenches of the European theater to the belly of Hell itself. It goes from fighting some German mad scientist to killing Mephisto to save the vampires and humanity from the apocalypse. It's presented through very stiff and boring cutscenes, which have people speaking slowly over still images or characters that stand in the same place for a long period of time. There are also way too many cutscenes in the beginning of the game, when you're itching to get right into the action. I'll leave the discussion of the endings, all of which are stupid and awful, at the end of this review. An aside, Simon being a folksy southerner who says one-liners that reference other shooters or Evil Dead is a hilarious contrast with the grimdark World War 1 setting.
The graphics are decent for a game made in 2009, but if you don't turn off anti aliasing and VSync, the game will slow to a crawl if you use fully auto weapons. The loading times can take up to a full minute as well, which is absurd considering this game is almost 15 years old. That's all loading times. So every time you die, you're going to wait a minute to load your last save.
The gameplay is pretty weird. The first half of the game is basically a World War 2 shooter, with a few demons and a lot of zombies here and there. The difference between this and something like Medal of Honor, though, is Simon can take an absolute beating. All of the enemies go down pretty easily, but you are an absolute bullet sponge. This encourages you to play it more like Doom or Serious Sam with World War 1/2 weaponry, rather than playing conservatively and taking cover. Your health also regenerates much faster when you're in melee range of enemies. The melee system is not to be ignored either. Like in games such as Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, the kick is extremely powerful and can knock down entire squadrons of enemies. You can also use a bayonet or a shovel alongside a pistol, and throw any spare bayonets you may have to take out multiple people with one throw and get more fury. The combos give you a fury multiplier, which temporarily makes you more powerful by helping you do more damage, but hearing the vampire whisper in your ear that you're doing a good job at killing is a reward in itself. In the halfway point of the game, you get a gauntlet and vampire guns, making the WW2 guns more or less obsolete and turning the game into a more traditional shooter with magic in your off-hand and a powerful gun in your main hand. The game is much better after this halfway point, though the final level is awful. There are also vehicle sections, some of which coincide with bosses. The mech is pretty fun to control, basically giving you a larger and more cumbersome version of yourself with unlimited rockets and ammo. The dragon is pretty fun as well, though he can be annoying to control and feels like driving a buggy and slow fighter jet. The bosses are pretty good for an FPS game as well. This isn't really a compliment to the bosses, rather a condemnation of most FPS bosses. The only boss I could say was bad was the final boss. He was pretty easy, he just took forever to kill to the point where I thought I was doing something wrong because his health bar was draining very slowly.
The endings are all pretty bad. None of them have you triumphantly defeating the bad guys. I don't think an ending needs to be happy for it to be a good ending, but this is a game about fighting German hell wizards and ancient demons with guns and magic. It's unabashedly stupid, which I love, but needs to have a triumphant ending like other shooters.
The easy ending has you wake up as if from a dream, like nothing happened.
The normal ending is one of the few video game endings where the final boss says "join me!" (as final bosses are wont to do) and you actually join him. Simon becomes a general for Mephisto and waits 100 years to fight the demons again in 2016. I guess this game must be historically accurate, because 2016 is when the world started to go insane. I guess the demonic war he was speaking of was much more subtle than in the first game.
The hard ending is similar to the normal ending, except he kills Mephisto and assumes control of the demons himself.
The normal and hard endings are much better than the easy mode ending, though I was disappointed that he turned evil at the end of them. If it's any consolation though, Simon's demon form looks absolutely badass.
The story involves Simon, an American World War 1 soldier who's fighting alongside the British in the Battle of the Somme. They did, however, take a few liberties with the World War 1 setting. The Germans are cartoonishly evil, the weapons and technology verge into World War 2 era technology, and there's one other minor thing that might make me question the historical accuracy of this game just a bit: demons and vampires didn't spill out of hell to fight both the Germans and allied forces in World War 1. This game has you going from the trenches of the European theater to the belly of Hell itself. It goes from fighting some German mad scientist to killing Mephisto to save the vampires and humanity from the apocalypse. It's presented through very stiff and boring cutscenes, which have people speaking slowly over still images or characters that stand in the same place for a long period of time. There are also way too many cutscenes in the beginning of the game, when you're itching to get right into the action. I'll leave the discussion of the endings, all of which are stupid and awful, at the end of this review. An aside, Simon being a folksy southerner who says one-liners that reference other shooters or Evil Dead is a hilarious contrast with the grimdark World War 1 setting.
The graphics are decent for a game made in 2009, but if you don't turn off anti aliasing and VSync, the game will slow to a crawl if you use fully auto weapons. The loading times can take up to a full minute as well, which is absurd considering this game is almost 15 years old. That's all loading times. So every time you die, you're going to wait a minute to load your last save.
The gameplay is pretty weird. The first half of the game is basically a World War 2 shooter, with a few demons and a lot of zombies here and there. The difference between this and something like Medal of Honor, though, is Simon can take an absolute beating. All of the enemies go down pretty easily, but you are an absolute bullet sponge. This encourages you to play it more like Doom or Serious Sam with World War 1/2 weaponry, rather than playing conservatively and taking cover. Your health also regenerates much faster when you're in melee range of enemies. The melee system is not to be ignored either. Like in games such as Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, the kick is extremely powerful and can knock down entire squadrons of enemies. You can also use a bayonet or a shovel alongside a pistol, and throw any spare bayonets you may have to take out multiple people with one throw and get more fury. The combos give you a fury multiplier, which temporarily makes you more powerful by helping you do more damage, but hearing the vampire whisper in your ear that you're doing a good job at killing is a reward in itself. In the halfway point of the game, you get a gauntlet and vampire guns, making the WW2 guns more or less obsolete and turning the game into a more traditional shooter with magic in your off-hand and a powerful gun in your main hand. The game is much better after this halfway point, though the final level is awful. There are also vehicle sections, some of which coincide with bosses. The mech is pretty fun to control, basically giving you a larger and more cumbersome version of yourself with unlimited rockets and ammo. The dragon is pretty fun as well, though he can be annoying to control and feels like driving a buggy and slow fighter jet. The bosses are pretty good for an FPS game as well. This isn't really a compliment to the bosses, rather a condemnation of most FPS bosses. The only boss I could say was bad was the final boss. He was pretty easy, he just took forever to kill to the point where I thought I was doing something wrong because his health bar was draining very slowly.
The endings are all pretty bad. None of them have you triumphantly defeating the bad guys. I don't think an ending needs to be happy for it to be a good ending, but this is a game about fighting German hell wizards and ancient demons with guns and magic. It's unabashedly stupid, which I love, but needs to have a triumphant ending like other shooters.
The easy ending has you wake up as if from a dream, like nothing happened.
The normal ending is one of the few video game endings where the final boss says "join me!" (as final bosses are wont to do) and you actually join him. Simon becomes a general for Mephisto and waits 100 years to fight the demons again in 2016. I guess this game must be historically accurate, because 2016 is when the world started to go insane. I guess the demonic war he was speaking of was much more subtle than in the first game.
The hard ending is similar to the normal ending, except he kills Mephisto and assumes control of the demons himself.
The normal and hard endings are much better than the easy mode ending, though I was disappointed that he turned evil at the end of them. If it's any consolation though, Simon's demon form looks absolutely badass.