The rogue-lite from hell

I don’t think that it’s a secret that there are way more bad comic book character video games than good; the needle is shifting the other way slowly but surely. There are a few characters who are overdue for an excellent game: Spawn being the first and Hellboy being the second. The last game featuring big Red was in 2008 and despite being developed with Mike Mignola; creator of Hellboy and this world as well as Guillermo del Toro who directed the films; Hellboy: The Science of Evil arrived on the scene and never found the right formula for success. In a word it sucked, I mean even crazy (well he wasn’t really crazy then) Adam Sessler on X-Play gave it a 1 out of 5. It was bad, and because of that Red needs a win; enter Hellboy Web of Wyrd.

Web of Wyrd (pronounced word) is an action rogue lite game that sees Hellboy searching for a missing Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (or BPRD for short) agent. The team sets up shop in a peculiar building known as ‘The Butterfly House’ which of course is more than a mere family home. This home has portals to another dimension known as the Wyrd, and it’s up to Hellboy to dive into the Wyrd and figure out what happened to his team’s missing agent and more so what and who is behind the Wyrd and this Butterfly House.

MSRP: $24.99
Platforms: PC (reviewed), Xbox, PlayStation, Switch
Price I’d Pay: $24.99

Combat in Web of Wyrd takes advantage of Hellboy’s strengths and uses melee fisticuffs with some assistance from firearms on the side. You all know me; I love a good scrap and this combat is certainly fun to start however there isn’t much depth to it. Being a rogue lite game players can expect randomly generated layouts of maps which is fine, the issue is that enemies are kind of boring to fight. Each arena room players enter will have 1 or more large creatures, giant statues come to life or monsters to be exact. These will spawn little guys who when killed will drop the currency used to upgrade your stats for this run. However, players only ever have to target the bigger monsters, once they are all dead the little ones just kind of commit seppuku and explode into the diamond currency.

Throwing hands with these would be the highlight if Hellboy had some more variety in his repertoire. All the fights just end up with players beating the larger enemies into submission which will stun them and allow Hellboy to hit them with his Right Hand of Doom fist and literally launch them away. Players can in theory target which direction these does fly; I say ‘in theory’ because even though the tooltip told me I could accomplish this, I never once was able to have an enemy fly in the direction I was aiming. This sucks because there are pillars that can be destroyed if an enemy smashes into them which does a massive amount of damage but will also leave behind chunks of rock which can be thrown by Hellboy. So, in the later fights where things are moving fast and furious it becomes extremely frustrating when you lose a fight because the game ignores your commands.

One area where Web of Wyrd shines though is its graphics and art style, it’s evident in almost every area that Mike Mignola had a hand in this game. Its hand drawn art style is beautiful to behold, the game just looks like a comic book come to life and I don’t use that lightly, if you are a fan of Hellboy and love the art style of it and even the Lobster Johnson series then these graphics in Web of Wyrd are for you. But as good as things look when its in motion, well that’s where I have my issues. The game seems to employ some sort of frame trick similarly to that of the Spider verse movies series. But where in that movie it fits and is kind of this quirky thing here it looks very glitchy and honestly, I can’t play the game for long periods because it was making me nauseous, which literally NEVER happens to me. I don’t get bothered by that kinds stuff but something about how this is presented just didn’t sit right. I never saw credits roll on this one for that reason sadly.

I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about the audio in game, specifically the voice of Hellboy; this is one of Lance Reddick’s final roles and I have to say he did a fantastic job. While it bothered me the characters mouths don’t open when they talk, the dulcet tones that Lance brings to big Red make small issues like that not even a big deal. Multiple points in the game when Hellboy is talking to various characters the way Lance delivered lines seamlessly going from berating to threating or throwing in a dad joke here or there just makes me so sad that we won’t get to hear him in any more roles. His take on Hellboy was fantastic and I can only hope that he is Resting in Power as he left an indelible mark in his craft.

I wanted to love Hellboy Web of Wyrd as a lover of beat-em up games but more so as a HUGE comic book fan, sadly the game just fell short in a few too many areas. As I said the art style is just beautiful to look at, I cannot understate how amazing it looks but once you start moving and the weird frame trick issues pops up everything just comes apart for me. Lance Reddick made for a fun, threatening, caring, funny, thoughtful portrayal of Hellboy, and whether that is attributed to Mignola’s writing or his own talent it was a fantastic take on the character. It’s just so upsetting that the rest of the game was not as strong as the narrative.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.