Devil's Hunt

It's clear the developers wanted to honor the story that inspired the game, but managed to miss in a lot of ways that makes the game experience only an average adventure. Devil's Hunt provides players with rich and detailed environments to explore both in our world and Hell, and a strong effort was made to foster characters with whom we can connect. Unfortunately, the dialogue often feels disconnected, the acting sometimes borders on wooden, and physical movement in narrative scenes feels stiff and puppet-like rather than smoothly captured from an actor's performance. It also doesn't help that the game suffers plenty of little glitches, from occasional frame stutters all the way up to Desmond getting stuck in environment architecture, forcing the player to restart from a previous checkpoint. It may be a very pretty looking game, but it's not polished. Hopefully some of these issues will get ironed out through post-release patches.

Still, some players may still find Devil's Hunt worthwhile simply for its intense action. Desmond is a butt-kicker, make no mistake. Whether landing an uppercut with his fist, slashing through a torso with a claw, or going on a rampage as a full-fledged demon, he's not to be trifled with. He can parry attacks to stun enemies before unleashing a series of lethal blows, and even perform vicious finishing moves to individual foes in the heat of a brawl. The combat's missing a couple of features that could have made it a little more intuitive -- such as target locking -- but once you get the hang of things, Desmond will feel like the highly effective demon executor he was meant to be. Devil's Hunt is perhaps too ambitious a game for a small, first-time studio like Layopi Games. Its rougher edges clearly needed a little more sanding before being rolled out to players. That said, older players who simply want some spectacular demon-versus-demon mayhem will likely find what they're looking for here.