Hellboy: The Science of Evil is one the worst video games that I’ve ever played. Before writing this review, I went into this game with my expectations low hoping by doing so I would be surprised however even my obscenely low expectations for this game left me disappointed. You can tell straight from the start that this game was released to simply to cash in on the new Hellboy 2 movie and that it was rushed with little thought for producing quality.

Where do I start with the train wreck that is Hellboy? Well first of all this game has nothing to do with the actual movie instead being derived from the comics with the characters designed to look like their movie counterparts. However besides the simularities with the character models, its completely different from the new movie. The story for this game is a simplistic stop the villain, Herman von Klempt from destroying the world plot. If your expecting more than to have the badly written story to loosely tie together levels then you’ll be sorely disappointed.

Moving onto the gameplay, I’d like to say things improve but honestly it doesn’t. Starting off the camera, you have little to no control over it so you’re stuck with the angle they give you by default. Most of the time you will have trouble seeing what your fighting because the angle they give is definitely not optimal. The collision detection is shoddy at best where your running into walls and obstructions when you definitely have room left. The game has repetitive actions such as breaking down doors and objects by button mashing square that gets old very quickly. The shooting mechanics for the game are quite horrible which consists of mostly using the second analog to move a cursor around a screen until it finally locks onto a target and letting you fire. This system feels badly implemented and you should be able to quickly lock onto the nearest target and firing instead of this convoluted system.

The graphics aren’t all together that great, its something that I’d expect from an early PlayStation 2 game, not a current generation Playstation 3. The character models look like bad plastic action figures and don’t really give you the sense that they’re very detailed. The backgrounds I could swear are just bitmaps that you might have found in the original Doom doesn’t give you the sense that you’re really there. Not that you’ll be able to see much anyway with the previously noted horrible camera.

The game features voice acting from actors from Hellboy movie series including Ron Pearlman and Selma Blair. The performances from the actors are acceptable however while the voice acting is fine, the material they are given to perform is quite bad. The dialog in the game makes you wonder why they bothered to bring the actors in at all. The sound effects for the game are fairly generic and the music is quite horrible, that is when you can actually hear it playing.

The multiplayer options for the include both splitscreen and online multiplayer. The splitscreen reduces visibility severely for a game which is already having problems with camera controls. Also when playing splitscreen the game can start to lag at times in outdoor environments which doesn’t make sense given game doesn’t seem to use much of the PS3’s power. As for the online multiplayer, I was unable to try it since there was nobody else was playing the game online to test it out with.

You’d need to be a diehard Hellboy fan that’s severely starved for any content at all for you for you to think about getting your hands on this game. Even then I’d strong recommended you think hard before putting down $60 on this game. If your looking for a good action then look at Ninja Gaiden Sigma or Devil May Cry 4 which both can be had for far less than $60 at this point. While this game isn’t as bad as Superman for the Nintendo 64, it isn’t that much better either.

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