There’s been something of a resurgence of the retro FPS from the indie scene in recent years. After more than a decade of copy and pasted Call of Duty campaigns and many imitators, it took smaller developers going back to the genre’s roots to start bringing some actual innovation into an increasingly stale genre. There was more to shooters than linear hallways and hit scanning enemies, proven time and again by the likes of New Blood Interactive and 3D Realms.
Despite a few less than stellar shooters in recent years, most have been home runs that refine and improve on the classics that came before. DUSK is like Quake perfected. Ion Fury is the best game made on the Build engine, bar none. In the lead up to release, it was looking like Hellbound might be the definitive rendition of Painkiller, but that sadly didn’t happen.
Hellbound isn’t bad, but numerous issues with its overall design hold it back from being recommended.
“When Do We Get The Freakin’ Guns?!”
The story of Hellbound is…wait, why are you asking for a story? This is a retro throwback shooter in the vein of 90s classics, so there’s not much in the way of a plot or characters. The game has bits of interstitial text on loading screens between levels and its main character does have a name (Hellgore), but the very thrust of this game is that you’re taking awesome weapons and slaughtering hellspawn. There doesn’t need to be much more of an explanation than that.
That could be seen as a negative, but it’s always refreshing to play a title that puts gameplay first. In terms of feel, Hellbound absolutely nails that. Your character runs like he’s hopped up on steroids and might be faster than most vehicles in modern games. If you turn the “Always Run” option on, you’ll be constantly outrunning enemies. That’s something you’re going to want because the AI in Hellbound isn’t exactly what I’d describe as intelligent. They’ll constantly be running straight at you or standing in place to shoot projectiles your way.
I brought up Painkiller before because that is the closest comparison I could find. Painkiller was something of an arena-based shooter where you’d get locked into a room and forced to kill enemies before being able to proceed. Hellbound doesn’t exactly copy that, but you’re generally going to be killing everything in a room before you make progress in each level. It can feel like a survival/horde mode at times, which is likely because the game initially started life as that.
It’s actually pretty surprising how basic most of the campaign’s levels are. They aren’t linear, but also not really sandboxy. There’s a fairly obvious manner in which you’ll navigate these arenas, but nothing truly sticks out. You collect keys, hit switches, and do pretty basic FPS stuff. I love mazes and key hunting, but Hellbound doesn’t have diverse enough arenas to make better use of these old-school design choices. It really doesn’t help that the graphics are a bit muddled and the enemy designs repeat far too often. You begin to develop a sense of déjà vu before the end of this 60-90 minute campaign.
The Safety Is Off
Hellbound attempts to nail all of the fundamentals of a “Doom Clone” in that enemies have specific attack patterns and designs to help players identify them, but there’s just not enough variety here. I’m thankful that the projectile-based foes aren’t hit scanners, but they all share character models with little to differentiate from one another. You’re also dispatching them with whatever weapon you have on hand instead of thinking tactically. There’s no real strategy other than “survive.”
The weapons, at least, feel decent. I can’t say I like the designs all that much (the general art direction isn’t my thing), but the triple-barrel shotgun is pretty satisfying to shoot. There’s a basic single fire and the alternate mode that empties all three barrels at once. It lays waste to everyone and trivializes combat in most levels. Later on, you get a chaingun styled automatic weapon and it’s even more broken.
What isn’t fun are the power-ups. Inspired by Quake, you’ll find a damage amplifier and a speed enhancer, but the effects used to signify these modes obscure the screen far too much. I thought the very first power-up was a joke because I quickly died to a horde of enemies after grabbing it. It was supposed to make my melee weapon a one-hit kill, but I couldn’t tell who was attacking me. Eventually, I just skipped the power-up, jumped across a chasm, and picked foes off from a distance. Their AI couldn’t deal with a small gap.
A Lot Left On The Killin Room Floor
I might be making it sound like Hellbound is bad, but that isn’t the case. The mechanics are solid and the game’s survival mode is decent. It can be fun spending 20 minutes surviving ever-increasing hordes and blowing through enemies like a machine. Developer Saibot Studios nailed the basic gameplay elements well. It’s just that the campaign portion of this FPS comes off like an afterthought.
With nothing else beyond those two modes, either, Hellbound is a tricky prospect to recommend. Throughout most of my time in the campaign, I kept imagining how this would feel with a multiplayer suite attached. Multiplayer wouldn’t automatically make this game better, but the limited options for playability really hurt the overall package.
In truth, what is currently available feels like a prototype for something better. If the campaign were just longer, tighter, more refined, then Hellbound would be an easy recommendation. Saibot created something that feels solid in the hands but doesn’t quite stick the landing. You can only play the campaign so many times before you’ve seen it all and Hellbound simply doesn’t deliver much else.
A PC copy of Hellbound was provided to TheGamer for this review. Hellbound is available now for PC.
