Reviews// Devil's Third

Some of the bosses offer incredibly high difficulty spikes, as do some ambushes. But when the game does get challenging it's done in the cheapest of ways. Instead of offering a new enemy forcing you to rethink your approach it'll just double the amount of bad guys that attack you. Get through an area with two bullet-sponge machine-gun-wielding fat dudes, then you can be sure that the next big area will have three.

When the game does introduce different enemies they're tired old cliches that you've fought a million times before. Zombies, invisible guys, guys on turrets and of course the obligatory rocket launcher vs helicopter. It does nothing new and fails to try to impress or even entertain you.

It's not as though Devil's Third has a decent enough plot to force you through the gameplay either.

You play as Ivan, an incarcerated ex-terrorist in an alternate universe where the terrorists now rule the world. Soon enough you're broken out of jail by the US military and join forces with them to take down your evil ex-pals to stop them from causing more chaos and destruction.

If the game was even the slightest bit more intelligent in any other area I would have thought that the plot was a parody of western military games, dragging up stereotypes with a wink and a nudge to highlight how bland writing has got within the genre. Instead it just comes across as a genuine attempt to appeal to American gamers that fails miserably.

Every beat of the story falls flat and each character fails to impose themselves. Ivan himself is a dull, line spilling mess. He doesn't develop during your time with him and acts as nothing more than a shell to push about the ugly world created for him.

There's nothing here to put any good into the 'So Bad It's Good' theory. When a game feels like a waste of time as well as a poor excuse for a finished product then it falls into the genuinely very bad category and I feel sorry for anyone that pays full price for it, especially when the last ray of light in the pitch black bucket is it's multiplayer which it being given away as a 'Free to Start' game on PC.

For all of the game's lack of imagination, the multiplayer side of things is surprisingly interesting. It has all the basic modes you expect from a game like this, Deathmatch, team Deathmatch, a version of Capture The Flag etc. but does introduce some unique ideas.

Festival is a game where you have to buy fruit from a vendor and chuck it into a mixer, while Chickens sends you on a hunt for feathered beasts that follow you. Spend more time with the egg layers than your opponents, and you win. It's hardly a mode that will get picked up by other games but it's nice to do something in this one that isn't done elsewhere.

There are 12 game modes in total and it's a pretty safe bet to assume that there will be a low player community that will get progressively smaller after release, so it's criminal that there isn't a player count against each game mode to make it impossible to tell where people are populating, if at all.

Some of the dressing around these game modes is nice with clans, a 3D lobby to try out and purchase weapons and upgrades. But when the combat suffers from the same issues online as it does in the campaign, all this effort to try and make something out of this mess is completely wasted.

Kills don't feel satisfying, deaths are met with a shrug as you stumble around poorly designed maps without any team tactics or strategy. You follow where the action is until it stops and either respond or run around aimlessly to try and find another victim.

Devil's Third falls short in everything it does and is easily the worst game I've played in years. which is heartbreaking. We all know Itagaki has it in him to produce better than this.

Pros
-Switching between Melee and Shooting is done well

Cons
-Everything else

SPOnG Score: 3/10