Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered review

Must know

What’s it? A hellishly enjoyable and hellishly silly remaster of a demon-hunting shooter from 2011.

Launch date: October 31, 2024

Anticipate to pay: Unconfirmed

Developer: Grasshopper Manufacture

Writer: Grasshopper Manufacture

Reviewed on: Home windows 11, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS, 16GB RAM

Steam Deck: Unknown

Hyperlink: Steam

I would say videogames have come fairly removed from the place we began. It is a mature medium now. We make video games for adults, about actual issues folks face in life; we have now that sense of veteran superiority, of understanding that we’re in our prime, and that we have advanced to the level the place we could be proud of the issues we’re making. In the face of this, it is vital to sometimes return to our roots, to recollect the place we got here from and the questions that we used to ask, equivalent to: what number of dick jokes can conceivably slot in one 10-hour videogame?

Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered does a noble job attempting to reply this and different vital questions, the majority of that are additionally penis associated. It is an unfiltered adolescent fantasy, a shameless barrage of jokes that have not been humorous since center faculty, a lurid triple-X dream that concurrently manages to be impossibly infantile.

It is usually, I remorse to tell you, an extremely enjoyable sport.

Whereas I used to be busy remembering how a lot potty-mouthed juvenilia we had been getting away with in the aughts-to-twenty-teens, I used to be additionally remembering how we might principally perfected the artwork of the mid-length motion sport. Shadows of the Damned begins and finishes in lower than a dozen hours, which today appears positively quaint, and but it feels mechanically substantial. The problem curve is well-tailored; the ranges throw selection at you with out getting complicated; the lean three-weapon roster implies that each gun will get its day.

And but I am not in it for 40 hours filling out talent timber or gathering shiny issues, I am simply in it to get my girlfriend and get the hell outta Hell. It is the form of sport I’ve fond recollections of enjoying on a huffing 360 whereas sitting on my cousin’s bed room flooring—the form that, possibly as a result of I used to be so small, felt lots larger than it was.

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(Picture credit score: Grasshopper Manufacture)(Picture credit score: Grasshopper Manufacture)

And truthfully, for a 360 throwback, it is wanting fairly good. Hell is opulent after a bit of a remaster. The environments are lovely and bloody, and the countless parade of demons Garcia meets are a formidable symphony of terror, pleasingly gory and accompanied by a very ear-splitting cacophony of shrieks and screams wherever they go. Garcia himself is handsome however picket, the limp cutscene animation by no means actually giving him a lot to work with, and the much less mentioned about his porcelain girlfriend, the higher. However who wants dialog, physique language, or emotional acuteness when you’ve gotten the countless hordes of Hell to demolish? (And now, with the addition of New Recreation+ mode, the hordes are actually countless!)

So I began blastin’

I will be transient with the plot. It isn’t exhausting, as a result of the plot is transient. Garcia Hotspur is a demon hunter. He is very cool and wears a purple leather-based jacket with no shirt beneath. Does not he get sweaty? It does not matter. He is received a stupendous girlfriend, Paula, who will get kidnapped by the Lord of Demons, Fleming, and dragged into Hell. He is received to get her out! Gotta get that woman. He is accompanied in his quest by a former demon/speaking cranium named Johnson, whose predominant job is to show right into a gun (usually) and a cool motorbike (solely as soon as, sadly) and likewise to make dick jokes.

(Picture credit score: Grasshopper Manufacture)

They plunge into the depths of the underworld; Paula will get more and more much less dressed as they pursue her; these occasions are met with the acceptable degree of respect and seriousness attributable to them.

In his travels in Hell, Garcia switches between three weapons: the Dentist, previously the Teether, a machine gun that shoots the apparent; the Skullgrinder, a shotgun that finally also can lob bombs; and… the Boner. It is a handgun that shoots bones. Absolutely that is the one which’ll get them into the dick joke corridor of fame.

In early ranges it is easy to lean on a favourite weapon: ammo is plentiful and none of the baddies give Garcia an excessive amount of bother. Later, although, ammo shortage and enemy range makes for rather more nervy encounters, like when a shotgun was all I had left to pin down a flying, fluttering Grim Reaper boss, or when a Buzzsaw Demon and his screaming cronies have you ever cornered and all you’ve received is your imprecise handgun, which barely makes a dent on the core on his again. You may’t simply decide your weapon of selection; you’ve received to ration deliberately, and the sport is nice at pulling you out of your consolation zone, making you scan via your arsenal for each trick at your disposal in an effort to get via the subsequent teeth-clenchingly lengthy combat.

That’s to not say you gained’t have favorites, although: I discovered myself enamored significantly with the Dentist, although it is a ruthless ammo-eater, as one good spray at an oncoming mob of demons leaves Garcia with a horde of kneeless, crawling suckers that he can stomp into a large number of purple goo.

A lot of the intermediate house between boss fights feels perfunctory, particularly in the early sport. There’s lots of dialogue between Garcia and Johnson, which is entertaining in the method that the radio is entertaining on a street journey when the aux is damaged, and swathes of miscellaneous mob enemies that are not actually enjoyable till, as I discussed, you get the gun that helps you flip them into gory bootprints. Every now and then Paula will seem someplace in entrance of you, wanting distressed, and Garcia will gasp at her for 20 seconds earlier than going again to his griping and killing.

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(Picture credit score: Grasshopper Manufacture)(Picture credit score: Grasshopper Manufacture)(Picture credit score: Grasshopper Manufacture)(Picture credit score: Grasshopper Manufacture)(Picture credit score: Grasshopper Manufacture)

Later acts begin to get wild, and that is the place the sport shines. A 3D platform rotation puzzle degree? Sure. Random sidescroller interludes? I am down. A complete multi-part sequence the place Garcia’s Boner will get larger (oh, god…) and also you spend 20 minutes headshotting onrushing cyclopes? Fuck it, we ball. (We bone?) Minigames too usually tend to be annoying, however Shadows of the Damned properly retains the problem of these detours to a minimal, so that they by no means have the probability to be irritating.

Bosses are the different large standout. Earlier than weapon upgrades the boss fights can really feel cruelly lengthy, uneventful and torturous with little room for error; after he will get these large weapons, although, Garcia’s braggadocio appears justified. It is a tastily satisfying expertise to bounce via stage after stage of a exact, screaming combat, demons coming in from all sides, magazines threatening empty, and nonetheless snatch that victory. You begin to assume, rattling, I am that man. I am tremendous cool demon hunter Garcia Hotspur. I do have a horny girlfriend who was stolen by the satan. I can pull off purple leather-based. I will be making this gun even larger, sure, thanks, please.

I do discover it outstanding that, in the chilly gentle of the modern-day, Shadows of the Damned has in some way managed to misogyny itself all the method into equal-opportunity objectification. Yeah, it isn’t like there are ladies on this sport, proper: there is a image of a girl, and it twirls coquettishly sometimes, and spits out strains that sound like a sexy Construct-A-Bear, and it serves its narrative objective. However there’s not likely males both, are there? There’s one man. There’s The Man, Garcia Hotspur, jack-of-all-trades and jackoff fantasy, a lot a masculine archetype and a macho superb and a Cool Man that he is in some way spun all the method round to being a Ken doll coated in Sharpie tattoos.

All of the different males are—properly. They’re useless! They’re rotting, nude, dickless. The alternative of virile. Let’s comply with the gun-as-penis metaphor to its pure conclusion, okay: Garcia is fucking his method via Hell, and he is doing an amazing job at it. There is perhaps a woman at the finish, however at the finish of the day we have nonetheless spent most of our time with a scorching man and his boner.

I am unable to say I did not have a great time with Shadows of the Damned. It is simply that it is a bizarre sport to revisit: At its greatest, it jogs my memory of my youth, when each new sport had the potential to be one thing simply as marvelous and ridiculous, self-indulgently enjoyable and self-indulgently silly. At its worst, it additionally jogs my memory of my youth, however extra of the half the place I and everybody else I knew was confused and sexy and coping with it in ways in which weren’t societally really useful.

So, okay, the dated humor is a bit of a boner-killer… however it’s a hell of a journey.