The Good
I gave Hellboy three stars out of five, so obviously something was right here.The graphics have an appealing, and entirely appropriate, animated look. The game makes pretty good use of the PSP's screen resolution and size, making for something that was easy to look at for extended periods of time. I rarely found myself squinting closely at the screen trying to make out the details the way I did in LEGO Indiana Jones.
The characters are well-rendered and their animations are pretty good, if occasionally repetitive (but what game isn't, unless it adds multiple, different animations for the same action?). Hellboy's dialogue, though rendered as subtitles, is in character and witty. The baddies are appropriately evil-looking and -acting, and I really adore the little fox Hellboy meets in the Japan level.
And speaking of levels, they were set in exactly the sort of environments you'd expect Hellboy to be pursuing evil in. The aforementioned Japan level in particular reminded me of the animated movie Hellboy: Sword of Storms. There were lots of things lying around that you could smash or use as weapons (and in some cases both, depending on your whim).
The fighting action was reasonably well handled, with plenty of combos for the type of player who likes to remember sequences of button-presses. If you're not that type of player, that's OK, too, as it is certainly possible to get by just shooting and hitting things with random button-mashing (though you won't unlock as many bonuses that way).
The Bad
Unfortunately, not everything in this game is so good. While the fighting was fine, it didn't have much variation, meaning it quickly got tedious. Instead of sitting down to play for long periods, as I often do even with games designed for short sessions, I found myself playing for ten or twenty minutes, then saving and walking away for a while.It was probably a good thing I did play in small increments, though, as this is really a rather short game. I didn't actually time myself, but I'd guess it was around 5 or 6 hours total. Now a short game isn't necessarily bad. I once gave a 6-hour point-and-click adventure game a really high score and a rave review, but that was because it kept me rooted to my chair for the entire 6 hours. Hellboy couldn't manage that.
My biggest peeve, though, is that the story have much more potential than was actually realized. Hellboy is about story. Sure, the action is a big part of it, but it's always rooted in story. This game had two storylines that you played through in alternate segments, but the two were never related to each other aside from the fact that they were both about Hellboy fighting evil. And the first time the game cut from one story to the next I actually thought I'd spent a bunch of time pursuing an enemy I ultimately didn't even get to fight. Fortunately, the game did get back to that story after a segment from the second story. Neither storyline had enough backstory, though, nor a satisfying resolution.
The Ugly . . . Er . . . Other Stuff
My other, lesser, nitpicks include the lousy camera. But how many reviewers have complained about bad cameras in how many games?I really missed the voice acting that other versions of the game got. I'm tempted to play this game again on PS3 just for that. If I read that it got rave reviews on other platforms I might consider it (once the price drops). If it's possible to play as other characters in the PS3 version, I probably will buy it eventually. I really, really wanted to play as Abe Sapien, but in the PSP version of the game you can only do that in multiplayer (or rather 2-player). Since I don't know anyone with both a PSP and this game, I didn't get to try that. It sounds like it might be fun to got through the levels in 2-player co-op, though.
While the fighting was, as I mentioned, not too bad, I was never really able to figure out how to get better ratings (and thus more points for unlocking extras) in the combat areas. And which areas counted as combat areas and which were just areas that happened to have fighting didn't necessarily have anything to do with how many enemies there were.
Regarding extras, though I wasn't able to unlock them all on my first play-through, what I did unlock was pretty decent, if fairly standard. First was the game trailer, already unlocked when you begin. Other extras include concept art and interviews with various people involved in Hellboy, including creator Mike Mignola and actors Ron Perlman and Selma Blair. And of course Guillermo del Toro.
The Just Plain Odd
I've already mentioned the not-so-great integration of two separate stories in Hellboy: The Science of Evil. What I didn't mention is that each of the two stories had a different style of cutscene. At least I think that's how it was organized. At any rate, some cutscenes were choppy-animated comicbook style, which I really liked. Others were basically the same as the in-game animations--perfectly servicable, but not as cool as the comic-book ones.I guess, too, that one of the things I found disappointing about the game, aside from the not-as-good-as-it-could-have-been story and the inability to play as other characters outside multiplayer, was the puzzles. There were a few--if you can really call them puzzles--to break up the combat a bit, but they were really simple. Really, really simple. Use this artifact to do x action. Turn this lever. There was only one puzzle that even approached the level I'd hoped for.
Of course, it's probably unfair to criticize a game for not being something it never claimed to be. A few more good puzzles, though, would have gone a long way towards making the combat less tedious. And they would have kept me playing for longer. Maybe they would have even made the game longer. And more challenging. And more fun.
But as it is, Hellboy: The Science of Evil for PSP was a slightly-better-than-average action game featuring a great character. I found it for $24.99 Cdn, which makes it a pretty good deal.
