by PK Hufford on October 22, 2008

You’d think that film studios would exhibit a little common sense and follow a simple rule: don’t make movies that suck. In my opinion, in the past fifteen to twenty years, I’d say about 50-60% of films fall somewhere within the mediocre to decent categories, meaning that I got some sort of enjoyment out of them. Twenty-five percent of films are truly amazing, and the rest you couldn’t pay me to watch. Most of the time the same ratios ring true for the video game industry.

However, when it comes to video games based on movies, most of them come up really short. In fact, they commonly are slapped together with popsicle sticks and duct tape. Here we are again with yet another season of summer blockbusters and the usual plethora of videogames based on those films. I happened to draw the lot for Hellboy: Science of Evil, and what an unlucky lot it was.

Any glimmer of hope I had of this game actually trying to redeem itself vanished about 30 seconds into the game when I heard the dialogue begin. It’s horrendous! It sounded like it was recorded and mastered on a Radio Shack tape cassette recorder made in the 70s. I’ve never heard such low quality voice recording in my life. Visually speaking, the graphics weren’t horrible. They just aren’t of the caliber that one would expect on the PlayStation 3. It may have well been ported straight from the PlayStation 2. In fact, I actually checked to make sure that the game was truly on a Blu-ray disc and not just a relabeled PS2 disc so they could milk the extra 10 bucks.

When I actually started to play the game, things got worse. The story starts by chasing some witch for some unknown reason and ends up in some underground crypt. My first enemy encounter was with a bunch of annoying gremlin-like creatures that tried to jump on my head and claw my eyes out. As I swung my mighty fists around, I got your standard in-game tutorial familiarizing you on what buttons to mash to flatten your targets. Then, one of those little buggers managed to jump on my head, and I didn’t know how to get it off me. Eventually, I ended up looking at a close up shot of Hellboy on his knees, health meter drained, a gremlin-like creature clawing at his head. At this point, you’d expect a pop-up informing you of your demise, giving you an option to restart the level, but two minutes later, I was still sitting on my chair, dumbfounded, mashing the buttons on my controller to see if I was missing something. Nope. I ended up pressing the Start button and starting the whole game over again from the beginning.

I managed to fight my way through the crypt, ended up in a grave yard and fighting more gremlins, all the while trying to figure out the plot, because there wasn’t an introduction video or any cutscenes. Thirty minutes later, I ejected the game and promptly put it back in its case at a loss for words. I can’t find one redeeming thing to say about this game.

Just because you can make a game based on a movie doesn’t mean you should. Look at the Lord of the Rings games; the movie studios, game developers, and even the cast of the movies, spent considerable time and resources to create quality, enjoyable gaming experiences in order to match the very high expectations set by the fans of that franchise. But Hellboy: Science of Evil is a classic example of the movie and gaming industry taking a good and potentially profitable franchise and ruining it in a rush to get it on the market. I’ve not read the comics, but I can assure you that fans of Hellboy are going to be very angry if they get a hold of this title. My message to those fans, and to the public, is that the only “science of evil” that I found with this game was unleashing it on the public.

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