Mad Devils promised to be a juicy action game for two about battles with the Nazis in hell. Some of this proposal is actually present in the game, but what about the implementation??

Meet me in hell

For the story Mad Devils answered the British writer Greg Buchanan (Greg Buchanan), who worked on No Man’s Sky: Atlas Rises and Metro: Exodus . On the one hand, he plays on a fairly common story about how the Nazis were involved in the occult and even tried to open the gates to hell. A group of special forces called Mad Devils wanted to stop them.

The glorious heroes were defeated, turned into demons and ended up in another dimension, in the dark underground world, where they will have to stop the plans of the maniacal Nazi leader, Major Strauss. At the same time, they themselves look extremely colorful: one is a skeleton, the other is a demoness with wings, the third looks like a red-skinned Balrog, the fourth generally resembles… a duck with a rocket launcher.

In total, six “mad devils” appear in the story – and almost the entire game we spend looking for comrades-in-arms and assembling our squad. All this is accompanied by beautiful art and quite expressive dialogues – however, they often go right during battles and therefore pass in the background.

Demons for pumping

There are six fighters, but you can https://casinogriffon.co.uk/ only play as two at a time. Offline you can switch between them yourself, and online the second one will be controlled by another player. Therefore, it is important to decide on your protégé. All six differ, firstly, in class: there is a fighter with two pistols, a typical attack aircraft, and a grenade launcher, also capable of scattering mines and throwing smoke bombs.

Secondly, each of the devils acquired in hell not only a new form, but also the ability to perform magic. And everyone has their own witchcraft techniques available – they throw fireballs, create local earthquakes, create protective shields and auras, and so on. And all this – pistols with grenade launchers, magic, and fighter characteristics – can be upgraded.

Special crystals collected at levels are used to upgrade weapons (bonuses to accuracy, damage, reload speed, magazine capacity). For them you can add the element of fire, light, darkness or ice to the damage. But the experience gained by everyone is used to pump up the magic and characteristics of devils – you need at least 10 thousand of it for one upgrade. However, there is a lot of “exp” here – as it should be in such top-down shooters, the enemies are coming at us in droves.

Stuck Dynamics

Throughout the game, at a frantic pace, we shoot opponents (among them Nazis and demons), listen to dialogues, gather comrades, search levels in search of crystals and chests with notes.

The authors try to diversify the situations. Either we take shelter from the demonic storm in special places, then we carefully follow footprints in the snow so as not to get blown up by mines, then we push trucks knee-deep in mud in the rain to clear the passage. And at the levels you can find special dungeons, where a test awaits us – we need to hold out against crowds of enemies for the allotted time.

However, in general, the gameplay is still quite monotonous, and the bots playing with us offline are terribly stupid and dropping like flies.

In the co-op, everything is, of course, more cheerful, but even there there is no escape from the controls, which at times makes passing almost impossible. The characters are clumsy, constantly bump into something, get stuck in textures and environmental objects – in general, they feel like irons on ice. Because of this, it is inconvenient to use shelters here. Plus the shooting itself is unconvincing – some barrels sound like firecrackers.

Despite all the positive aspects present in Mad Devils, it is worth recognizing that the clumsy characters, unresponsive controls and “farts” instead of shooting sounds are a death sentence for a game that is trying to be an explosive action game in the style of Alien Shooter .

Pros: good dark plot; colorful characters with their own abilities; there are interesting situations and challenges; beautiful art; juicy special effects.

Cons: unresponsive controls; characters constantly get stuck in environmental objects; shooting was poorly implemented.