Game Review: Hellbound and S.C.A.R.
It’s November, 1994, Thanksgiving weekend. All the men are in the living room watching football, the women have gone Black Friday shopping, and I am in the basement with my cousins, crowding around a CRT monitor as we watch our oldest cousin blow up demons from mars with a shotgun. It is the first time I have ever seen DOOM, and my mind is blown. The speed of play and the unmitigated violence were things I had never seen in a videogame before. DOOM is now infamous, and these days there’s a new first person shooter game every few years that tries to recapture that feeling, with varying degrees of success. Today, I’m looking at two recent attempts: Hellbound, and S.C.A.R.
Hellbound, from Saibot Studios, is a love letter to the original DOOM, which is a nice way of saying it borrows the aesthetics of DOOM wholecloth. The loading screen between levels uses a static map with different locations that get splatted out upon completion, just like DOOM. It gives you a percentage of enemies killed and number of secrets found, just like DOOM. You play the silent murderous protagonist bent on killing as many demons as he can. Just like DOOM.
Hellbound has very little in the way of story. You play as the sole survivor of the planet Hell, where your people were destroyed by an invading force, who then turned their sights on planet Earth. Humans send you back to Hell to destroy the invading force and reclaim your planet. All of this is conveyed to you through snippets of text during loading screens, which ensures the game isn’t bogged down in lore and can be ignored if it doesn’t interest you.
The actual gameplay feels really good. Combat requires constant movement and a lot of circle-strafing around relentless hordes of enemies. There are a variety of baddies, who all have a distinct feel. The grunts with clubs and guns are easy to take down, but if you leave them alive too long their sheer number can fill the levels with enough fire that it becomes death by a thousand tiny cuts. Large demon-like creatures lob fireballs that explode, but are easy to dodge if you have room. Each enemy has its own behaviors, and when they are all attacking together, it's important to account for their individual tactics to avoid getting killed. This is the mark of good game design and Hellbound uses all of the tools it has available to keep the game interesting.
Hellbound offers a variety of level environments for the player to navigate. One of my favorites featured a series of winding tunnels and ledges that all looped back on each other, giving the level a feeling of tight quarters while also affording the long range enemies plenty of room to shoot. The use of space and verticality offered a particularly fun challenge, as I had to be wary of getting jumped by demons trying to shred me to pieces with their claws while also having to look out for enemies shooting from above and below.
Combat is good, but it wasn’t perfect. Taking damage doesn’t feel right, where too often I would drop to around 20% health without even realizing it because there aren't a lot of visual or
auditory clues for being hit. The protagonist is constantly grunting or making other noises from jumping or opening doors, and the sound ques for taking damage weren’t distinct enough to register as anything but ambiance. You’ll be far too busy dodging and firing to look directly at the health bar, which also borrows from the original DOOM as a percentage and a head that gets progressively more bloody the more damage you take. Apart from that there is a lack of variety of both weapons and enemies. The content that’s there is polished and balanced well, but it constantly felt like the game was holding back because there wasn’t enough to go around. All in all, it was a good gaming experience and a fun trip of nostalgia with modern graphics, but its limitations are certainly notable. Overall, I would still recommend it to fans of the genre.
Where Hellbound captures the feeling of those early days of first person shooters and brings it into the modern day, S.C.A.R. from developer Savage Studios feels like a game that jumped directly out of the 90s. Enemies are blocky and polygonal and objects have that fuzzy look of pixelation around their edges. Where Hellbound takes its inspiration from DOOM, SCAR may look to inspire a very similar feel to the original Quake.
SCAR distinguishes itself from the pack by starting the player off with a grappling hook. The hook can be used to latch onto surfaces and pull the player across the room, swing over gaps too large to double jump across, or ascend towards the ceiling. Game design reflects this from the start and each level has a huge amount of vertical space to move around in, as well as horizontal. Grappling hooks in a game, or even a first person shooter, isn’t an original idea (looking at you Titanfall) but it’s still a rare enough idea that when it’s there it adds a fresh perspective and element of gameplay to what might otherwise be a straightforward and unoriginal concept.
However, its biggest strength also becomes its greatest weakness. Level design becomes cluttered with cross beams and platforms, and oftentimes my hook would miss what I thought I was aiming at and hit an object nearby, causing me to careen off in the wrong direction or miss my landing completely. Enemies also had a bad habit of getting stuck in these rafter areas. This became increasingly problematic, as certain levels would not let me progress until every enemy in an area was dead, and then it became a hunt to find the one enemy that had wedged itself between a wall and a cross beam up in some random corner. The visual design and layout of levels also became a problem, as clearing areas resulted in the game announcing that a door had opened, and I found myself back-tracking constantly in an effort to figure out which area I had just unlocked, with no visual clues to help.
All that said, when the combat was good, combat was really good. The grappling hook gives a lot more freedom than similar games, and soaring through the air while shooting a hovering monster as you pass by is a fantastic feeling. When SCAR gets it right, it gets it really right.
S.C.A.R. is currently in early access, and I hope they take the time to get the level design and balance just right. If they do, it’s going to be a game that’s truly worth your time. In its current state I can’t in good faith tell you this is a definite yes, but if you’re looking for that Nostalgia feel with a twist, and at a very affordable price, it might be worth it to you to check it out.
- The Clever Coyote