Hellboy: Web of Wyrd (PS5)

Hellboy: Web of Wyrd is both a 3D brawler and a rogue-like, the punchy action seeking greater depth through randomized areas, changing boosts each run, and the threat that a death will throw you back with all the goodies you’ve grabbed and progress you’ve made lost save for a few long term collectibles. The mix of the supernatural comic book franchise and gameplay types does sound like quite an unexpected pairing with some room for interesting ideas, but while all the concepts can sound intriguing on their own, Hellboy: Web of Wyrd doesn’t necessarily seem to be pairing them up because it has strong ideas for what to do with them.

Hellboy: Web of Wyrd, also known as Mike Mignola’s Hellboy: Web of Wyrd, does seem to expect a little bit of familiarity with the source material, although even if you don’t know the history of the half-demon protagonist with a giant stone arm, you can get the gist of why he’s working with the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense in this title. Some late game elements do pay off more if you know the character’s history, but perhaps more than anything, a familiarity with the Hellboy comics will help you greatly appreciate the impressive cel-shaded art style that manages to carry over the comic’s bold flat colors with heavy reliance on shadows into 3D with it only occasionally being too dark for its own good. Hellboy’s work with the BPRD finds him in South America at the mysterious Butterfly House, the mansion containing a few access points to the supernatural realm know as the Wyrd. In the usually unreachable Wyrd, the myths and folklore of mankind manifest as tangible terrors, and the interference the owner of the Butterfly House engaged in has put various places across the globe at risk of their old legends coming to life.

When you enter the Wyrd, you’ll actually be transported to crumbling recollections of places from across time, and while the idea is that creatures of folklore are springing to life, Hellboy: Web of Wyrd doesn’t go for easy or typical choices. While you might see something that looks a bit like a werewolf or bat monster, the references dig much deeper into creatures like the water women known as rusalki and the scaly Tsar Vodyanik of Russian mythology. The collectible lore that is just sort of laying around in hallways ends up more interesting to find because they recount lesser known tales and speak on fascinating local myths, and with the Wyrd connecting to Italy, Russia, Scotland, and even New York, you’re given a nice range of world cultures that also reflect on the areas shifting from old ruins to eerie forests and even abandoned subway tunnels. It is a bit of a shame that the character running the bestiary seems to describe the monsters on show only through wise-cracking and the misguided idea that anything you have fought has killed you before, but the actual historians will provide you the juicy lore that make the monsters more than just video game enemies.

Hellboy may be facing a lot of different monsters along the way, but the half-demon isn’t one to mix up his moves much. Your most reliable means of damaging foes throughout the adventure will boil down to putting that big stone fist to use, a punch combo with either light or delayed heavy blows inevitably going to be how you handle anything from a skeletal knight to a witch eager to take your eyeballs. Despite the box art you never get to use a sword, but the punches do have some good weight to them and sound effects sell their hard-hitting nature, it still sort of satisfying to land blows even after you’ve done the same combo hundreds of times. Hellboy is a bit of a slow fighter though, meaning you need to pace yourself well so an enemy won’t interrupt you, but you can eventually get some other helpful tools like a gun and a charm. You get to bring one of each of those extra battle options into the Wyrd, the player able to decide if they like the quick firing of the pistol over the heavy close range damage of a shotgun for example while charms can instead give you a quick battle option like a temporary energy shield or a pulse to knock enemies away. Hitting foes into walls and stunning them are pretty important to success in battle, but most important of all is managing the Toughness system.

In Hellboy: Web of Wyrd, both Hellboy and all his enemies come into battle with red health that needs to be depleted to kill them, but over top that when an encounter begins is also a barrier of yellow life known as Toughness. Toughness replenishes on its own if someone isn’t hit for some time, although Hellboy can attack weak enemies that are otherwise not necessary to kill in order to pick up some Toughness refills during a fight. Managing Toughness is one of the most important parts of a fight, the player needing to be aggressive to ensure the enemy doesn’t keep regenerating their shields, but also since your own healing is limited to random rooms for the most part, you want to make sure you don’t let your Toughness get fractured. This system does encourage you to stay in a fight when you have the foe’s health exposed even if it’s risky to do so but also gives you a way to recover from taking a nasty hit so long as you can avoid more damage for a while, but it also feels like it builds up a pretty bad habit in the early game. When Hellboy: Web of Wyrd starts off, you might even wonder why it’s a rouge-like at all as the first areas aren’t too punishing and simply charging into battle and whaling away on foes usually does the job. While at first you visit each area and clear them out, the game then has you go through them again but with the difficulty increased, death now much more likely since foes can better break through your combos or deal quick severe damage. After training you to be unrelenting it can be a bit of a hard adjustment to practice caution, although funnily enough the boss monsters still feel vulnerable to overly aggressive play since they don’t become much harder in the repeat runs. Dodging, when necessary, does at least require a bit more of an eye and good reflexes since you have to look at the direction of an attack and weave around it accordingly, but focusing too much on it will likely make the fights harder for you than the aggressive play that usually does the job well.

Unfortunately, while the repeat runs with the difficulty cranked up do start to break you out of some fairly plain and repetitive battle strategies, they can also get frustrating since you’ll start dying and going back into an area of the Wyrd to try again isn’t exactly made more exciting through the randomization. Room randomization might as well not matter much, most battle arenas not really mixing up how enemies are thrown at you to make them feel any different, but the real weak part of the rogue-like design comes in the form of the upgrades, both in terms of the ones that last between runs and the ones that only last until you die or clear the current area. The problem with long term upgrades like increasing your weapon power, Toughness, or getting limited revives in the Wyrd is that the resource used to buy them are earned very slowly, meaning many times heading back to the Butterfly House between runs will often leave you with nothing interesting to purchase. Similarly, a temporary currency is earned while in the Wyrd but disappears when you leave it, but anything you can buy with it while in the Wyrd is very pricey and often not really that big a boost to your abilities anyway.

The temporary upgrades in Hellboy: Web of Wyrd are a very underwhelming bunch for a few different reasons. While sometimes you’ll find a room with one provided to you for free or only after a combat challenge, the upgrades can sometimes be far too conditional to really feel like they add much to the action. One major reason this issue arises is because so many of the upgrades involve adding the chance to inflict a status effect to either your fist, gun, or charm. Each one can only hold a single upgrade per run although you can make the upgrade stronger by collecting duplicates, but some of the effects are far too situational. One upgrade for example makes it so any time you dodge an attack, the enemy takes a bit of damage, but it only applies when you’ve inflicted the associated status effect that lasts for a few seconds. Not only should you likely be pressing whatever attack advantage let you apply the effect instead of dodging, but it hardly feels like a boon you’ll use intentionally, this also true of the similar status effect where damage you take is also reflected back onto the enemy a bit. There are a few upgrades with some actual value, you can get a straightforward one that boosts damage when it’s applied to the foe so you can actually benefit from it, and some like adding another bullet to a gun before you need to reload or giving you a tiny extra chunk of Toughness are at least things you can notice. So many of the upgrades seem like poor choices though if you do have options, Hellboy: Web of Wyrd feeling like it needs more powers like the one where you have a chance of making an enemy freeze in place for a bit so that you’re more often excited by what you find and able to actually feel a difference in your power level between runs.

Sadly, Hellboy: Web of Wyrd starts to feel like its indulging in repetition for the sake of it when you get to the third batch of harder areas, it hard to muster interest when the story isn’t doing much and you likely figure out the few upgrades you can even feel the effects of early so you have no reason to try new builds or experiment. While areas are often a bit maze-like since they stitch together random rooms, you still likely end up going through them all either because you can see the hint of an upgrade spot or simply have no idea what route will take you to the exit, the confusing design just an unfortunate feature on top of other weak ideas. If you want to speed things up a bit, the pause menu lets you enable additional health, make enemy attacks easier to read for dodging, and slow down their special move charge times, none of these trivializing the difficulty but perhaps easing the repetition a bit by giving you a better chance of eventually getting through the game after it has lost all of its charms.

THE VERDICT: Hellboy: Web of Wyrd has a strong look, its fist fighting is sold well through visuals and sound effects, and the focus on lesser known mythological monsters makes you interested to read the lore on the monsters you face. Sadly, this brawler boils down to bland fist fights since the Toughness system ends up rewarding constant aggression too much, although your other attack options outside it aren’t that strong anyway. The rogue-like elements are paper thin at their worst and often an impediment as they force more repetition into an already repetitive game, so while there’s a few upgrades you actually like to find, mostly you’re stumbling across underwhelming alterations you don’t even feel across the many hours of basic battles.

And so, I give Hellboy: Web of Wyrd for PlayStation 5…

A BAD rating. Rouge-like design elements are meant to add replayability and variation to a title by mixing and matching elements, but Hellboy: Web of Wyrd feels like it was made when the creators saw the design of fellow rogue-like Hades but failed to understand it. It copies things like doorways alerting you to what rewards lie ahead and even calls it run-specific upgrades Blessings like Hades does, but it seems the developers forgot that the upgrades in Hades can lead to runs feeling incredibly different. In Hellboy: Web of Wyrd, if you aren’t finding one of the upgrades that has a noticeable effect, you might as well have not found anything, that constant sense of disappointment not really counterbalanced by the times when you do manage to get everything you want. It feels like you’re rolling a dice repeatedly trying to get a six with none of the other numbers mattering, but here, even rolling a six isn’t exactly paying out handsomely. You get a little better, you might find things a bit more convenient in a lucky run, but it’s not shifting up the action all that much and oftentimes it just speeds up the action some. The fist-fighting is at least not so barren a system that you completely come to loathe it, although it definitely loses its luster because it boils down to the same punch combos repeatedly with just a brief moment of dodging or playing smart per enemy. The bosses in particular are pretty underwhelming since they can often be rushed down before they show off what moves they even have, although at least you won’t often get to the end and then fall short in a run. Hellboy: Web of Wyrd likely could have benefited from being more straightforward with pretty much every element. Enemies could involve deeper battle strategies to overcome if they weren’t being scattered around mazes randomly, your upgrades could afford to sometimes be minor boosts or very conditional if they kept compounding across a long journey, and you could remove a lot of the meaningless repetition that comes from the punishment for death. There’s definitely some talent when it comes to the look and eye for lore here, and it too would be better served in a game that didn’t keep yanking you back to run through the same content again and again.

Hellboy: Web of Wyrd could have also worked as a rogue-like if it had been more willing to let you grow in power and that could have lead to more dangerous battles to accommodate that, but instead, despite this being the second rogue-like from developer Upstream Arcade, it feels like there was little understanding of what makes the genre appealing. You’ve got a good deal of what makes the Hellboy series fun here; Hellboy’s sold well as a heavy-hitter, his casual attitude is embodied well by the writing and the voice acting of Lance Reddick, and the mix of myth on show is intriguing to see. However, the gameplay context around Hellboy is a messy web of weak ideas that bogs down this brawler far too much.