An unoptimized tribute to a dead era of games- Hellbound Review

The 1990s were a decade that popularized the genre we know and love today as first-person shooters, fueled by creations such as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Duke Nukem, and Quake. These games being such huge successes eventually spawned cloned versions of the games. You might remember games such as Marathon or Heretic. Hell, even Duke Nukem 3D is a Doom clone. Now, Saibot Studios, known for the creepy and mature Doorways series, now have a new game that follows in the footsteps of the Doom clones before it: Hellbound.

Hellbound has you play as a macho and angry lad, aptly named Hellgore. After being revived by humans and the last of his race, Hellgore’s modus operandi is to travel back to Hell and drive out the demons that live there and prevent their ongoing invasion of Earth. To do this, he must destroy the ancient pillars at the core of Hell, which will dismantle the teleportation system connecting the two worlds. You might be thinking “wow, that’s pretty similar to the Doom plot”, and you wouldn’t be wrong. I mean, invasion of Earth by demons, teleporting to Hell, needing an angry protagonist to do the job? That’s the Doom story right there.

Even in the story, the gameplay is extremely similar. Hell, even the title’s font tries to look the same. The only difference really is the graphics, which, to put it simply, are pretty terrible given that it’s running on Unreal Engine 4. The gameplay is barebones and, again, runs the same as Doom. You’ll unlock better weapons as you progress through the game, utilise your speed and distance to stay ahead of your enemies and kill with murderous intent, and you’ll explore secret areas and find cool easter eggs as you make your way to the final level. You’ll fight all kinds of enemies, including demons that chase you down on all fours and can kill in one strike, enemies that throw fireballs from long distances, and grunts that can use all the weapons that you use. The weapons available include a club that practically kills in 1 hit, a triple-barrelled shotgun that deals insane damage, a repeating rifle, and a rocket launcher. Each weapon has a secondary attack that’s mapped to the second mouse button. These might allow you to aim in, or in the case of the triple-barrelled shotgun fire from all barrels in a burst and do 3x as much damage. Along the way, you’ll be able to find and utilize power-ups such as Hell damage (which deals 3x damage), Hell Speed (which doubles your movement speed and halves attack delays), and Hell Skin (which reduces incoming damage by 90%).

But, really, so what if the story is the same or the gameplay is a clone? It’s still amazing. And the devs know that because they wanted to make a game that took the things we loved about the 90s FPS genre and put them together. There’s plenty of bugs, and I’ll get to those, but the gameplay is just… fun. Coupled with fantastic level design, this game oozes player satisfaction. When it worked flawlessly, I loved every single minute of this game. The enemy designs were fantastic, and working out all the exploits to improve your gameplay just made me happy and reminded me why the 90s FPS genre was so great. There’s no doubt in my mind that a fan of that genre would also find as much enjoyment in this game as I did.

But, as I said, the game is great when it works flawlessly. Unfortunately for Hellbound, this wasn’t always the case. I ran into so many bugs and issues. Firstly, I don’t know why but you can’t change your controls. I’m a man that likes to use the E button as crouch, and F as interact, and because I couldn’t change that there were numerous times where I got killed because I didn’t interact with a button fast enough and had to stay put for a few seconds (surrounded by enemies, mind you) just to remember what the correct one was. Aiming down sights, as well as reloading a checkpoint or save after dying, reset the FOV. It was such a pain having to reapply settings every single time just to get it the way I liked it. Health and armor caps at 100. BUT, if, for example, you’re on 99 HP and collect a pack that has 100 HP in it, your health will shoot past the 100 cap and land on 199. Weirdly, if you try to collect any health after reaching over 100 HP you won’t be able to. Not sure why that was programmed that way.

The final, and only boss, would occasionally stop firing at me and just stand still and take all the damage I dealt with no reaction. At one point he just chased me down but didn’t attack. It was as if he had a certain amount of ammunition in his strikes and abilities that he ran out of. In that same encounter, I noticed that when there are too many weapons, ammo, health, and armor dropped and floating on the ground the game chugged to as low as 15 FPS.

I also had a glitch where the final elevator platform of a level (which cues the completion screen of the level once it’s activated) didn’t activate the completion screen and it just kept moving down. I had to restart an earlier save on another level, finish that level again, and then complete that glitched level again, just to get to the next level even though I was right at the end in the first place — argh.

I also have a number of grievances with the game. For one, the music. I loved it at the beginning of the game when I had only just heard the loop. But, after the 100th loop, I realised how repetitive and generic the music actually is. It’s, like, metal in genre, but made by someone who pretends to know what metal sounds like, made a 3-4 minute song of it, took 30 seconds of that song, then looped it over and over. Sure, there are different songs in the soundtrack, but it all sounds the same. I would’ve loved to see some innovation or creativity in the music, maybe even have a more relaxed metal song play when there weren’t enemies, then kick it up a notch every time there are more and more enemies.

It also runs pretty poorly, given for what the recommended specifications ask for. For something that you’d expect would easily give you 60 FPS on the worst of PCs, put simply it doesn’t. At least, not on max settings. Max for me is 55, maybe 60 FPS, but my specs shoot way over the recommended. In fact, the recommended specs are Windows 7 and later, an AMD FX-8320 or Intel i5-2400 processor, 8 GB of RAM, and AMD R9 290 4GB or Nvidia GTX 770 4GB graphics card. I run Windows 10, a non-overclocked Intel Core i7-6700 processor, 16 GB of RAM, and a stock Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070. This should easily beat these specs and I should comfortably sit on no less than 144 FPS throughout the game, if not more. In fact, that’s far from the truth. In order to get a boost in FPS and sit on at least 85-90 FPS, I had to drop the shadow quality setting and effects setting down a notch lower, and run everything else on max. Those two settings on the highest choice actually chugged 15-20 FPS each. That’s about as far from optimized as you can get. In fact, that explains why the 19 GB file size is the size that it is; the game is not optimized correctly. You can see the FPS drop on max settings in the video below.

 

If it wasn’t for the bugs and some grievances, this game could be incredible. The gameplay is insanely rewarding, and I loved every minute I spent in this game when it worked correctly. Sure, it’s a Doom clone, but that’s the way Saibot Studios intended it to be, and they used every single thing that made the 90s FPS genre so cool and put it in one sweet game. Do note, that it’s super short. It’s got a survival mode, sure, but the campaign is what you’ll likely play. In just over 2 hours, I completed the 7 levels and 1 boss fight available. That being said, that’s a completely reasonable amount of content for a price point at $15.

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