Hello fellow gamers, Racula here and welcome to XPN Gaming. I'm here to give you all a read on the game know as Mad Devils, I was playing on the Xbox for this review. Now when I heard the game title Mad Devils, my mind instantly went to a shooter type game.
Or some kind of multiplayer that involved devils of some form.
So I jumped on into the game, to see what it actually was, I wasn't exactly right or wrong.
More or less somewhere in between, so let's delve on in and see what my thoughts are on this.
What's Mad Devils about?
Released on May 10th 2021, Mad Devils is a 1900's throwback, retro co-op, top-down shooter.
All set within an alternative reality of World War Two.
You play as Sergeant Jack Asher, who was killed in combat and has woken up in the underworld, twisted and with demonic gifts.
Players will explore hell, regrouping with the rest of Jack's team, the Mad Devils.
Each member of the Mad Devils, has been given elemental and ethereal magics, along with being turned into demons them selves.
Guns ablaze
Mad Devils pretty much centres around running and gunning from a top-down shooter view, through areas filled with enemies.
Similar to how Diablo looks and plays, if you've ever played them.
This can be played either solo or in online co-op, with six characters to eventually choose from.
Overall the gameplay is ok at it's best, but not exactly brilliant.
The map-building code tends to create confusing paths, that had a tendency to get me lost very easily during my gameplay.
There's a lot of fiery gates that block specific areas, that unlock later when at different levels.
However some of the enemies, that need to be defeated in order to move on in the area, sometimes spawn behind these gates.
Making things difficult to progress within the game.
Also the enemies are like bullet sponges, you keep shooting and shooting and yes more shooting, but sometimes they just won't drop.
AI just don't seem to know, that this the part where they are suppose to fall down.
Also I struggled with the aiming system on my playthrough. With being on the Xbox, movement and aiming requires both analog sticks. Left analog stick: for your basic everyday movement and running around and the right analog stick: for aiming at the enemies. As your character can pretty much spin around with the aiming, it does become fairly difficult to accurately aim, move and shoot all once.
Even with the lock on, I still struggled to aim properly and had to run away several times, before I could defeat just one enemy.
Meet the Devils
So as I said before there's six characters to choose from when you find them all, you start off with two already:
Sergeant Jack Asher and Diana Cross.
Along the way, you'll eventually regroup and team up with the others:
Pvt. John Chester
Cpl Robert Harris
Sgt. Victor Malkov
Dr. Grahame Miller
Each character has their own unique abilities, to which all can be empowered and also develop your powers.
By finding and collecting demonic crystals through out the underworld.
Ready player two
Mad Devils works better as a co-op game, partly due to the more interactive nature of playing with others in general.
But also because of the combat design for the game as well.
Single-player mode tends to hurl massive waves of enemies at you, even in easy difficulty as well.
Which means, players are getting overwhelmed too easily and the primary strategy of run and hide, makes the game feel simpler.
Hell looks lovelier then I expected.
Looking at the graphics for Mad Devils, it kind of resembles a polished 3D platformer world, with a cartoonish style twist.
The prologue opening cutscene, it's mildly, disturbing illustrations with a voiceover to it.
I get that this is trying to set a much better tone for the storyline, however this style doesn't show up again.
Which is a bit of a downer, as the rest of the cutscenes are all set in-game and don't have much movement to them.
Reminds me of cutscenes from ps1 games, you see the character and them moving about, but no facial movement.
For example, Metal Gear Solid on the ps1 comes to mind for these scenes.
I did notice when playing Mad Devils, it did stutter when loading up some of the areas, they also flickered at times as well.
Causing the game to either buffer when loading up areas, loading screen or crash, which is not good.
What did you say!?
So the audio balance of Mad Devils is a bit all over the place at times.
No matter how much I changed volume settings to make the game audio better. Background sounds, like howling winds or gun shots, just over powered the music or dialogue of the characters.
Sadly making anything difficult to hear through out the gameplay, though from what I could hear dialogue wise, the voice acting was a bit hit and miss. For this I'm grateful for subtitles and it's why I always put them on any game I play. If I'm honest, the voice acting came across a little bit flat and could of done with some more "oomph" to make it grab my attention more.
Most of the time, it didn't really let the story line surface, so I didn't really understand what was going on personally.
My final thoughts on the game.
Overall Mad Devils is a good game if your into this style of gaming and can look beyond the little issues it has.
Personally it's not for me, don't get me wrong, I enjoy playing these types of games.
I just don't like shooting games or anything with guns in them really, honestly never been good at them and can't aim to save my own life haha.
Hence why I never play any Call of Duty, Fortnite or any other type of shooting games.
I'm more of a fantasy player and prefer magic, bows, swords and so on.
But if this your sort of game and are interested in playing Mad Devils, it's out on Steam, Xbox and Playstation.
Click on the links below for the platform you would like to chose.
XPN Rating: 3 out of 5
Thank you to everyone, who has taken a moment to read this review, it means a lot to me.
Also a big thank you to Itzy Interactive Inc. for providing the code for this review.
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