Skip to main content

Fantasy Island: Hellraid

Edit: originally referred to 'Deep Silver's Hellraid' as opposed to the 1,0000% more accurate 'Techland's Hellraid'.

The last time I enjoyed a first-person melee combat game, I was booting orcs into spikes or off cliffs, and pretending that the bits with spiders didn't exist. They did exist though and, Looking Glass games aside, serve as scuttling proof that arachnids are capable of ruining anything. No matter. I can just about forgive Dark Messiah for its tarantulike transgressions because it's packed full of wonderful physics-based 'accidents'. The new trailer for Deep Silver's Techland's Hellraid doesn't show any such invention, but it does show a fair bit of biffing, with spells and swords. It actually reminded me that Hexen 2 existed and then I remembered how impressed I was by Hexen 2's graphics and then I looked at a video of Hexen 2 on Youtube. Wow. There are so many new graphics nowadays.

Watch on YouTube

Slight correction. There is a bit where a massive container falls on some baddies and squashes them. Environmental hell-kill!

I stopped playing Dead Island shortly after the tutorial finished so I can't agree with the many who are saying, "it's just a reskin". I can't very well disagree with them either though. It probably doesn't help that many of the enemies seem to be de-skinned zombies. Yes, it's a game full of skellingtons. And zombies actually. Hell, it seems, is mostly full of dead people, in various states of disrepair. They're all very angry though. There seem to be a few demons as well and they have totally been working on their abs so that they'll look good when dancing topless at the disco inferno.

It's a strange world. Here's Hexen 2, for comparison. There is a spider. Of course there is a spider.

Watch on YouTube

'Dynamic roleplaying' is a man falling into a puddle.

Read this next