Hell has risen up and taken over Earth, and you may have had something to do with it (you being War…as in one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse). Who used you to make this happen? Why? HOW? Apparently the best way to discover that is to smash thousands and thousands of demonic entities and zombie-like human beings in to bloody piles of gooey entrails and chunks of limb.

Win win?

So, how do you figure out what went wrong? Chatting with demons! Seems some of them aren’t real tight with the man in charge (The Destroyer. Must have taken a good second and a half to come up with such a creative nom de guerre), and they’d love to help you take him down if you can. They’ll give you abilities, tell you where to go (first time ever that being instructed to “Go to Hell!” isn’t actually a bad thing) and sell you fighting moves and weapons and upgrades. You get their vile schwag by ‘selling’ them the thousands of souls you get from killing things.

Think about that for a minute.

Most of the things you’re killing are altered human beings. They’ve been altered by their planet being a Hellscape. That’s kind of your fault. And now you’re killing them and selling them in to eternal damnation so that you can do a really cool looking triple jump cut attack with that scythe you bought twenty minutes ago…probably with grandma’s soul.

HERO OF THE YEAR, BABY!

Really, it’s all just an excuse to hack and slash and hack and slash and hack and slash some more. It looks pretty as your rip through monsters and follow the story and beef up your abilities. And I love it despite kind of sucking at hack and slash games. Seriously, I tend to forget crazy concepts like ‘blocking’ and ‘not going all in with aggressive assaults’. Also, this game REALLY makes me wish I had a gamepad I could plug in to my PC, because running through this with keyboard and mouse is kind of a pain in the ass. Left mouse button for sword stuff, right mouse button for that scythe you just bought, left alt to dodge AND to activate alternate attack abilities, space to jump, Caps Lock (yes…CAPS LOCK) to bring up your ‘cool powers’ menu mid-fight, e to do a finishing attack, the ` key to launch out your annoying and horrible sidekick…and so on. Christ. Sure, I could re-map them, but is there any real way to make that work BETTER?

Anyway, the game also gave me an excuse to stretch out my full version of Fraps and record some goddamn video of cutting things up and trying to remember to dodge (and often forgetting).

Both of these are sort of ‘challenge’ rooms from pretty early on in the game. That one actually wasn’t too hard by comparison, since everything on the screen was actually killable (though the fiery dudes are just easier to avoid in a group melee situation like that). The next one got a little hairier.

Yay for wimpy ass flying things! And critical kill animations that interrupt the attacks of other bad guys, regardless of how big they are!

So there you go. You beat shit down and try not to die. Certainly not ground breaking (and what the fuck is War compensating for with a sword that outlandishly huge?!) but it’s fun.