DEVELOPER: Upstream Arcade

PUBLISHER: Good Shepherd Entertainment

REVIEWED ON: Xbox Series X from a copy purchased by the author.

Mike Mignola’s Hellboy is a character built to star in video games. Between the iconic title character, his rich supporting cast and world inhabited by occult supernatural threats – not to mention literal Nazis – there’s a lot to mine from this property that will soon be 30 years old. Unfortunately the likes of Hellboy: Asylum Seeker and The Science of Evil have done little to brighten Hellboy’s interactive stardom, leaving a guest appearance in Injustice 2 as the best way to pound on people with the Right Hand of Doom.

During the pre-show of The Game Awards in 2022, the debut trailer for Hellboy: Web of Wyrd premiered, immediately wowing all who viewed it with how it managed to look and move like it was ripped straight from the pages of a comic book. Just in time for the Halloween season, Web of Wyrd – pronounced “word” not “weird” – is now in the hands of players. While it was clearly designed and directed with passion for Hellboy’s red, right hand, its shallow combat and uninteresting story keep it from being the hit it perhaps could’ve been with a bigger budget.

Dangerous spires are popping up all over the world, all of which are linked to a place known only as the Butterfly House. From this location, Hellboy dives into a world known as the Wyrd, a place constructed through the power of story, to save a fellow B.P.R.D agent who ventured in prior to their arrival. Using a tether to keep himself anchored to the physical world, Hellboy must explore the twisted world of the Wyrd to uncover who’s behind its sudden appearance and how it connects to the mystery to the Butterfly House.

Hellboy: Web of Wyrd features some terrific voice talent, namely the gone too soon Lance Reddick, who’s perfectly cast as the title character, and veteran actor Steve Blum. Despite this talent, however, the story of Web of Wyrd does little to engage the player. As evidenced in even the debut trailer, the game looks the part of a Hellboy comic, but there’s no real presentation to speak of. Unmemorable dialogue exchanges are only ever delivered between static characters talking to one another in the hub world or cut-scenes that have the minimum of motion.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Hellboy universe, or only know it from the films written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, Web of Wyrd is not what you call a great introduction to newcomers. Unless it’s found within the lore you uncover while exploring that’s buried in menus, it’s not even communicated what each of the letters in BPRD stand for. Characters like Abe Sapien and Liz Sherman are also nowhere to be found. What you’re left with then is a few BPRD agents whose appearance might mean something to die-hard Hellboy readers, but little to everyone else as they’re an undercooked supporting cast who exhibit but the simplest of personality traits.

The story won’t compel you to keep diving back and forth into the Wyrd, but the combat mechanics crafted by developer Upstream Arcade certainly will. The blows from Hellboy’s fist feel appropriately crunchy, especially as you slam enemies into walls or hurl broken debris towards them, and when combined with various firearms like Hellboy’s iconic pistol, relics and other upgrades, there’s a lot to keep you motivated to move from room-to-room dispatching creatively designed creatures.

As solid as the basic foundation is though, it’s undermined by repetitive environments and encounters. Web of Wyrd is a roguelite where each dive into the Wyrd constitutes a run. When your health runs out, you’re snapped back to the Butterfly House where you can talk to your team and spend currency earned to build yourself up for your next try. Broken up into five areas, each with their own boss to topple, there’s a lot of variety in the locations you travel to, from a run down subway, a sunken city and a creepy forest. As the game smartly builds upon Mignola’s work, the inky blacks pop against Hellboy’s mostly crimson character model and the creatures, ranging from giant bats, bizarre sea creatures and living statues that you come up against slide nicely into this world.

Winning fights in Web of Wyrd is akin to Nintendo’s Punch-Out!! where you must successfully learn when to block, duck, or side swipe attacks to open up enemies to retribution from your fists. You might stumble during your first few runs, but once you learn how to counter your foes blatant tells, you’ll quickly realize that Web of Wyrd doesn’t have that much to offer. The geography will change for each part of the Wyrd, bringing with it a new set of monsters, but you’re ultimately doing the same thing over and over again. What’s here is enjoyable, there’s just not enough of it to keep you engaged for long stretches of time.

Each section of the word is built using procedural generation, meaning no 2 runs will ever be the same. What that also means is that all you’re ever doing is running down the same few similar looking interconnected hallways that lead you to your next battle. Periodically traps will show up to wake you up somewhat, but they’re normally minor announces at best like having to move around stationary floating mines, or running past purple energy on the ground.

Arenas are filled with a dozen or so small enemies, but they’re mostly just minor annoyances that barely attack you while you look for the one or two bigger enemies you need to topple to move forward. The largest threats in Web of Wyrd are often not bosses or blood thirsty beasts, but rather ramps and walls that will make it hard to gauge when to block or dodge. The camera is also a little too close to Hellboy at times, and if your primary targets wander too close together, you’ll often take off-screen damage from the baddie you’re not locked on to.

Bouts will assuredly keep you on your toes, and there’s enough variety in the equipment to cater Web of Wyrd towards how you want to play. The grenade launcher for example will bypass an enemies defenses and deal damage directly, while your pistol can be used to stagger an enemy to open them up to a devastating heavy blow. Relics, like a sword that can deal damage or a shockwave to push mobs away, similarly allow you to express yourself, as do mid-level power-ups that can be attached to either your gun, fists or relics that cause enemies to freeze in place or take increased environmental damage.

Once you settle on your preferred build, there’s little incentive to switch things up, and that’s when the monotony starts to set in where everything from the environments to the battles start to blend together. Damage to your health bar then starts to come less from the enemies and more from your own impatience and apathy as you desperately try to clear a room as quickly as possible.

You can also tell that developer Upstream Arcade deeply cares about this project, but perhaps didn’t have the biggest budget to work with. Once you clear each region of the Wyrd and their respective guardian, you must repeat these stages again just with an extra floor and boss. Once this task is done, those bonus areas are then cobbled together into another area stuffed with the same few repeated enemy types. Between the recycled backgrounds, layouts and brawls, Web of Wyrd can overstay its welcome even though it’s not terribly long.

Hellboy: Web of Wyrd could use some user experience enhancements with future patches. The default control layout for example is not ideal, and thankfully you can remap all the bindings to how you want them. You must do this each time you boot up the game, however, as it doesn’t save these settings. An upgrade to your sword relic states that you’re supposed to blink to enemies across the room, which is helpful as Hellboy doesn’t swiftly clear the distance well against a grenade launching Nazi, but as of this writing that function doesn’t work.

Hellboy: Web of Wyrd‘s bones are as sturdy as Hellboy’s right hand, and when combined with the terrific art direction, it certainly gives a good first impression. As you start to familiarize yourself with its mechanics and come to the realization that you’ll be traversing the same few areas ad nauseum, your dedication to the BPRD’s mission will being to falter unless you have a strong attachment to the property. Developer Upstream Arcade definitely earns the second part of their name with Web of Wyrd as it does feel like a throwback to a by-gone era of game design. There’s some enjoyment to be had here, but like the coin-op games of yesteryear, it’s best taken in small doses which suits the title’s relatively low asking price.

Hellboy: Web of Wyrd is available now on the PlayStation and Xbox family of consoles, Nintendo Switch and PC.