What would happen if the chilling Silent Hill mated with the horrific Resident Evil? Shadows of the Damned (SD) tries to provide the answer. SD brings together the talents of Resident Evil 4’s director Shinji Mikami and the man behind the terrifying sounds in Silent Hill, Akira Yamaoka.

Within SD you assume the role of the oddly named Mexican demon slayer Garcia Hotspur, who like John Constantine in the Constantine movie, has sent countless numbers of the Devil’s fallen army on a one way trip back to hell. Understandably, this has left him with a less than favourable reputation in the realm down under (and we don’t mean Australia).

Boasting a scary look, but an incredibly tame name, Fleming, the lord of the demons, decides to kidnap Hotspur’s girlfriend, Paula, and drag her down to his domain. It leaves our hero with no other choice but to follow them straight down to hell.

Not in the brochure

The City of the Damned isn’t really the type of place you would find in a Thompsons Tours travelling brochure. Besides not being as picturesque as say Rome, the place is filled with dilapidated buildings, hoards of demons and bosses who definitely haven’t friended you on Facebook.

There’s also a number of really graphic and horrific scenes, such as the heads of people mounted on tavern walls with butcher cleavers in them, as well as some rather unfortunate souls who have been guilty of gluttony in real life, now feasting on their own corpses as demons in hell. This unfortunately means that the game won’t make for the perfect gift to your favourite teenage nephew, as the game’s content is rated at 18 and older.

The graphics are powered by the Unreal engine and although this game might not blow you away graphically, it does feature some well designed demons and environments. On the topic of environments, you won’t navigate this dangerous environment alone, as you are aided by a former demon called Johnson. Besides being able to transform into an assortment of guns as well as the melee weapon, Johnson also possesses a vast selection of clever and funny one-liners, which will lighten up the dark atmosphere of the surroundings.

Weapons of choice

Garcia uses three main weapons, a pistol, an assault rifle and a shotgun. Each of these also sports an alternate fire, which is a charged light shot that doesn’t do any damage to the health of foes, but is still useful since it can freeze demons and as mentioned above, you can dispatch dark areas by taking aim at a goat’s head.

You can purchase weapon upgrades in the game using gems as currency that you collect by eliminating enemies and destroying nearby crates and other objects. Upgrades include the Teether which fires teeth projectiles at a high speed at enemies, chewing (sorry, we couldn’t resist) off their limbs.

Gameplay

Speaking of light, as in Alan Wake, there is an element of light vs. dark in the gameplay. Some areas are bathed in darkness which cloaks demons in an impenetrable aura of strength and eventually eats away at your health. The only way to counter this is to fire a light blast at a mounted goat’s head to lighten the area up and dispatch your foes.

This, strangely enough, isn’t the weirdest element in the game as there’s a number of these weird concepts in the game, including certain doors and gates sporting a crying baby’s head mounted at the front. The only way to open these is to feed the baby a strawberry and as you can imagine, since being in hell, strawberries aren’t exactly a common thing to get hold of.

These elements, coupled with the sometimes-over-the-top (check out trailer posted below) commentary of Johnson, although mostly entertaining, does detract from the scariness factor of this title.

There will be blood

SD is filled with suspenseful moments and immersive and provides for some engrossing gameplay as you go through one hell of a journey (both literally and figuratively) to save your girlfriend.

The game is full of enjoyable, sometimes spooky, and lots of tense moments, especially when the waves of demons outnumber your bullets, but that said, it could have been scarier, seeing that its basically a Resident Evil game with hell as its venue. It goes for a recommended retail price of R499.

Pro

Fun and engrossing gameplay and the humorous exchanges between main characters.

Con

Humour can sometimes go overboard, and when combined with other weird elements these do detract from scariness factor of the game.