A gloriously stylish trip to Hell, in more ways than one.

Creative Staff
Director: Suda 51
Producer: Shinji Mikami
Music: Akira Yamaoka

What They Say
A twisted psychological action thriller from the nightmare team of Suda51, SHinji Mikami, and Akira Yamaoka. Garcia Hotspur has killed one too many demons and pissed off the Lord of the Underworld. Now he’s about to take one hell of a trip to rescue his kidnapped love in the City of the Damned.

Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Suda Goichi or Suda51 is one of the few video game auteurs who has not restricted himself to just one key franchise. Though all of his works released in the US have been hyper-violent, hyper-sexual, and an odd mix of the insultingly juvenile with the incredibly witty, they have varied in art direction, genre, and gameplay. By teaming up with Shinji Mikami of Resident Evil fame, Shadows of the Damned feels like Suda51′s first aim at a truly mainstream title. Rather than an arty rail-shooter adventure game, or a satirical otaku brawler, Damned takes a swing at America’s latest craze: Blasting hordes of zombies to bits. What results is a frustrating and fascinating title that is Suda51′s best and worst work to date.

For this review, I played the Playstation 3 version of the title, but experiences with the XBox 360 version are reportedly consistent with my observations.

Packaging is extremely basic, as there was no special edition of Damned released. The game comes in a standard PS3 game case with slipcover and manual. The manual is bare-bones, and gives just enough information on how to play the game without any flavor text or color. Both manual and cover feature hero Garcia Hotspur looking down the barrel of his gun/sidekick Johnson while aiming at some offscreen enemy.

When I first saw the Shadows of the Damned trailer, the game seemed to be a shameless ripoff of Robert Rodriguez’ Grindhouse: Suda51 claims the inspiration came from Jim Jarmusch’s road film Strangers in Paradise. While Planet Terror is doubtlessly an influence in the final game, it’s but a tile in a mosaic in references and homages to horror cinema and gaming. Damned’s level progression screen is borrowed from Ghosts and Goblins; demon lord Fleming looks like a Filmation Ghostbusters version of Resident Evil 3′s Nemesis; there’s a pointy-headed villain seemingly on loan from Silent Hill, and cannon fodder enemies look like leftover Heaven Smiles from Killer 7. The best homage may be the Evil Dead tribute level. What’s surprising is how Damned manages to keep a unique graphical style despite its myriad influences. Dark black shadows contrast with vibrant purples, greens, and reds, almost like a black velvet painting or a Day of the Dead celebration. Grasshopper Manufacture has managed to design a unique vision of Hell that’s consistently stylish. The interplay between the “normal” version of hell and the darkened shadow version is especially memorable.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BUWx7xVzrQ&w=640&h=390]

Execution of that design, sadly, is where problems emerge. Main character Garcia’s running movements appear stiff and awkward. The graphics will tear if you spin around quickly. Though the distance is obscured by shadows and fog, you can see pop-in in the distance if you look for it. Most egregiously, sometimes cutscenes will start and Garcia’s model will be invisible, and he’ll suddenly appear a few seconds in. While the graphical foundations of Shadows of the Damned are extraordinary, the game is buggy and lacks any polish whatsoever.

Akira Yamaoka’s score, however, cannot be faulted. Some tracks feature signature Silent Hill elements such as a mournful guitar, static, and industrial din, but Damned’s soundtrack has a stronger rock and punk sound to complement the game’s action and attitude. Two standout pieces are the loading screen song (which helps make the frequent reloads bearable) and the funky, bizarre Light Sushi song. You’ll know it when you hear it. Voice acting is excellent, competent yet still cheesy enough to fit with the style of the game. Steve Blum, of Cowboy Bebop and Big O fame, does the voice of Garcia Hotspur, and his accent works with the ridiculous character. However, if you’re familiar with his earlier work, it’s hard to keep from thinking of Spike Spiegel faking a faux-Mexican accent. Johnson, the refined-yet-crass floating-skull sidekick, gets an excellent, tongue-in-cheek performance from Greg Ellis.

Some have accused SquareEnix and Hideo Kojima of actually wanting to make movies rather than games due to their penchant for frequent cutscenes and long sections of expository dialogue. Suda51′s motivations are often harder to understand. His games seem to rejoice in being games in their self-referentiality and satirical use of ludological grammar. However, Suda51′s and Grasshopper Manufacture’s games often contain elements that are frustrating, unintuitive, or simply broken. Killer 7 was a rail shooter, but the enemies were invisible. You had to stop and scan the world to see them. No More Heroes starred an assassin, but one who had to take thankless part time jobs in order to pay entrance fees for his battles. It’s hard to know whether Suda51 is commenting on the arbitrary nature of goals and fetch quests in modern gaming, or whether he’s simply a flawed game designer.

The influence of Shinji Mikami seems to have helped in Shadows of the Damned, as this is Suda51′s most mainstream and accessible title yet. You play as pseudo-Latino Garcia Hotspur (a portmanteau of Grasshopper Manufacture?) a badass demon hunter overflowing with machismo. One night after killing a particularly nasty demon, Garcia returns home to find that his eccentric but beautiful girlfriend, Paula, has apparently hung herself. Fleming, the lord of Hell, shows up afterwards and claims her as his bride. To rescue her, Garcia, and Johnson, his sidekick and a former demon, must travel to Hell to rescue her. Fortunately for Garcia, Johnson can transform into several kinds of guns and a motorcycle. He’ll need all of these tools, and more, to win Paula back and defeat Fleming.

Shadows of the Damned is a basic third-person shooter built off of the Unreal Engine. It plays somewhat like a cross between Resident Evil 4 and Killer 7. Each level Garcia must navigate is broken up by locked doors that he must eventually pass through to get to a giant boss at the end of the level. Some doors are locked until all of the enemies have been cleared out of an area. Others, ones with demonic baby faces on them, require keycard-like items, such as brains, eyeballs, or strawberries, to bypass. Finally, there are light and darkness puzzles, which are arguably Damned’s most unique mechanic.

When in the shadowy darkness, Garcia’s health is continually drained. In most cases, he’ll want to fire a beam of light at a goat head or Light Sushi to dispel the darkness and preserve his health. Some enemies and switches, however, are only vulnerable in the darkness, so venturing into and out of the darkness is necessary to clear certain areas. These darkness puzzles are Shadows of the Damned’s most elaborate sections. While never too difficult to figure out, it’s always rewarding to be able to figure them out and banish the darkness once and for all from a level.

Bosses are reminiscent of encounters from The Legend of Zelda. Each boss will have set patterns of movement and weak spots, and it’s a kind of puzzle to figure out how to expose the weak point and hit it. Once a boss is defeated, you’ll receive a power-up for Johnson that will upgrade your gun.

These are sound, well-worn mechanics, and if I could leave it at this, the game would rate a whole letter grade higher. While hardly being original, Damned would have been a solid, if generic, shooter with a wild sense of style and lots of fun surprises. Sadly, though, the game has some serious bugs and some inexplicably frustrating choices on the part of Grasshopper Manufacture.

As with the graphics, the game lacks polish, and could have used a few more months to tighten up the loose ends. While never game-breaking, Damned had several bugs that were extremely frustrating. In a section of darkness, I got caught in a wall. My health was still draining away, and I would have died and had to restart from a previous checkpoint were I not able to dodge-roll out of the wall and resume progression through the dark corridor. I collected a red gem, then died: When I restarted from a checkpoint, the red gem was no longer there, as though it had disappeared. Once, a tough enemy got stuck in a wall and once it freed itself, it seemed to be invincible. Fortunately, killing it was not required and I just moved on past it. Later, two fiendishly difficult enemies got stuck in walls simultaneously. I was actually quite pleased about this, because it allowed me to finally kill them with ease after some difficulty. I was never able to reproduce these errors, so there’s no guarantee any given player will experience them, but the potential is there.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEoJsJGU3jM&w=640&h=390]

What you will experience, however, is Damned’s instant kill enemies. There are several different foes that will kill you dead with a single touch. The animation of Garcia’s instant death is usually quite funny the first time, but after five or six times, the joke’s over. Compounding the frustration is the fact that you’re sent back to a loading screen, and some cutscenes are unskippable. Even though this is a problem common to many games, it’s still unforgivable: Let us skip a cutscene if we’ve seen it ten times already!

That said, however, Shadows of the Damned was a riot and largely worth the frustration. While neither Mikami or Suda51′s best, it’s still an enjoyable and often witty tribute to grindhouse horror. Most of the fun in a Suda51 game is experiencing the weirdness yourself, but I’ll list just a few things that make the game worth the investment:

The bizarre animations for the goat and baby heads; Johnson and Garcia’s odd banter; The story of how Garcia met Paula; Propaganda posters and ads throughout the City of the Damned; Giant, perverse fairy tells explaining the origin of the game’s bosses; Dick jokes so bad and unfunny that they become funny through force of repetition; The loving tribute to Evil Dead; The hallucinations in the Underworld’s Red Light District; Side-scrolling shmup sections, and the wonderful, wonderful Light Sushi sections.

Also, the game’s sequel needs to star Paula.

In Summary
Much as we’ve come to expect from Suda51: a stylish, funny, and obscene tour of Hell that’s marred by some inexplicably inept design decisions. While the gameplay is actually much more balanced and well designed this time around, it’s almost though the game compensates by having graphical glitches and gameplay bugs. Still, like most Suda51 games, the sheer joy and creativity make up for the times you want to throw your controller across the room. Gory, sexy, obscene, witty, and stupid in equal measure. Recommended with reservations.

Content Grade: B
Graphics: B+
Sound: A
Text/Translation Grade: A
Packaging Grade: C+
Controls: B-

Age Rating: Mature 17+
Released By: EA and Grasshopper Manufacture
Release Date: June 21, 2011
MSRP: $59.99
HD Video Output: 480p, 720p
Approximate Play Time: 8 to 10 hours
Replay Value: Low

Review Equipment:
Playstation 3, Sony Bravia 1080p 40″

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Zx82Y6lb0o&w=640&h=390]