Hellboy Web of Wyrd is a third person rogue-lite beat ‘em up from Upstream Arcade based on the Hellboy Dark Horse comics series from Mike Mignola.
If you’re not familiar with the character or his story, Web of Wyrd will not help you with that. You’re dropped right into the middle of an ongoing mission for the BRPD, an organization that prevents paranormal incidents from destroying our world; at least that’s what I think they do, as neither the acronym nor their mission statement is ever expressly explained. The storyline just doesn’t make much sense, and only gets more confusing as it goes with twists in the plot dependent on prior knowledge of the Hellboy lore.
I really like how Hellboy Web of Wyrd looks. Its action is filled with flashing comic art effects and screen-filling colors to emphasize impacts, and it also seems to drop a few frames from animations to subtly invoke a stop motion-like feel, similar to the Spider-Verse movies. But in contrast, the environments are quite dull.
But those tedious environments are just the start of the problems, as the game’s rogue-lite loop is quite thin as well. You’ll traverse four realms in total, defeating a boss at each conclusion. Stages are a series of combat chambers connected by gated hallways occasionally lined with easy to avoid traps. You’ll stumble across random upgrades that offer you increased health or armor, or special modifiers for your abilities like freezing enemies or damage-dealing dodges. Once you complete all four areas, a fifth is revealed, but you’re abruptly booted back to base and forced to redo each area with the new fifth one bolted onto the end. If that wasn’t exhausting enough, the finale has you re-run all versions of that fifth stage again in a single run.
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Upgrades you can buy from the hub area will carry over between runs, but death carries no harsh penalty other than starting a stage again from the beginning. Enemy encounters aren’t difficult enough to make the repetition frustrating, but the combat suffers from that lack of challenge. Hellboy’s fists are your primary mode of attack, and his repeatable 3 hit combo and heavier charged swings land with satisfying thuds. A dramatic finisher on stunned enemies can push them across an arena and slam them into walls and structures. You can throw debris, and dodge or block at the last second to slow down time and knock enemies back. You also have access to guns and relics as support items that can help you deal damage, stun, or clear space.
Arenas will spawn several trash mob enemies alongside 1 or 2 actual threats. Strangely, these main enemies are the only ones that can be targeted, and taking them down will despawn all the rest. But the biggest drawback to the combat is that all of the enemies you can target essentially have the same attacks. Diagonal swings need to be sidestepped, hooks need to be ducked, and double arm attacks blocked. As soon as you pick up on the tells, every enemy becomes child’s play, and flashy visuals can’t rescue the onsetting monotony.
I ran into a couple of technical issues as well, such as collectables I grabbed in stages not having any way for me to check on them despite voice lines saying I should ask an NPC back at base about them. A relic meant to teleport me to enemies worked maybe once the entire time I used it, and after beating the final boss my screen faded to white and the game soft locked. Needless to say, it was a disappointing end to my 8 hour playthrough. Upstream Arcade actually pushed the original embargo date back to provide a patch that did fix that ending bug, but that doesn’t address the overall stingy gameplay offerings.
Hellboy Web of Wyrd has the look and feel of something really cool, but it’s let down by almost every other aspect of its execution. Even amazing voice talent from the late Lance Reddick as Hellboy and the legendary Steve Blum as Lucky don’t add anything noteworthy to the time spent. The game is available now on PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch.
