What is Hellsign?
It is a game I was gifted recently, and after about 10 hours on it, I'm still on the fence as to how it is.
More specifically, it's a game about hunting ghosts and demons by tracking down the evidence they leave in a haunted site, figuring out what you're dealing with, and preparing the right tools and traps to put it down. This premise is fantastic. If you wanted to play a game based on the Supernatural show, if you're familiar with it, this would be where you start. While you don't get the pleasure of listening to Kansas while driving around in an old Impala, you do get to shoot lots of monsters.
Again, the
premise is good. But how's the execution? Bit more tepid here. For starters, Hunts are randomly generated, which is good as it gives you a variety of options for hunting different things in different areas, as well as a few different types of Hunts (simple scouting to look for signs, sweeping for killing all the small fry, and more). But along with this random generation comes the fact that you can't die in the game. You just wake back up at home with ominous whispering in your noggin. While you do keep all the items you find during a failed hunt, you get lesser amounts of money and XP. (For clarity, you'll never *lose* XP, but the amount you would gain decreases and your mission instantly ends and rewards that lesser amount. If you killed 10 critters, you'd only get the XP of like 6.)
There are some roadblocks. I'm just starting out still, but with these middling level missions, I can't hardly stay alive. I want to upgrade armor, but using it requires special skills (XP earns skill points, points buy skills) I don't have. And the cost of both a new skill point and the money for equipment upgrades rises very, very quickly compared to how much you earn. This leads the game to be extremely grindy, as you're either doing tons of low-paying jobs or wasting a lot of time if you die in the higher paying, harder hitting jobs.
Combat is more or less alright. But Dodging is a bit wonky on a few enemies, and at least so far, I'm having ammo type problems. You can only carry two guns, each loaded with a single ammo type (though your backup arsenal is stored in your vehicle). If you run into something that needs damage from a
different ammo type, you're up the creek. You can't open your menu in combat, nor access your vehicle except to flee, ending the job early. Best case scenario, you're pinging the enemy to death for ages. Worst, it kills you, largely wasting all your time spent so far on the mission.
Now, I do see grayed out slots for other ammo in the inventory, meaning at some point I'll get something that lets me switch types on the fly. But that point is not now, and it's very frustrating in the meantime.
I'm not giving up on it yet, and either way I'll post my further feelings about at a later time.
