McFarlane's Evil Prophecy Game review (PlayStation 2)

Each character also has a specifically unique elemental attack that he or she can perform. As it is explained early on in the game, each hunter represents a specific elemental power. Logan is fire; Jaeger is electricity; Sundano is magic; and Delphine is light. When you press the R2 button in conjunction with a directional button, this allows you to perform a combination attack with one of your teammates. Throughout the game, helping out specific teammates during battle will increase your cooperative abilities with that character. As this increases, your ability to inflict damage with these combo attacks also increases. Certain combos actually work better on certain enemies than others, so you have to figure out the right combination of characters to inflict the most damage to specific types of enemies. This is kind of a neat idea, but really, the whole elemental angle feels like something of a tacked-on mechanic that doesn't feel very much in keeping with the game's primary themes. Still, the combo attacks do add more depth to the gameplay than you would otherwise get.

Evil Prophecy also has a multiplayer component, though it is one that isn't accessible in the story mode. Outside of the story mode, the game also features dungeon, battle, and time attack modes. The dungeon mode is a cooperative, up-to-four-player mode where you and your friends simply battle through level after level of never-ending bad guys until you're all dead. Battle lets you and your friends either compete against one another by trying to see who can kill the most enemies, or it actually lets you fight one another to the death. While both of these modes are nice ideas, they aren't as well-put-together as one might hope. The fighting in the battle mode, when playing competitively against one another, is just sloppy and incoherent, and the cooperative dungeon mode just gets old quickly. Were the co-op gameplay available in the story mode, it might have been more entertaining. But in its current state, it lacks any sort of longevity beyond a couple of plays. The time attack mode is single-player only, and unless you're especially keen on trying to beat your times on specific levels, it isn't very interesting.

With Todd McFarlane representing the influence for Evil Prophecy's visual design, one might assume that the game would take a decidedly comic book-like appearance. Interestingly enough, this isn't really the case. The six primary horror monsters that serve as the game's bosses--Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, Voodoo Queen, Sea Creature, and the Mummy--feature the same look as the action figures they're based on, with McFarlane's signature, over-the-top style quite prevalent. For instance, the Wolfman, rather than just being the traditional tattered-pants wearing, human-built wolf creature of old, now features a decidedly more grotesque design, with its wolf head actually appearing from out of a forced-agape human mouth and a large blade mounted atop its right shoulder for some inexplicable reason. The trouble is that these are really the only characters that feel like decidedly McFarlane-like creations. The four heroes aren't very aesthetically interesting to look at, and most of the grunt enemies you face, while certainly horrific in most cases, aren't anywhere near as creatively designed as the main monsters. In fact, most just look like pretty simple rip-offs of other horror game enemies. McFarlane's art style also doesn't really translate especially well into the game's graphical design, and if it didn't have the man's name right in the game's title, it'd be easy to mistake it for just another horror-based game that could have been inspired by practically anybody.

Technically speaking, Evil Prophecy looks OK, though it's definitely not impressive. Characters and enemies are limited to a fairly short roster of animations, most of which aren't especially involved or interesting-looking. The game features six different world areas, each with several different-level sections. Though the worlds are fairly different from one another, the levels are typically just thinly different interpretations of the same basic world designs. None of the environments are particularly rife with eye candy, but the dank, atmospheric looks of them are complementary enough for the game's creepy intentions. Evil Prophecy does run at a fairly consistent frame rate (save for a couple of rough spots), but the game suffers from a pretty horrid camera. It is utterly incapable of framing a proper shot on its own during combat, and even trying to swing it around into a proper angle is next to impossible, since it will often still frame you halfway out of shot even at its best angle. Were it not for this infernal camera, Evil Prophecy might have been a far less frustrating game than it turned out to be.

Evil Prophecy has absolutely no speech whatsoever. You will hear periodic grunts and shouts from your hunters and from the enemies onscreen during a fight, but the game's cutscenes and bouts of dialogue are handled purely through scrolling text boxes at the bottom of the screen. The remaining aspects of the game's audio design are equally minimalist. Background music is appropriately dread-inspiring, though not ever especially memorable, and the in-game sound effects are basically what they need to be but nothing beyond that. The game certainly doesn't sound terrible, but there just isn't much sound to it.

In the end, it's tough to recommend McFarlane's Evil Prophecy. By no means is it an especially bad game. It has certain unique qualities to it that set it apart from just being another halfhearted beat-'em-up game, and if you're especially fond of Todd McFarlane and his creations, the ability to fight against his interpretive monsters and the addition of several interviews with McFarlane himself (as well as quite a bit of unlockable concept art) might make the game worth renting. However, for anyone who isn't especially obsessed with all things Todd McFarlane, Evil Prophecy just has too many problems to make it recommendable.