Devilated tries to fuse Doom Eternal with Borderlands and loses its mind in the process

Devilated makes me feel drunk. With power or Everclear, I'm not entirely sure—possibly both? Looked at from a clinical distance, it's pretty clear that this was intended to be a hybrid of Doom Eternal's cooldown-heavy arena combat and key hunting with some light Borderlandsian lootin' and shootin' mechanics on top. But something went wrong. Perhaps some Golden Light contaminated the mixture, Brundlefly style, because the experience of playing it is like entering a weirdly compelling manic fugue state.

I'm smashing all the buttons, I'm firing all the bullets and barely any of it makes sense until the dust settles, the gibs rain down and Gianni Matragrano (that one voice in every retro FPS game these days) delivers one of the worst, most nonsensical one-liners I've ever heard. I smile. Laugh, even, in spite of myself. Devilated is a thoroughly cursed mutant of a game, and I mostly mean that endearingly.

There is method to its madness… Presumably. To think that this game could be this unhinged accidentally calls into question everything that I hold dear about game design. No, I choose to believe that there was a conscious drive here (from solo developer Trunka) to be as wild and wacky as possible, from the opening cutscene to the level design, enemies that inhabit them and the tools that you use to clean them up. So, let's try and break down Devilated's gore-slick parts, and how all of them manage to be deeply weird.

Deer in the headlights

The setup here is pure meathead boomer shooter. There's demons, you're a gravelly voiced badass named Deer 315, voiced by Gianni. Why Deer? Not because he wears a deer skull as a mask, no. But because he apparently likes John Deere tractors. Did I mention this game has a weird sense of humour? ANYWAY, he's here to kill (and eat?) demons until there's no more demons left, because he hates em' and they apparently hate him too, as every level is covered with graffiti directly (and immaturely) taunting him.

The structure is classic FPS stuff. Get to the end of the level, collect keys, open coloured doors, find secrets and shoot monsters. But the monster spawns are semi-randomized, and every single level has a unique (and often multi-phase) boss. And there's twice as many levels as you'll see in a playthrough, as you get to pick from two options after each stage, meaning that after the credits rolled and I reached New Game+, I had an entire second campaign to play.

There's a lot going on in the levels, too. They're not designed in any kind of coherent fashion. Each has its own theming, from abstract urban alleys to Japanese shrines to cursed forests to just purely abstract spaces. They feel chaotically put together enough to be procedurally generated, but uniquely detailed enough to clearly be hand-made, and generally flow from fight to fight well. There's talent here, tinged with madness. And thankfully it's hard to get lost, thanks to a powerful 3D map and an objective marker pointing you to the next key or door, ferrying you to where the demons are.

Those encounters are where it gets real wacky. The enemies are a nonsensical collection of sword and gun-toting guys, giant flying heads, snapping toothsome books, TV-headed freaks that shoot static from their CRT faces, the occasional barrel-mimic and no shortage of giant spiders. But I barely had time to process what they looked like, as combat is frequently this chaotic gore-soaked haze of particle and blur effects played mostly on muscle-memory, enemies exploding as I cycled frantically through cooldown-based powers unlocked and upgraded through killing the game's many bosses.

There's bullet time that doubles your fire rate and a Doom Eternal style meat-hook that pulls you through the air and instantly gibs whatever you ram into. I found myself constantly mashing the Use button in combat to launch hungry face tentacles that instantly devoured any enemy low on health for a quick mid-fight snack, while mashing dodge to abuse its invincibility frames. It feels like I'm in control, most of the time, but I don't think I could ever adequately describe how I won any given fight, other than 'shoot lots', mash buttons. At least there's plenty of ways to shoot.

Chaos reigns

The guns are every bit as bonkers. Some of them look like regular FPS weapons, but behave entirely unlike it. Pick up two generic heavy machine guns and one might fire a straight vertical fan of five bullets per shot, while the other shoots piercing ring-lasers straight out of a shmup. Paradoxically, a voodoo skull might act as a standard rifle, while prayer beads act like automatic pistols. The more normal a gun looks, the more likely it is to do something strange when you pull the trigger, and every boss drops their own head, which gives you ten shots of their primary attack to use in the next level. And sometimes, you just get random weapon drops in the levels.

This dovetails into the looting and shooting mechanics. Keeping up kill combos rewards money, Devil May Cry style, and each level has a shopkeeper (who also has a lot of nonsensical, referential voice lines, like babbling about how buying from him raises his Social Link) to sell excess guns to, buy ones you might want, or get rare health and ammo restore pickups that you can save for rainy days. But I found most of my funds best poured into extending maximum ammo pools (each weapon has their own) and expanding my inventory size, letting me carry extra weapons for when, inevitably, one runs out of gun food.

Every individual part of Devilated is weird. Put together it's a sickly fever-dream. Random, nonsensical one-liners don't just pop out of Deer's mouth, but also just in the air whenever an enemy perishes. Your crosshairs wildly spin when you fire. Some secret areas just contain nothing but sassy text. One boss rotates your movement controls 90 degrees until you can climb inside its head and kill its heart, and that's just the first phase of the fight. Everything happens all the time so much and… I like how it feels.

So, is Devilated good, or bad? Yes. I don't think the concept of 'quality' applies to it anymore. Is this a recommendation or a warning? Also yes. Am I enjoying it? Yes. And if you're an FPS sicko like me, you might too.