Playing A Game Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit PC

It's one thing when Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit's protagonist mocks his own game over having a spindash move. It's another when the level is filled with pinball bumpers and self-propelling cannons.

(Spoiler alert: watch me revisit the "borrows from others, with questionable results" theme once I finally write-up Darksiders II.)

Hell Yeah isn't totally without a personality of its own, and in fact its flippant plot and nonsensical environments clear the way for some pretty clever level and enemy designs. At least, clever visual designs.

But its mechanics are confusingly assembled from a variety of inspirations, usually without the contexts that made those inspirations meaningful; like a Frankenstein's monster of gameplay ideas that can grunt but hasn't figured out how to use its thumbs.

Take the saw-drill's ability to break through some materials -- you need new upgrades or abilities to get through new obstacles, kind-of like Metroid's progression-blocking doors. Except Hell Yeah is a linear game with discrete levels, so there's barely any point to having these obstacles in the first place.

Or jumping, which is, you know, a pretty core part of a side-scrolling platform game; Hell Yeah's jumping physics are crazy floaty, and take a while to get used to. Which makes it seem like a troll move when an early level takes the saw-drill away and completely changes the jumping physics out from under you.

Or the weapons that you can switch between - oh yeah, because this side-scrolling platformer is also a twin-stick shooter - of which almost all are a waste of a button-press. Some weapons have consumable ammo, and you can even buy more weapons from the item shop!, but I've yet to see anything that out-performs the standard, infinite-ammo gatling gun.

And then there are the WarioWare-styled micro-games that cap each boss fight -- which have satisfyingly-funny animations, but whose directions are often unclear; and since failing the micro-game damages you, it might even kill you and send you back to a pre-boss checkpoint, prompting you to re-think the decisions that have led to this moment in your life.

Oh, and I almost forgot about the "Island," a mobile-style idle minigame where you can assign jobs to the bosses you've defeated so far. I almost forgot about it because, after the game introduced it, I never saw it again and it had no effect on the real game.

Hell Yeah isn't a bad game, not exactly, even if parts of it are certainly bad. Overall it's not-intolerable, and there is some entertainment value in discovering more of the game's wild, wacky bosses.

Just, not enough value to merit the alternating-slog-and-sleepwalk that is Hell Yeah's hodge-podge gameplay.

Progress: Finished the Mount Olympus Casino (?) level.

Rating: Meh