Devil's Third (Wii U)
By: Nintendo
ONE of the most quality-obsessed publishers in the world teaming up with a bona-fide rock star of Japanese gaming for a rare spot of Wii U ultra-violence? What could go wrong?
Oh, my! Nintendo rarely let the meat of their games get too bloody – hell, one of their finest releases this year features a woollen dinosaur that poops yarn balls. Yet for reasons that surely amount to too much sake, the company decided to save action guru Tomonobu Itagaki's Devil's Third from the can when its original publisher, THQ, went boobs-up in 2013.
The result, while a far cry from the sunshine n' rainbows the company usually peddles, is at once one of the worst games of this generation and endearingly strange to boot.
Sounding like a brand of cheap whiskey, Devil's Third, from the man behind Ninja Gaiden and the pneumatic Dead or Alive fighting series, stars Ivan, a jacked-up Vin Diesel-a-like tearing his way through ninjas with machine guns and swords.
Swearing like a navvy, our Soviet slaphead takes on terrorist organisation The Sword when the world's satellites are destroyed by its cadre of lethal assassins. With a squad of veteran marines by his side, the uber-macho, chain-smoking throwback takes out the trash amid a flurry of one-liners.
A first-person shooter that switches to third-person combat, players can switch seamlessly between guns and melee weapons mid-fight, though the blasting is as imprecise as the fisticuffs are sloppy. Most of the problems lie in unresponsive controls, though it's also a technical mess. The barren, textureless environments are largely indestructible and as linear as a piece of string, with missions consisting largely of stomping forward while blasting cannon fodder enemies who boast all the hiding finesse of Dougal in a caravan.
While the Wii U may not have the horsepower to match the PS4 and Xbone, it can do better than what looks like a well-scrubbed PS2 title. Frustratingly, there are glimmers of a decent game beneath Devil's Third's amateur night programming, with interesting plot turns, almost-cool moves and a passable multiplayer, where players opt to join one of two factions or remain a lone wolf mercenary, slaughtering enemies swiftly and brutally to earn upgrades, new weapons and bonkers mods.
Destined for cult status for all the wrong reasons, I almost feel like recommending Devil's turd – sorry, Third – as a perverse rental or group purchase just to sate that circus freak point-and-stare curiosity. Nintendo, it seems, even make getting it wrong spectacular.
