Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit (2012)

Sheesh. It's been over 10 years since this game first caught my eye, so it hurts for it to turn out like this. I wanted to give this a fair shake even after it became clear it wouldn't be worth pushing all the way through but the game seems to have decided to end my run earlier than planned.

I booted it up tonight determined to hit the 2 hour mark and just short of it I managed to hit what I assume is a game-breaking bug. I can't kill one of the monsters because the search and destroy minigame doesn't seem to spawn a target for me to hit so I just run out of time and take damage. It's locked me out of progression and won't work no matter how many times I try so I'm calling it there.

The game was already on thin ice with its sloppy feeling controls and sad excuse for a metroidvania world design. The difficulty bounced between "close your eyes and button mash" easy and instakill spikes you can't see until you're dead. The checkpoint system is awful-- I wouldn't be surprised if you could soft lock yourself with it. The dialogue is all late 2000s silly randomness with none of the charm. I like the edgy violent cartoon aesthetic but it was a bit too saturated and hurt my eyes to play for long, which is very rare for me.

Maybe there's a workaround for the issue I found but I'm not convinced it's worth the effort to find it. I bestow upon "Hell Yeah!" one of my rare 1 star ratings.

I enjoyed this game. I played it to nearly 100% completion, and it kept my interest the entire time.

That said, I could also clearly see while playing it why the game is not for everyone.

Hell Yeah is a 3rd person 2-D shoot-em-up with a Metroidvania exploration style with areas becoming unlocked as you get powerups. Compared to other Metroidvania games (such as Guacamelee) this one is pretty straightforward. There's not too much hidden and the challenge is mild to moderate.

There's 100 dirty pictures of your main character spread across 100 different monsters. These act as minibosses - some more mini than others. You find the monsters, kill the monsters, gain more powerups and unlock more areas to find more monsters and kill more monsters. Some monsters are a straight shoot out, some are a straight puzzle or challenge, some are a more tactical or puzzle shoot out. It never gets very complicated to figure out, you can easily play this game to completion without a guide.

The camera is sometimes a pain in the ass. Especially on the monsters where you have to juggle them in the air to be able to kill them. You can zoom out, but zooming out pauses the screen. This game would be greatly improved by the simple change of being able to set the came in zoom or pan mode for an extended period of time.

There's also a minigame to finish off each boss monster that results in a highly melodramatic overblown death cinematic. Think Mortal Kombat fatalities mixed with Loony Toons. These are funny if you're drunk and annoying if you're sober. Either you laugh at them, or you set your controller down and go grab a snack while they're playing.

Some of my friends called the controls 'floaty' - I found they took some getting used to, but by the end of the game I had either trained myself to compensate well or learned them well enough to not have any issues with them. I played this on PS3 and felt the controls were appropriate for the PS3 controller.

The colors are bright, the humor is juvenile, and the songs get stuck in your head. I had some good, stupid fun running around and shooting things. This game is pretty short - about 8 hours total - and I actually like it that way. It would have grown stale if it was much longer. It's not hard to complete the extra areas, as they only add perhaps 1/2 hour to the game. The only thing I did not complete in this game were two of the challenges and the casino jackpot - meaning I'm missing a trophy. Oh, well - no big loss.

Overall, I felt this game was fun. I liked the humor, I liked the "hey, have a stupid big gun, go shoot things!" feeling and I liked the simplistic Metroidvania aspects of the game. Was it great? no. Was it fun? Hell yeah.