Hentai Vs Evil

Most of the time reviewing video games is a pretty sweet gig; you get to talk with developers and publishers and share enthusiasm about their project, give some structured feedback and praise, and help your audience decide if what you’ve just played is worth investing their hard-earned money in. That said, there are times when a game crosses your desk that leaves you simply scratching your head and wondering “what exactly did I just play?” That was very much the case after my recent play through of Hentai vs. Evil by Axyos Games, where I had to look over my shoulder to ensure I was alone before reluctantly firing up my Switch to get started.

At A Glance

Visuals	3 / 10
Sound	4 / 10
Gameplay	2 / 10
Overall	2 / 10

 

Positives	+ Nudity toggled ‘off’ as standard
	+ Whilst very limited, the soundtrack is okay
	+ Some of the environments show promise
Negatives	– Inconsistent and sloppy graphics
	– Rinse and repeat gameplay after the first 5 mins
	– Dreadful premise all around

So let’s start with the elephant in the room – yes, you read the title correctly ladies and gentleman – it’s called Hentai vs Evil. And for those of you who perhaps aren’t so well versed in the Japanese language (or the danker corners of the interwebs), let me offer you a rather disappointing lesson – ‘hentai’ is a term for porn featuring anime characters. So, now armed with that knowledge, I’m sure you can share in my confusion at finding a game with such a premise so readily available on the otherwise family friendly Nintendo eShop! 

Booting up the game, you’re thrown straight onto a rather meagre title screen that doubles as an arcade-type character selection screen. The one playable waifu jiggles around awaiting selection while two more are two blacked out, assumingly to be unlocked later. Then three pieces of text caught my eye and immediately filled me with dread – they read “Dress Up”, “Photo Mode” and “Uncensored Mode”. Yeesh, what a combination, huh? 

Selecting ‘Dress Up’ I found I could change my character’s clothes, headwear, hair colour, skin tone, and then rather depressingly, body proportions, including thigh and breast size. Scrolling through the clothing options that included bikinis, pyjamas and school uniforms, I began to realise just how far we’ve strayed from God’s light, and was a little shocked that this was still considered acceptable in 2021. ‘Photo Mode’ is a clunky replica of similar modes in more upscale games, where you can manipulate the camera around your character to snap pics of them amidst awesome action and breathtaking surroundings, but we’re very, very far from those circumstances here. Here we quite simply have an empty grey background, a lone anime girl swaying back and forth in a selection of skimpy outfits, and the looming presence of that ‘Uncensored Mode’ button that was staring at me accusingly. Shaking my head and wondering at just where my life had gone wrong to lead me to this point, I bit the bullet and pushed ‘Y’, discovering that it made my character topless and the rest of her clothes mostly see through. I have to admit that I’ve never been more relieved that a woman kept her pants on than I was in that moment.

Now there’s a sentence I didn’t think I’d ever write.

Please let me be clear – I’m certainly no prude – but I do have a problem in playing a game that asks me to build a digital woman from the ground-up, seemingly for the sole purpose of making her naked and taking pictures of her. In the year 2021. My mind simply boggles at who thought this was acceptable, amusing, or God forbid, a turn on. You can rest easy in the knowledge that I selected any old outfit and kept ‘Uncensored Mode’ switched off so as to simply crack on with the game.

I suddenly became very aware of what I was playing and slapped Flight Mode on on my Switch, lest one of my friends pop into their menu and see what software I had running, but I was met with a message that said I had to turn off Flight Mode in order to play! After picking through the game I can tell you that there are absolutely no online elements aside from Survival Mode leaderboards, so why exactly an internet connection is mandatory is completely beyond me, aside from potentially wishing to embarrass players into broadcasting that they’re playing the game to their whole Friends List.

The game itself is woefully underbaked, and hardly qualifies as a game at all. Graphically, things are all over the place, with the environments using a mix of low-poly assets and higher clarity textures that seriously clash, and the stiff character models and animations round things out rather miserably. Of course, most attention has been paid to the waifu’s character models, but even they’re more ‘last creature at the bar’ than ‘stunner that everyone’s chasing’ if we’re being honest. Had the game found a consistent approach to the environments then they could actually have been pretty decent – the low poly stuff definitely has a fanbase, and the textures used aren’t half bad either, but the mish-mash of styles looks terribly amateur and undirected. The music that punctuates the action isn’t bad at all, but as it amounts to just a single track on loop, it can’t possibly be expected to enhance the experience that much – especially with the regular mewling of the character and generic gunfire sounds belting over the top.

And where the graphics fail, there sadly isn’t much gameplay to pick up the slack either, I’m afraid. There are two gameplay modes on offer – ‘Rescue’ which asks you to kill 12 grim reaper enemies before finding the caged waifu and setting her free (which then unlocks her as a playable character); and ‘Survival’, where you kill droves of enemies until you’re either killed or the time runs out. As far as gameplay goes, you spend your time running backwards and holding the fire button, killing enemies who are all too slow to catch you, simply requiring you to change direction every now and again to avoid an enemy that’s behind you. You’ll discover these tactics after perhaps three minutes of gameplay and you can rinse and repeat it to the game’s entire completion in about 30 minutes – or until your brain tells you to just turn the game off, whichever is shorter. How anyone can be expected to endure the tedium of Survival Mode is anyone’s guess. I’m assuming it’s named as such because you have to constantly overcome the urge to kill yourself with every minute of gameplay that passes, so keen will you be to put yourself out of the misery.

With literally only three levels on offer, the lack of variety extends from the gameplay to the level design too, where the plan seems to have been to create sprawling but otherwise entirely unengaging arenas for the player to fight in. There’s a mountain town, a pirate bay and a city to fight in, but while the aesthetics of the levels are certainly quite different, there’s no gameplay differences to speak of, and you end up gunning down the same mundane enemies over and again, albeit in slightly different surroundings.

My time with Hentai vs. Evil was thankfully very short and produced more head shaking and fewer smiles than the average episode of Dragon’s Den. Designed to appeal to an incredibly niche demographic, there’s a feeling that the lack of content or enjoyable gameplay will be quite simply ignored if you allow the players to ‘hur-hur-hur’ at animated breasts. Part-baked at best and just plain bad at worst, the redeeming features are so few and far between that I’d say you’ve already spent too much time with this title by even reading this review. (But I certainly appreciate you doing so!) 

In the interest of full disclosure, the publisher provided VGamingNews with a copy of the game in order to conduct this review.