I was doing some research a few weeks ago for the ongoing Marvel retrospective, looking at the lists of Marvel games when curiosity struck me; I know DC has a good number of games (maybe I'll even get to them in five years when the Marvel retrospective is done), but I don't know much about the other companies. My first thought; Image Comics, the upstart company of the 90's that went on to rival the Big Two- and having been founded by a bunch of disgruntled ex-talent. They came out right in the middle of the licensed video game boom, there has to be some video games. Sadly, there was nothing for everyone's beloved Image characters such as SuperPatriot, Diehard and Shaft- a sad day for such fondly remembered and iconic characters. I instead turned to the least popular and least iconic character who barely anyone knows, Spawn.
Jokes aside, Spawn is a very iconic comic character and back in the day he was everywhere. Created by Todd McFarlane, a veteran of the Marvel comic world at that point, the character glided into the comic scene in May of 1992 and quickly became a favourite of many a comic reader- myself included, only later than 1992 of course as I wasn’t even born yet in May that year. Featuring a dark storyline and hyper violence (for the time), it tells the story of a tortured former CIA assassin named Al Simmons whose resurrected after being killed by his former friend and former boss by the demon Malebogia as a ‘hellspawn’ to lead the armies of hell against both the human world and the angelic world. He rebels and recovers his lost memories, fighting against his own nature to try and save his soul. This sets in motion a very eclectic and meandering mix of storylines involving demon hunters, sorcerers, mafioso cyborgs, serial killer preachers, hoagie sandwich obsessed detectives, becoming the ‘king’ of the homeless inhabitants of Rat City, US politics, numerous redesigns and new powers, sentient capes that drastically change size from panel to panel, an empire of tie in merchandise, necroplasmic energy blasts, impossibly over the top guns that only the 90’s could have and a whole lot of chains and spikes. This isn't a full fledged history lesson of the complicated storylines, but I just had to get introductions out of the way for those who don't know. My favourite thing about Spawn is how it mixes a bunch of different aesthetics and storylines into a distilled ‘image’ of the 90’s. It's pretty rad, is what I'm saying.
Weren’t the 90’s awesome? Other than eventually crashing the comic book industry, of course.
So, I decided to look into any Spawn video games. I know there's a standard action platformer on the SNES which was okay from what I remember playing when I was eight, and Spawn: The Eternal on the PS1 which is notable for being a very broken and borderline unplayable mess of a video game. I also knew of Spawn: Armageddon on the PS2 which was a slightly broken and derivative but ultimately playable experience and I discovered two others I had never heard of: a Game Boy Colour game which, whatever, it's probably fine but then I discovered the subject of this article which we all know. I likely would never have really given it a second thought if it wasn’t for one detail I saw, being the listed developer: Capcom.
Now, Capcom is no stranger to licensed games, having made a variety of Disney games in the SNES/Genesis era. But somehow they made a Spawn game I had never heard of before. It just struck me as such a weird combination. Even more weird than the concept was how I didn’t know about it. Why is that, I pondered? How had I, a major grade Capcom fanboy and casual fan of Spawn not heard of this? So I gave it a go, and entered into the fever dream that is Spawn: In the Demon’s Hand.
Released in the early months of 2000 in arcades on Sega’s NAOMI hardware, on the Sega NAOMI system it eventually came to the Dreamcast later in the year. Apparently a PS2 version was being planned as a potential launch title for the console which would have been wild, but ultimately was cancelled due to reasons officially unknown, but I can maybe take an unofficial guess. Trying to find any contemporary reception to the arcade game was difficult and fruitless, but the Dreamcast port went on to have mixed reviews from various sources. Some were positive, such as Electronic Gaming Monthly giving it an 8/10, while others were, uh, not so positive; from NextGen magazine- “lack of decorum allows us only to comment that this game would be more aptly subtitled ‘From Capcom’s Rectum.” Jesus, NextGen, who hurt you? Also, if you were going for a ‘savage’ burn by changing the game’s subtitle, shouldn’t it have been ‘In the Demon’s Rectum’? Anyways. I tried out specifically the Dreamcast version. As for the game itself? Well…
A fever dream is the best way I can describe this game. It is fast paced to a fault, hectic, chaotic and often nonsensical. But somewhere, deep in its chaoticness is something resembling fun, just under a thick layer of ‘jank’ you have to dig through.
You may have to dig pretty deep.
It is a third person 3D action brawler which sees up to 4 players go through one of three different game modes: Boss Rush, Team Battle, and Battle Royale. You can play as several Spawn characters, from different versions of the titular character to secondary characters such as the cop partners Sam and Twitch, Jessica Priest and Spawn’s eternal nemesis, Clown/Violator. Some characters have melee weapons, while others have various guns and every character has some special or unique powers they can use by using some button combination in certain circumstances, usually hitting the attack and jump button at the same time when wielding certain weapons. In the Dreamcast version, there are in fact 37 different playable characters compared to the arcade’s lean 12. Don’t get too excited, however, as most of those are simply basic enemies that you can choose to play as, for some reason. I know I got excited when I cleared Boss Rush mode for the first time and I unlocked the fan favourite character of ‘Green Beret 1’. Other notable characters include ‘Curse Subordinate’, ‘Skeleton 1’ and ‘Wolf 1’ which is actually just a wolf. Not all of the unlockable characters are basic mooks, to be fair, with all of the bosses you encounter in the Boss Rush mode such as Admonisher, Vindicator and Overtkill also being unlockable. Just look at those names, Spawn was 90’s as hell (pun intended).
Oh, and Spawn also has government created super-soldier cyborg gorillas, because of course it does.
You have four primary buttons; one for switching weapons, one for jumping, one for attacking with your current weapon at your currently selected target, and a button for “controlling” the camera. I put that last one in quotations because the camera is hardly controllable, and the worst enemy in the game. There is no manual camera control, despite the fact that the Dreamcast controller has an analog stick that could have done the job just fine. You may be asking “without camera control, how do you aim at enemies?” and my answer is- yes. Instead, there is a sort of ‘autoaim’ system where your character will lock on to the closest enemy when using a ranged weapon. It sort of works. It has issues when multiple enemies are close together which is all the time, but it does it's job well enough. By hitting the camera button, the camera will attempt to center back behind your character but will often get stuck on something- if you hold it, you go into a first person aiming mode. You cannot move and shoot at the same time, which I think is the worst thing about this game as it makes any ranged character frequently die due to not being able to move out of the way of anything. There is a dodge roll ability you can use by first hitting the camera button then double tapping left or right, but I never found this to be useful. It's a little involving of an input command to hit when you need it, and you’ll need it on a moment's notice with how fast paced this game is. I don't really get why it couldn’t have been a simple button press to do instead of having to hold a button then double tap a direction.
Boss Rush seems to be the ‘main’ mode of the game so to speak, so we’ll primarily talk about that. Each level sees you ‘spawn’ into a small, simple map and this is when the insanity starts. You have about 2 minutes to defeat the boss of the level while trying not to be killed yourself, either by said overpowered boss or the various enemies also running around. Everytime you die, you lose time and you don’t have much to begin with so it can get very hectic quickly. Right from the get go against the first boss, ‘The Mafia’, the delirium and fever sets in.
He’s the Mafia. All of it. He’s THE Mafia.
Things are flying at you constantly. There’s pickup’s all over the place, enemies are constantly bombarding you or locking onto you to bombard you and bosses are throwing out constant overpowered attacks that you can’t really effectively dodge. Pop ups bombard your screen if you pick anything up, or die. It’s very clearly an arcade game, that much is certain. The pace can be both exhilarating and overwhelming, and you rarely have time to think of such things like ‘strategy’ or really time to think at all.
You can also find weapons stashed in special boxes in some levels which can be anything from hand grenades to high caliber machine guns to an auto tracking magic gun simply called ‘The Monster’. Some characters can’t use some weapons, which is a good launching point for a major criticism of this game: the character balancing is nonexistent. Some characters are overpowered while some are almost unusable. It’s a combination of a few factors; the controls making ranged characters have inherent disadvantages due to not being able to move and shoot at the same time so they just get constantly bombarded by bosses, some character’s specials just not being useful, and the fact that some character’s can’t use weapons found in levels. The first point is just a fundamental issue of the game, making it a flat disadvantage to be using a ranged weapon in most circumstances- in a game this fast paced, if you’re not moving it feels like you’re just dead considering the amount of enemies coming at you and bosses, again, frequently having instant kill attacks. The other points are just baffling design choices. Take for example the characters' different special moves.
Some are very useful, such as the default Spawn’s ability to attack with his demonic chains in exchange for a bit of health which can stun bosses for a few seconds; it goes without saying why that's useful. They aren't stunned for long enough for Spawn to do much damage to them after, but in the two player co-op mode I could see that being a strategy. Compare that ability to the edgy scantily clad mercenary (the Spawn classic) Jessica Priest; her power is she has a kick attack that can launch enemies into the air to be juggled by your guns (if you can manage to aim at them), and can she can in fact run and shoot at the same time except it's nigh uncontrollable because of the camera and only straight ahead. The characters aren't exactly on equal footing power wise. Some of them seem more geared towards the competitive multiplayer deathmatch modes such as ‘Twitch’ Williams being harder to lock onto and shoot when he has a sniper rifle, which is a point, but I feel it's still some weak design to have their powers be essentially useless in the other modes.
As I said above, ranged characters feel they are just at a disadvantage compared to melee. I played through Boss Rush twice as both Spawn and Jessica Priest, and struggled the whole time once I got past the first 5 or so bosses/levels. I'd chase down the boss, get into position and try to fire some shots off only to get maybe a second or two of damage on them before being hit by some sort of charge attack or some undodgeable explosive projectile and wiped off the face of the map. I then decided to try out a melee character, and went in again as the half naked angel warrior lady (also a Spawn classic) Grace, who's easily distinguished from the other half naked angel warrior women by the fact that she has brown hair. She uses a spear as a weapon, and I cleared the game with much less difficulty due to the fact that you can move and attack at the same time. I'm not going to even bother explaining the power level of the obvious roster fillers of ‘Wolf 1’ and ‘Skeleton 1’ who, while being fun (who doesn't want to play as a skeleton with a heavy machine gun), are of course incredibly underpowered ‘joke’ characters. The unlockable boss characters are toned down from their non-playable counterparts of course, but they still stronger than the other non-boss characters.
The other game modes are various multiplayer focused ones, with Battle Royale being a free for all against other characters and Team Battle being, well, a battle of teams. The competitive modes definitely made me feel a little like I was playing a more janky version of Capcom’s other Dreamcast classic, Power Stone, only with more hellfire and damnation. Power Stone came out but only a year or so before In the Demon’s Hand, and it is interesting how similar the general idea of both games gameplay is to one another. I think it’s ultimately down to Capcom wanting to experiment with the transition to 3D action brawlers, but it's still curious.
That awkward moment when a cybernetic mafioso mercenary punches your torso clean off your body. It’s something you’ll see quite frequently.
I know reading what I have so far that it sounds like I utterly hated my time with the game and am being overly critical, but in this instance I'm being critical because I didn't actually hate my time with the game. I'm being critical because I care, and I want better things for In the Demon's Hand. Like I said earlier, somewhere in this fever dream is a fun game if you can turn your brain off and have some friends to play it with. If I had a Dreamcast and this game when it came out, I know I definitely would have been in a friend's basement playing it while eating poutine and probably having a grand old time. To that end, I'm going to talk about what I think the game does right.
Your reward for defeating Malebogia, demon king of hell? Getting sucked into a portal, then being told to play the game again. Classic.
First: the vibe and presentation of this game is phenomenal. The cast is filled with just about every Spawn character at the time that you could ask for, and it's dripping with that Dreamcast/arcade energy you just can't explain but you can feel. The graphics are fine if nothing special on a technical level, but they have captured the art style of the comics to a tee, complete with the exaggerated anatomy and obsession with asymmetrical gauntlets or boots or shoulder pads. Of special note is the absolute banger of the opening cinematic, which I absolutely recommend watching. It legitimately took me by surprise when I first started In the Demon’s Hand up. Both the cinematic itself and the absolute headbanger of a music track got me a little hype, I'm not going to lie.
Second: I think the game has some obvious issues with its controls, but I think it's core idea and ‘gameplay loop’, to use a slightly pretentious term, is solid and ultimately why I don't say this game is bad. With a bit more cooking time, I think this could have been a better game. Give the characters another pass or two with their specials, iron out some of the clunkiness and I'd even say it has potential to be a great game.
Would I recommend Spawn: In the Demon’s Hand? It's a hard question. Someone's experience with the game would depend on if you're someone willing to put up with some serious ‘jank’ as I stated near the beginning, and how willing you are to put time into what you know is a flawed experience. The game is definitely improved with co-op as everything is, if only to avoid having to rely on the less than intelligent AI teammates or enemies in the deathmatch modes. But if you can turn your brain off, enjoy the classic ‘7/10’ game feeling with some friends, are capable of forgetting about things such as ‘strategy’ and ‘depth’, just want to explode demon things and fight against (or as) a cyborg gorilla and don't mind experiencing the effects of a 102 fever in video game form, then I would say yes- you could maybe enjoy Spawn: In the Demon’s Hand. Even for people who can't say yes to all of those, I could still recommend it on spectacle alone- it is something I think people need to experience at least once for maybe 10 minutes to understand.
What future relics will the tide bring to shore, brought up from the depths? Something undeservingly forgotten, or something that should have stayed hidden beneath the waters of time? Well, I don't know yet either until the inspiration strikes me, so don't worry too much about it.
Until next time, land dwellers.
Pros
- + Captures the feeling of the 90's comic books perfectly.
- + Can be a 'hell' of a time in co-op.
- + Fast-paced, hectic and explosive action.
- + Seriously, watch the opening cinematic.
Cons
- - Some serious jank.
- - Sometimes too much hectic action.
- - Character imbalance issues.
7
out of 10
Overall
If you can overlook and dig through some heavy jank, you can maybe find some enjoyment in Spawn: In the Demon's Hand. You just may have to really dig.
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