Hentai vs. Evil

It used to be that EastAsiaSoft was the company best known for putting out cartoony adventure games and fan-favorite shoot 'em ups. I'm talking about cult hits like Rainbow Moon, Lost Sea, Soldner-X 2 and the underrated Blue Rider. But lately it seems like EastAsiaSoft has decided to go in a different direction. Their recent titles have included a drunk homeless guy beating up frat bros and a seemingly endless supply of games starring scantily clad anime girls doing various activities. Their newest offering is Hentai vs. Evil, and as you can tell by the name, it falls squarely into the latter category. It's a third-person shooter where our cartoony heroines take on a never-ending onslaught of monsters and zombies. It's a silly premise, for sure, but is EastAsiaSoft's newest release a horror gem waiting to be discovered, or is it a cynical cash-grab with a click-baity title? I guess we're about to find out.

Spoiler alert: There's no hidden depth to Hentai vs. Evil. This is a game where you control one of three generic anime girls and then shoot monsters. That's it. That's the whole game. And I don't say that in the reductive way where the most complicated game can be reduced to a simple description, because anime girls with guns is where the sales pitch begins and ends. There's no setup, no story and no ending. It doesn't even have a title screen. It just jumps right into being a game where anime girls pick up guns and shoot zombies.

Hentai vs. Evil is split up into three stages and two generic modes. The more fun of the two has you trying to rescue an anime girl from the clutches of evil. The goal is to run around the three stages hunting Grim Reapers in order to free the caged girl. It's simple and relatively quick, which is a welcome change compared to the awful Survival mode. This is exactly what it sounds like -- a test to see how long you can stay alive as zombies, ogres and, yes, those damn Grim Reapers come from all sides.

On paper, that may not sound all that different from most survival shooters, but Hentai vs. Evil makes the exercise mindlessly boring. I hope you cancel your plans, because these survival rounds last forever. Instead of getting increasingly challenging and intense, this mode starts easy and remains easy, no matter what difficulty you choose. And because the power-ups and health items quickly respawn, you'll find that a session can go on for hours without breaking a sweat. It got to the point where I started dying on purpose just to move on to the next stage.

On that note, I have to say that the level designs are probably my favorite part of this game. There are three stages in all, including one that takes place in the suburbs, one set on a pirate-themed island and a third one that is set at night in the middle of a large metropolitan city. Of the three, only the city stage is a clunker. It's dark, repetitive and not memorable in any way. That said, the other two stages make up for this by being large and fun to explore. The island, for example, not only has wide-open sections to fight in, but also a closed in town that lives up to the pirate theme.

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This ends up being the one and only time when we see an actual spark of creativity. Had this game come with, say, ten stages as well-crafted as the pirate island, then I suspect my grade might be a little higher. Sure, it would still be a repetitive mess of a shooter that is way too easy for its own good, but at least exploring the different worlds would have given the game more replay. As it is, you'll try out the Rescue and Survival modes, play through the three stages, collect 100% of the achievements and then never want to play Hentai vs. Evil ever again.

And that brings me to the real problem with this game. Is it the terribly floaty gameplay that makes aiming incredibly frustrating? No, though that certainly is a problem. It's also not the annoying music nor the insanely limited selection of bad guys. The real problem with Hentai vs. Evil is that it never lives up to its name. The title is click bait, nothing more. It promises one thing and then never actually delivers on that one thing it promises. For a name that will almost certainly get my review demonetized, the contents of the game are shockingly tame. There's more titillation going on in Waifu Unleashed than anything in this so-called hentai game. Hell, even EastAsiaSoft's recent anime girl poker game is sexier than this.

It's time for developers to realize that adding attractive women to your terrible game doesn't make their game less terrible. Anime girls are not a band-aid. A purposely attention-getting name like Hentai vs. Evil may get the game noticed, but you still have to deliver something that's actually worth playing. This third-person shooter isn't sexy and fun, but rather is boring and repetitive. I miss the days when EastAsiaSoft didn't need to trick consumers into buying their games.