Hellraid First Look

Hellraid looks beautiful. The environments are dark and gloomy and the high quality textures pop out on the screen with gorgeous detail. This is definitely a game that takes advantage of the next-generation platforms and the power found inside the PC.

In the world of Hellraid, players must Find the right equipment to do the job. They have added Hundreds of thousands of randomly generated items that are unique to each player. Weapons have a light attack, a heavy, but slow, attack, a parry, dodging, and you can equip a shield. Each weapon has a different lengths and this comes into play when attacking. There is also a dodge ability that is key in saving your life during combat. You can jump in and dodge out of combat–which is very helpful in defeating the undead enemies seen in the level shown at the E3 presentation of Hellraid.

There are many different enemy types we were shown in Hellraid. One such enemy type was the elemental enemy. These have particular abilities glowing off of them and take different tactics to take down. Enemies will also drop their weapons and they will have random properties. You can pick up the weapons enemies drop and mix in melee and magic attacks. Switching between weapons and magic is super easy and just a button press away. The game was shown with an Xbox controller during our E3 presentation. During your exploration, players will also find gold lying on the ground. Gold allows you to buy premium weapons and armor from a blacksmith. 

Combat is fast and furious and players need to think quickly on their feet in order to succeed. Some weapon types seem to work better than others against the many different types of undead. I saw undead shooting arrows, some using swords of various sizes, other undead were using axes, even some undead were cowering behind shields, and others were utilizing magic with staffs. Moving around seems to be the key to victory as that is how our presenter was playing. He also quickly moved between different weapons to vanquish the foes before him. As we mentioned above about the dodging mechanic. It seems to be a real key to the combat as it was being used in every encounter.

There are also RPG elements found in Hellraid. The most obvious of these is the game’s skill tree. As the player earns experience, they can put points into skills and abilities. There are skill trees for the Warrior and Mage and players can put points into either tree as they want. This will help create a very unique character tailored to your likes and playstyle.

Though the game looks extremely polished and fun in the current build, sadly players will have to wait until 2015 to get their hands on Hellraid. It is coming to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. However, for those of you who want to try out Hellraid on the PC, an Early Access beta test will be available this fall through the Steam client. 

Hellraid looks amazing and we can’t wait to play more of it. This is truly Diablo meets the Elder Scrolls with super fast, intense, and fun combat.