Hentai Vs Evil is a game seeking a very particular, niche audience: Those who like third person arcade style horde shooters as well as anime waifus. I guess it’s not that small of an audience, because everyone likes bouncing breasts to some degree, but Hentai Vs Evil capitalizes on its namesake to provide a truly unforgettable game experience. Or, rather it could, if any attempt was made to do such a thing.
There’s no story mode in Hentai Vs Evil. There are three maps to play on, two game modes, and two difficulty settings. The three maps are a small town overrun with zombies, a pirate bay overrun with zombies, and a city overrun with zombies. Beyond the basic zombie enemy type, there are also enemies that look like Shrek who may sneak up on you every now and again, but it’s pretty easy to see their face and be a believer when you have a rifle or shotgun in your hands. There’s also a grim reaper enemy who moves much faster than others and has significantly more health, but they’re all somewhat easily dispatched assuming you have decent kiting skills to lead enemies along, since there’s no AI outside of “chase player character.” In fact, the enemies don’t even have AI pathing, so if you jump over a fence they just helplessly stare at you as if they’re pondering their life choices.
The two modes, Survival and Rescue, have you doing mostly the same activities: Wandering through environments and mowing down undead. Survival mode is exactly as it says on the tin – you survive for as long as possible and rack up (no pun intended) as large of a score as you can. Rescue mode involves killing 12 grim reapers and freeing the caged waifu located underneath a beam of pink guiding light. The first two times you clear Rescue mode, a new character unlocks on the title screen for you to customize. Each new game drops you on a map with three weapons in front of you, two automatic rifles and one shotgun. The two automatic weapons really don’t have a lot differentiating them, as they both have the same 30 round magazine, but one fires faster than the other so that was the preferred weapon for this review. Picnic boxes float in the air regardless of map, and shooting them a few times will reveal power ups that either give you incendiary rounds, or deals massive damage with each bullet.
Due to the fact that there’s no real AI in Hentai Vs Evil outside of chasing the player character, it can be extremely easy to get enemies hung up on objects in the world with them being woefully unable to maneuver around fences to even reach you. Though, rather than doing any of that, once you reach the target number of enemies killed you can just sprint to your destination and be relatively safe. Kiting enemies in this game is extremely easy as they don’t really seem to have any tools to combat the player sprinting, and notwithstanding if you’re playing survival mode there are a variety of locations where enemies will simply stop moving because they don’t know how to reach you, so getting a high score is as simple of a matter as, “How long do I want to leave my Switch on today?”
The visuals are muddy, and kind of a mixed bag. The protagonist girls you play as are insanely pixelated, no doubt due to the fact that the game was ported from PC to Switch, and the frame rate can go from “fine” to “chunky” quicker than a Campbell’s brand. Waifus can be customized in the Dress Up menu that’s present on the title screen, and lets you switch among outfits such as bikinis, school uniforms, coats, or fantasy outfits. Hair color, headwear, and skin tone can be selected, as can the height of the character, as well as the size of their thighs and bust. There’s also an uncensored mode you can select which effectively just removes the top from the character so you can see bouncing bazongas, should that be your prerogative. The fan service level of the girls you can customize is through the roof, but the environments and enemies simply aren’t varied or interesting enough to carry any kind of lasting appeal.
It took roughly 30 minutes to play all three starting maps on Rescue mode, and then another half hour of playing survival mode while realizing the enemies literally couldn’t reach me on a sand dune I jumped on without much effort. There simply isn’t a lot of game to Hentai Vs Evil. The gun play itself is adequate, but there are no gameplay mechanics for this to fall back on to say it’s anything other than Unity Asset Shooter #69. There’s no story, three enemy types with no variations in their behavior to force the player to make different decisions (though the basic zombies do receive a different coat of paint on each map), and only a few guns to keep players occupied, including a couple of extra guns you might find randomly on maps, such as a grenade launcher.
If you are really, incredible desperate for a game with bouncing anime breasts but unrefined aiming mechanics in a third person shooter, then Hentai Vs Evil might be the title for you. The game has a kind of quirky humor about it, because you can play as a girl armed with nothing but an automatic rifle and her underpants, but nothing is really done to capitalize on that kind of silly humor. On top of that, you’ll see everything Hentai Vs Evil has to offer in roughly half an hour, an hour if you stick around and play survival mode until you find an easily exploitable location, which I can imagine would be a hard sell for even the most hardcore players who enjoy arcade-style third person shooters. After unlocking the first two extra characters, there’s not much else to reward the player for continuing to play outside of just achieving an even higher score, something like additional character slots or unlockable costumes could have gone a long way.
Truth be told, there’s nothing wrong with Hentai Vs Evil, it’s just that there isn’t a lot to enjoy in its $10 price tag. Having the three enemy types at least behave differently could have added more dimensions to the gameplay beyond, “Kite and shoot.” Hentai Vs Evil could be a decent pick up and play title for someone who just wants to turn their brains off for a while, though, as this might scratch some itch that something like GalGun 2 or Bullet Girls Phantasia couldn’t satiate.
Developers: Axyos Games, Catness Game Studios
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4