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Undoubtedly featuring a terrific sense of visual style and some great music, this non-traditional adventure trips itself up with problems
There’s nothing quite as disappointing, when you’re someone like me who loves when games take risks and do things that are unexpected, as titles that have good ideas but are let down by various aspects of the execution. To Hell with the Ugly unfortunately falls into this camp, telling a pretty unusual story set in a very noir-esque 50’s Los Angeles, with you playing the part of a handsome tall drink of water named Rocky. On paper there’s actually quite a lot to like here. The game’s art style is stylish and has a vintage polish to it. The jazz helps to often wonderfully set the ambiance. The story and adventure aspects, well, they mostly work though the game’s way of handling some things is a bit unusual and not always the best. The real issue though? Some technical problems that hamper play on the Switch. The one that hopefully can be patched pretty easily is that in conversations when you’re prompted to make a choice the game doesn’t allow you to do anything for some reason. If you pause the game to go to the main menu screen (not the system menu, mind you) it suddenly works again but if I hadn’t just tried everything to get around the issue I would have been stuck maybe 10 minutes in and dead in the water. The other issue I have is with the timing-based combat that pops up periodically. I’m sorry, but either what they want you to do is unclear or visually what you’re seeing isn’t synching up well with what the game is expecting. More often than not, going for even roughly the same timing for my button tap, the results varied a bit wildly to the point I would have preferred it would just go full RNG and take it out of my hands. I’m a beat-em-up and action-based fan, and like a challenge, but these segments are an inconsistent mess and really took the steam out of the experience. If you’re game for something quite different, and can live with some warts, there’s some cool stuff to see here that feels pretty unique, but it could really use some patching before it hits its full stride.
Justin Nation, Score:Fair [6.2]