A lot of games I saw at E3 this year were games I was looking forward to and most were new iterations of established series. With Hellraid, I hadn’t really heard of it before and didn’t know what to expect. I watched gameplay driven by one of the developers and it looked pretty interesting.

Hellraid is a first person hack and slash dungeon crawler in which you play the last member of a cursed kingdom fighting demonic forces. At first blush it reminded me of Hexen with some fresh paint but the added combat tactics and new gen production values helped to distinguish Hellraid. The combat gives you a fast light hit and a slow heavy hit with parry and dodge options as well. This is a pretty basic control scheme but each enemy has strengths and weaknesses that require different combat tactics to kill. This wouldn’t add much depth if the enemies attacked in a one to one fashion but of course they don’t and multiple strategies are required to get through the dungeon.

Helping along the way in circumstances that go from bad to worse are a huge list of weapons, items and armor. The team reported there are hundreds of thousands of items to find in the dungeon crawl which should activate that Diablo portion of the gamer brain that keeps players looking for a bit more loot before shutting down for the day. The different weapons have a huge effect on combat as they have different trajectories and effective distances. This makes the movement very important as you need to be able to get in and out of range without taking hits yourself.  When you mix all that together with magic you are left with a diverse set of options that allow you to build a character according to your specific play style and strengths.

The look of the game is based on gothic architecture and the enemies are based on European Folklore. The demons on hand are similarly based on folklore and are not just arbitrary enemies which further gives them personality and distinct strengths and weaknesses. I really dug how those enemies stood out from more standard medieval RPG fare.

In addition to the solo story mode, which is roughly six to eight hours of gameplay, Hellraid offers two other modes. One is a multiplayer co-op and the other is a specific mission mode in which you have specific objectives to complete. Sadly there is no local multi-player but getting some friends online together to tear into the dungeons looks like it would be fun.

Hellraid does not look as robust as something like Skyrim or the Witcher series but if everything comes together they way Techland hopes it could be a fun action game. Not everything needs to be a big immersive world and I miss old school dungeon crawlers so this may be just what the doctor ordered. Hellraid is for the PS4, XBox One and PC and is set to release sometime in 2015.