ike a piece of toilet paper stuck to your shoe, this game’s annoyances are hard to shake off. The more time you spend with it, the more you feel like you’re being punished for your sins. As for the game, it commits many.
Despite being a not-so-subtle way of trying to sell McFarlane’s line of figures, there actually is an attempt at depth here. This fact, however, only unintentionally re-emphasizes how shallow it is once you get mired in its mindless, never-ending combo-fest. Irony – useful word, but no fun in this case. Evil Prophecy has four comrades battling through hordes of monsters to get to famous bosses such as Dracula and Frankenstein. You can switch among your friends at any time, and each has special combos. However, the combat is rendered joyless because the overall targeting is very poor. Half of the time, hitting someone right in front of you is a chore.
There is some degree of strategy in the game because you can command your other friends to follow pre-set orders such as staying back or attacking only the leader of a group of enemies. But I wouldn’t rely on the AI to tie its own shoes, much less follow orders. The game also has lofty ambitions in its friendship system. If you watch each other’s back, players will help you in combat. This system works, but the downside is that you are often worried about your comrades, and because of this (and the above-mentioned AI), you spend a lot of time switching between characters. This led me to throw my hands up and yell, "Do I have to do everything myself?! I’m surrounded by idiots!" You don’t get that cool feeling, like in EA’s Lord of the Rings fighters for example, that you’re part of a larger battle – just that you’ve got to baby-sit everyone.
During my time playing this game I had to take a break. I ran an errand to the Minnesota Department of Motor Vehicles, and the freaking DMV was less taxing than this frustrating experience.