There comes a moment, when you are about to start a game for review, where the possibilities are endless. Will it be a triumph, like Elden Ring or Persona 5 Royal, or will it be more of a slog, where every sinew has to be strained in order to find something to say apart from “Ew”?
Well, with this very moment of anticipation in the air, I loaded up Cazzarion: Demon Hunting, and will attempt to set out my thoughts below.
So, story? Um, no. There’s none of that nonsense here. You start the game, you choose a level, you shoot some enemies. This review is just writing itself, isn’t it? However, just to pad this section out a bit, the Xbox Store page brings the details we need, as some of the enemies we are about to meet include: Sexy vampire women who kill you; Zombie granny on Ecstasy; Tranfeminine, lesbian werepig. Blimey.
Anyways, all we have to do is stay alive and kill demons. Simples, right? How could anyone mess that up? Well…
We’ll start by taking a look at the presentation of the game, and seeing as the Xbox Store page remarks that a humble Xbox One is not powerful enough to run Cazzarion: Demon Hunting, then surely it must look good? Well, remember that “Ew”? I think it is best summed up with that.
The graphics are shonky, the camera sways around like a drunken sailor after twenty pints, the guns look and sound like pea shooters and the design of the demons we are meant to be hunting is rubbish. However, I want to make sure I am completely balanced in the way I talk about this game, so here goes – an old Xbox One would be embarrassed to run a game that looks this bad. There’s texture pop-in, there’s falling through the scenery, and random graphical glitches where a wall is suddenly replaced with a field. In fact, I came across all of these and more in the first five minutes.
The sound is poor as well, with the worst sounding demons ever, squealing like a teenage girl catching sight of Harry Styles. As mentioned before, there are rubbish sounding guns as well. I cannot stress just how poor everything about Cazzarion: Demon Hunting is.
However, as if the developers were engaged in a dare, the actual gameplay is even worse. Demons run at you, you shoot them in the face, they fall to pieces and that is literally the whole of the game. There may be fifteen maps, as the blurb for the game proudly boasts, but not a single one comes with a reason for you to be there, besides trying to save alive. There is no ultimate goal, no nothing to do, no point. You shoot, find ammo, shoot some more, then die to a demon that spawned behind you, which you were completely unaware of as the feel is just as bad as the way Cazzarion looks.
It gets worse. Aiming down the sights of your gun is almost a seizure inducing procedure, delivered via the weirdest animation I’ve seen in a long time, and when you do aim down the barrel, the wayward camera decides that now is the time to start on the shorts and gets even more stupidly inaccurate.
I’m not a fan of anything that Cazzarion: Demon Hunting brings to the gaming table, but if I was pushed, the best thing would be the fact that it only gives you limited lives and when they are gone, it is game over. At least then you can put the game down and walk away, chastened that you dared to criticise stuff like Destiny, even when games like this are festering out there in the marketplace.
Now, at this point, you’ll usually find that in these cheap rubbish games, there is at least the promise of easy achievements to be picked up in return for your hard earned £4.19. But no, the disappointment continues to flow, as Cazzarion: Demon Hunting does not even include Xbox achievements. Not that they are hard to get, they literally do not exist in this game at all.
So, to sum up. Cazzarion: Demon Hunting looks bad, is poorly designed and is no fun to play. It’s about as close to “nil points” as you could imagine, but technically it runs (more like limps, but still) on Xbox Series X so I have to give it at least half a mark.
Honestly, there are absolutely no redeeming features to Cazzarion: Demon Hunting and the last straw for me and my playthrough came on the house map: I’d painstakingly cleared the upstairs floor of the house, then positioned myself at the top of the stairs, surmising that demons would have to come up the stairs to get me, giving me sufficient time to shoot them all. But no, they spawned from behind me, in an empty bathroom, and I was killed. At this point I walked away.
Morale of the story? Do not buy Cazzarion: Demon Hunting. Not even as a joke.
Cazzarion: Demon Hunting is on the Xbox Store
