SAND LAND

Stick Response and On-Foot Brawling

The sticks feel fine when walking, but the minute you throw a punch as Beelzebub, you notice the drag. You press light attack, and the animation has to finish its entire follow-through before your next dodge input registers. There is barely any animation canceling here, which leaves you eating hits from bandit clubs that you clearly saw coming. When an action RPG sells itself on letting you master demonic powers, I expect clean melee hitboxes and crisp dodge windows.

Instead, on-foot fighting feels like swinging through molasses. Hitboxes on Beelzebub's melee strikes are wider than the visual effect suggests, which helps connect on groups, but enemy strikes have weirdly lingering active hitboxes. You dodge sideways, clear the dust, and still take chip damage because the swing animation was still tapering off. It makes clearing out infantry camps on foot feel like a chore rather than a show of martial skill.

The full English voice acting and text on Steam keep the banter going during these scuffles, which softens the blow. Thief and Sheriff Rao chatter in the background while you trade sloppy punches. Still, the moment you get surrounded by soldiers, the camera tends to get snagged on nearby ruins, making target switching stickier than it ought to be.

Heavy Armor and Rolling Iron

Everything changes the second you hop inside a Battle Tank. The sluggishness disappears, replaced by heavy machine weight that actually makes mechanical sense. Turning the chassis has deliberate inertia, the turret rotates with a smooth, predictable cadence, and firing main cannons feels heavy and loud. ILCA clearly put all their mechanical polish into the vehicle systems.

You can circle strafe enemy armor, fire a high-explosive round into an engine block, swap weapons, and drop machine gun fire onto foot soldiers before they can scatter. The hit feedback on vehicular combat is crunchy and sharp. When your shell hits an enemy tank, there is an immediate visual pop, debris scatters across the sand dunes, and the reticle gives instant hit confirmation without the input lag that plagues Beelzebub's fists.

Beyond the basic tank, you unlock machines like the Jump-Bot and the Motorbike. The Jump-Bot handles vertical terrain and bounces over obstacles, while the Motorbike tears across flats. Switching between these rides to handle different threat ranges gives the combat loop the variety it desperately lacks on foot.

Scraping Parts Across the Desert

The $59.99 tag buys you a massive expanse of arid desert that eventually pushes into Forest Land. Navigation works well because the vehicles carry genuine momentum. If you boost your Motorbike over a crest, the suspension compresses and lands clean without clipping into the terrain geometry. Running across the wastes without a vehicle would be agony, but the game is smart enough to keep you mounted for most long hauls.

Progression is tied directly to scavenging mechanical parts, upgrading suspensions, swapping out engine blocks, and bolting on stronger secondary weapons. You bring your scrap back to build up your base into an actual hub town. Finding a new weapon type that lets your tank burn through tough armor plates gives a real dopamine hit. It rewards thorough exploration, provided you stay in your cockpit instead of hopping out to punch desert lizards.

Pacing Lapses and Boss Duels

Boss battles highlight the exact divide between the two game styles. When you face off against rival military machines or oversized desert beasts from inside a vehicle, the encounters are tense. You track reload timers, time your dash boosts to avoid incoming mortar rings, and punish wide recovery windows on enemy warmachines. It feels deliberate and rewarding.

Then the game forces an on-foot story duel, and the quality plummets. Bosses carry super armor through basic combos, forcing you into a tedious hit-and-run loop where you tap one light punch, back away, wait out their swinging string, and repeat. Beelzebub should feel fast and lethal. Instead, he plays second fiddle to a piece of steel tread.

If ILCA had tightened up the combat frame cancellation and trimmed the recovery on Beelzebub's basic melee suite, this would be an absolute standout action RPG. As it stands, you play it for the heavy armor and tolerate the walking.