Hit & Myth (Gizmondo review)

Developer: Gizmondo Studios Texas
Publisher: Gizmondo Games
Released: N/A

Hit & Myth is an unreleased action game that was scheduled to be published in 2006.

There's five levels and you play as a medieval knight called Sir Timorous Cadbury IV who's attempting to stop the evil machinations of the demonic hordes. The gameplay is a twin-stick shooter (using the face buttons to fire) and you can also summon spells that offer temporary upgrades such as increased speed. The Gizmondo is a fairly comfortable system to hold, but the constant need to be circling enemies by rotating the stiff d-pad is enough to give you hand cramp within a few minutes. Also, the lengthy missions (which take 30-40 minutes each to beat) aren't suited to handheld play, and while checkpoints are available there are no mid-level save points. Additionally, despite the controls being the best they could be given the system layout, consistently hitting diagonals is tricky due to the requirement to press two face buttons at once. The gameplay can be challenging with enemies spawning out of nowhere, or firing from off-screen at high speed. However, at least there are ample opportunities to refill your health and spell power by dispatching opponents so you always have a good chance to succeed. The field-of-view is limited and the environments can be overly dark at times, but the cool lighting effects from your weaponry help to brighten the path ahead. Impressively, the action never slows down, even when the game throws a huge number of sprites on-screen. Perhaps its best feature is its wickedly sarcastic sense of humour and heavy use of voiceovers, as they give your team-mates and enemies oodles of personality. The bosses are interesting, but after a couple of levels you've seen pretty much everything the game has to offer.

Hit & Myth is an above-average title that would certainly have added more diversity to the Gizmondo library, and it's worth a play-through if only to experience its hilarious script. Unfortunately, it offers little in the way of replayability and it's a shame that the monotonous gameplay wasn't spiced up with some fun diversions.

Random trivia: The original plan was to include four selectable characters, but this was eventually limited to one due to time constraints.