Devil's Third is an action game that combines cover-based shooting with mêlée combat. The view is third-person but switches to first-person when you aim down the sights.
There's various objects you can utilise as cover, and it was nice to see many of the objects were destructible, which meant you have to flee to a different object. Obviously, you can use it offensively too, so if an enemy is constantly hiding, you can just destroy his cover and defeat him with brute force. You will be locking in and out of cover when outnumbered, and can rely on dodge-rolling when there are fewer enemies.
Ivan's health regenerates after a few seconds, so as long as you utilise the cover, then you can survive. While waiting for those few seconds, Ivan will go into one of his cocky idle animations such as taking a drink, or lighting a cigarette. It's funny when he does this when pinned down with a barrage of bullets.
Mêlée combat involves strong or light attacks, in addition to block and dodge. There are no special combos, but defeating enemies this way plays a brutal execution animation. Mêlée style opponents tend to be good at dodging, and unless you gun them down quickly from afar, you will end up taking them on mêlée style too. I wasn't a big fan of the mêlée combat since enemies often chained multiple attacks together which didn't give you much scope for countering. Many of the boss battles rely on this style combat, so sometimes the bosses seem unfair when they surprise you with a near unblockable combo without warning.
Ivan can carry two guns at a time, and some of the guns have an alternate fire mode. So you can have an assault rifle that doubles as a grenade launcher, or flamethrower. You also can carry up to 5 grenades. Enemies drop guns so you can often switch out, and larger fights often have a ammo crate where you can keep refilling up your stocks of ammo. It's always worth keeping an eye out for explosive barrels to easily take out many enemies at once.
Occasionally there will be set pieces where you will operate a gun turret to gun down large amount of troops, or to take out vehicles such as helicopters or tanks.
Much of the gameplay is what you have seen before in Third-person or First-person shooters, so it follows a similar structure of giving you a bit of story via cut-scenes, lots of gunning, set pieces, driving sections (well, there's only one instance) etc. The level design is linear, with a several objects to find often slightly off the main path.
Despite having a macho action hero and some b-movie style ideas, it wasn't as Duke Nukem-like as I was expecting. It does have the occasional cheesy action hero dialogue and gore, but was no where near as sleazy and cheesy as I anticipated.
The game had troubled development, but no where near Duke Nukem Forever levels. I was surprised how competent the game was because Devil's Third got absolutely panned by the major critics. I don't understand why though. Many games aren't original but this game did try something slightly different. Sure, there's nothing groundbreaking here and you have seen the individual elements being done many times before, but if you like shooting things, then it's completely fine. I only noticed frame-rate drops in a few small sections of the game, and the graphics are fine for the most part. There's a few parts where the textures look a bit inconsistent, but it looks fairly stylish and clean.
I definitely had fun playing through the game, but it's hard to recommend it over other action games. It is a rare mature game on the Wii U, so definitely serves a purpose.