Having spent a bit of time jamming on PC, Devil Jam has officially hit consoles. The game is a blending of Hades and Vampire Survivors, or more specifically, the art of Hades and the gameplay of Vampire Survivors, albeit without the same level of depth and content as either game. But with a price of just £6.29, is that really a problem?

You start off as Falco, lead guitarist for a band that was just starting to make it big when Death (note the capital D) claims them, sending their souls down to Hell where the impeccably dressed ruler of the flames awaits. The Devil recruits Falco and eventually his two bandmates to help stop Death, who the Devil views as something of a business rival, by battling their way through 20-minute runs, culminating in a battle with the Reaper.

Available On: PC, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch
Reviewed On: PS5
Developed By: Rogueside
Published By: Rogueside

Review code provided by the publisher.

There’s not a whole lot of story going on, and what little there is actually comes later in the game after you’ve beaten Death a few times. The three band members will offer up little snippets of their lives, motivations, and why Hell might even be the best possible place for them as they chat to the Devil. To put it another way, Devil Jam might look like Hades, but it certainly isn’t anything like it when it comes to storytelling chops.

But those looks are definitely striking. Bold lines, striking colours, high contrast. There’s no getting around the obvious Hades influence, especially when the Sins pop up to offer you their powers. When the action gets going, it looks beautiful, although I did notice a few visual problems, specifically how certain abilities have a box floating around them. It’s like you can see the hitboxes.

Out on the battlefield, Devil Jam is all about that Vampire Survivors style, the one where almost all your abilities and attacks are fired off automatically. I say almost because there is an option to manually aim your main attack, if you prefer, but otherwise your only controls are running around and performing dashes while hundreds of onscreen enemies attempt to turn you into regular old jam instead of the devil kind.

As you’re commiting several genocides at once against the critter population of Hell, there’s a decent if forgettable selection of generic rock tunes in the background to keep your foot tapping. For a game about a band signing deals with the Devil, I hoped for slightly more morable songs, but what we get is fine enough for the action.

Slaughtering enemies results in XP crystals, and when you have enough to level up, one of the Sins will offer you a few boons to choose from. These range from summoning weird jelly creatures to firing out love bombs to hailstorms of ice shards, or you might get a chance to upgrade one of your existing abilities.

Again, comparing to Hades‘ Gods, the Sins don’t have as much depth to them because you don’t get to slowly uncover more and more about them, but their visual designs and the gifts they offer at least give them some personality.

At the bottom of the screen you have a 4×4 grid that looks a lot like a guitar fret. Here, you slot the abilities you are gifted by the Sins every time you level. The big gimmick is that the grid is basically in 4/4 timing, meaning on each beat your main weapon fires, along with whatever abilities are in the matching column. If you aren’t musically inclined, just think about it this way: every second, a column fires, activating every ability and weapon within it.

It’s a gimmick because it’s really just a fancy way of displaying cooldowns for powers, but it’s also a fun thematic touch in a game that otherwise doesn’t do that much with its musical premise. It would have been great if that rhythm concept was somehow tied into the gameplay more as well.

But there is one interesting mechanic tied to the grid. Abilities are also offered up by the Sins, and these power up (or “amplify”, as the game likes to say) other slots in the grid. These buffs can stack as well, so with a bit of forethought you can really supercharge attacks and effects. Notice I did mention forethought, though, because there’s no way to fiddle with placement after your initial decision. It’s a double-edged sword: being able to swap things around probably would have led to some awesome builds, but by making you figure it out as you go, the game injects some fun tension into proceedings.

At its best, Devil Jam delivers exactly what is so easy to love about this genre: chaos. Lots of it. All over the screen. As you ramp up abilities, turn up the difficulty, and seek to kick Death’s ass once again, the screen is bombarded by explosions, beams of light, puddles of goo, runes, and frost breath. It’s immensely satisfying to watch the chaos erupt across the screen like a firework display.

Whether you die or defeat Death, you wind up back at the Devil’s office where there’s a couple of things to consider. Firstly, the Devil has something in the region of 150 quests on offer, most of which are about killing X amount of enemies, upgrading boons to their highest Demonic level during a run, or doing a few other character-based things. These quests offer up rewards of currency, new boons to purchase at the merchant so they become available, and more.

Progression, then, is a mixture of things. Mostly, it’s handled via kicking Death’s ass, but it can also be linked to the quest system. For example, this console release offers up a single new arena to battle in, but unlocking it is actually buried inside the quest system, which meant I didn’t see it until I was pretty much finished with the game.

I mentioned merchants. Those are important because they provide the main source of powering up. There are different bottles of stuff you can collect on the battlefield and buy with Hellions, which in turn can be handed in for permanent stat buffs. There are also options to unlock new boons that will pop up during runs, and environmental objects that can be interacted with for boosts during a run.

Really, the game’s biggest flaw is a lack of content, although that’s somewhat easy to ignore given how cheap it also is. There’s just three basic arenas to fight in that very slightly alter enemy layouts and a few simple modifiers, and they all look pretty boring. Enemy variety is very limited, so after a few runs you’ve seen them all, and there’s just three bosses outside of Death to fight, all three of which you’ll see in every single run.

The game tries to throw in a couple of extra things. Difficulty levels scale all the way up to 20 and modify the number of foes you face, health, damage, XP amounts, and more. And there are a few challenge areas, like fighting enemies in the dark or trying to survive as long as possible without being able to attack. But these disable quest progression and don’t count toward anything, so there’s not much reason to do them over a normal run.

Point is, Devil Jam runs out of steam quite quickly. Only the fun of watching the screen turn into a barrage of particle effects keeps you going, and the pleasure of that is going to depend heavily on your tolerance for repetition.

The pacing is a little off, too. After I beat Death for the first time, which only took a few runs, the game loses its momentum because it doesn’t give you much direction. The Devil gets you to sign a new deal to help beat down Death Co a little more and offers some vague explanation of having to beat him no more than 10 or so times. But I’ve done that, and there doesn’t seem to be any more story progression. And on top of that, the last Sin took an age to unlock because, like that bonus level, he was also locked behind a random quest amongst the other 149 of the damn things.

Finally, performance. The game works perfectly fine on PS5. No framerate drops, no crashes. Nothing. Well, almost nothing. I did run into a weird issue where hanging around at Devil HQ between missions causes my PS5 to start emitting a noise somewhere between a whine and a buzz. It’s purely limited to this game and this game only. I have a theory that somehow these sections are really ramping up the thermal output, causing the fan to go crazy. Maybe the framerate isn’t limited or something. But that’s speculative on my part. All I know is that no other game in my library does this.

Devil Jam is one of those games that’s very easy to enjoy for a few hours, and just as easy to quietly walk away from. The core loop works, the chaos is undeniably satisfying, and the whole Hades-meets-Vampire–Survivors pitch is strong enough to carry it for a while. But it never really builds on that foundation in any meaningful way, leaving you with a game that feels more like a solid idea than a fully fleshed-out one.

For such a cheap price, there’s an argument to be made here. You’ll get some fun out of it, you’ll probably beat Death a couple of times, and you might even experiment with a few builds along the way. Just don’t expect it to sink its hooks in for the long haul. Between the lack of variety, the odd pacing, and progression that feels a little too scattered for its own good, Devil Jam ultimately struggles to keep the momentum going.

It’s not bad by any means—just a bit thin. And who wants thin jam, man?