Catacomb 3-D is the third in the Catacomb series of video games, and the first of these games to feature 3D computer graphics. The game was originally published by Softdisk under the Gamer's Edge label, and is a first-person shooter with a dark fantasy setting. The player takes control of the high wizard Petton Everhail, descending into the catacomb of the Towne Cemetery to defeat the evil lich Nemesis and rescue his friend Grelminar. Catacomb 3-D is a landmark title in terms of first-person graphics. The game was released in November 1991 and is arguably the first example of the modern, character-based first-person shooter genre, or at least it was a direct ancestor to the games that popularized the genre. It was released for DOS with EGA graphics. The game introduced the concept of showing the player's hand in the three-dimensional viewpoint, and an enhanced version of its technology was later used for the more successful and well-known Wolfenstein 3D.
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Well, it's iD's precursor to WOLFENSTEIN 3-D, which essentially makes it the great-grandfather of all FPS games. As you might imagine, that means it's pretty rudimentary. But it's still playable enough. Low enemy type count, low 'weapon' count, the perspective doesn't quite work right sometimes, and it gets mighty tedious, but there are some fun levels (suprisingly not TOO too maze-y!) and a little bit of game-spanning puzzle-solving to be done.
A respectable test run, but even the boys knew back in the day that that was pretty much all it was. Fun to try if you're curious.
A respectable test run, but even the boys knew back in the day that that was pretty much all it was. Fun to try if you're curious.
(This is the 58th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
Before there was Wolfenstein 3-D, there was Catacomb 3-D: The Descent. Before that, there was Hovertank 3-D, but if you'd consider Catacomb 3-D a rough prototype, which I do, I don't know what you'd consider Hovertank 3-D to be. Humble beginnings to a genre that would evolve incredibly fast from here is what you'd call it I guess.
Id Software, developers of Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein, the latter of which will debut in 1992, started their work on the FPS genre by releasing the above mentioned games in 1991 using a prototype of the Wolfenstein 3-D engine. They would improve upon their framework in incredible pace, which you will be able to immediately notice just by comparing Hovertank (April 91), Catacomb (November 91), Wolfenstein (May, 92) and Doom (December 93).
Today's review focuses on the second of those 4 games, which is the third entry in the Catacomb series and the first in first person perspective. The game would be followed by the Catacomb Adventure Series that included three games. These weren't developed by id Software but rather internally by Softdisk, and apart from small improvements and additions, they offer pretty much the same gameplay, so I won't play and review them as part of this challenge.
But here is my review for Catacomb 3-D: The Descent. It will be more negative than I actually am about the game, it's just that from a critical standpoint it's not that good. From a video game historian's perspective, one will definitely appreciate the game for what it is and what it led to.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 1/10
Don't be fooled by the FPS categorization. You don't shoot bullets. You use your hand to shoot magic bolts in a game that has a dark fantasy setting.
You play a high wizard and need to rescue your friend, who is held captive by the evil lich Nemesis. There are 20 levels, some of which have scrolls in them that give you tips on how to progress. At the end of the game, you can just walk up to your buddy and rescue him without even defeating the Nemesis.
So yeah, no story, let's move on.
GAMEPLAY | 10/20
You likely know what the boomer shooter genre looks like. You move through 20 flat levels that are built in a more and more of a intricate maze-like fashion, with areas divided by walls and doors. The controls are set up so that you can move by pressing the keys on your keyboard while shooting with either the left mouse button or the ALT key. Although you can also use the mouse to help, turning is done very slowly in both cases.
You walk through all areas of a level to find keys that open locked doors, which hide portals. Some levels later on have more portals that mostly are there to confuse you and act as puzzles (read: filler). While looking for the keys, enemies - of which there are a grand total of 5 - will appear and will require getting disposed of. On easy, the first enemy, trolls, require 3 hits to die. The second enemy, orcs, require more like 10-15. Then there are mages, bats and red demon-type creatures, which require up to 50 hits. Only mages shoot bolts back, the rest just walk up to you and hit you, so the only real difference here is how many shots it takes to kill them, which should tell you how rudimentary the design is here.
Your bolts have no ammo and can be shot non-stop. That's also a requirement because a big part of progress here is to shoot at every single part of a wall, as some of them can be destroyed and hide key items, like, keys... So once you kill all enemies and still haven't naturally found the key to progress, you start a session of non stop shooting, killing your index finger in the process. It's not that bad actually, the simplicity of this task is definitely much better than having to play poorly controllable platformer game, by far.
You also can shoot nukes and rapid-fire bolts, and will find a large amount of healing items everywhere. The healing system is likely the same as in Wolfenstein 3D, but instead of having 100% health, your health is displayed with an image of your characters head. As he takes damage, he gradually loses the skin on his face and reveals more and more of his skull. I thought that was a nice touch.
Playing this will undoubtedly help in putting into perspective how quickly the genre is set to evolve. I thought it was interesting to see where the boomer shooter subgenre was about to find its foothold, but wasn't quite there yet.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 3/10
No voice acting. The sound design is as basic as the entire game, you know, apart from the fact of starting a new genre, but basic nonetheless. It includes some unpleasant noises, such as scraping against a wall, which was probably twice as annoying because you weren't intended to be stuck there in the first place. The soundtrack literally consists of one song, one that would a month later be used for a section in Commander Keen 4, so hearing that for 2 hours straight was very pleasant, as you can imagine.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 5/10
It's difficult to give this game a fair rating because, on the one hand, it is extremely brief and simplistic in design, with the only improvements over Hovertank being that the few enemies actually received some design attention and the walls featured textures rather than being painted a single color.
On the other hand, this graphics engine was quite revolutionary due to its unprecedented nature. Due to the nauseating movement structure of this game combined with the very little detail present here, I'll rate this lower than I probably will Wolfenstein 3D, but credit where it's due. Which it probably is with Hovertank.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 3/10
The only immersion comes from the fact that this plays in the first person view that players weren't accustomed to yet. There is barely any story or world-building here to really get immersed in anything else.
CONTENT | 4/10
20 levels that all have you do the same thing, just with a little bit more complexity each time. The simplicity of the shooting did feel fun when it flowed relatively well to be honest, and I'm likely going to enjoy the more sophisticated Wolfenstein and Doom quite a lot based on my experience here, but obviously this is very much lacking in depth and variety.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 4/10
You go through levels that become more and more complex as you go deeper and deeper into the 'dungeon'. Unfortunately, late game it felt like filler and unnecessary complexity rather than fun puzzles to tease your brain over. Making enemies bulletspongy enemies late-game is understandable, because how else are they going to differentiate them in these early times, but it's not good regardless, and the fact that you can simply walk past the final boss to find your friend and win the game is an odd, yet hilarious oversight.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 7/10
Similarly to the graphics section, how do you rate this fairly? By saying that Hovertank did it first and Catacomb didn't improve on it in a notable way to earn a high rating? I suppose. That doesn't make the fact that this is very innovative and a great thing that the dev team accomplished, and was about to accomplish from here on out.
REPLAYABILITY | 1/5
No replayability, though there are three difficulty levels. I can't imagine wanting to up the difficulty considering how bulletspongy enemies get in the later levels.
PLAYABILITY | 4/5
Crashed once when I was strafing a bit too much using ALT. Otherwise, works well.
OVERALL | 42/100
Hey, not the worst score in the world. Catacomb 3-D is a game I appreciate for showing what's possible, and for its time in history. As a game, its simplicity offered me with a fun, mindless first hour, but as a game from a critical standpoint, it's not good. If you want to go into id Software games, I'd recommend starting with Wolfenstein, as you don't miss out on anything significant with Catacomb that won't be present in Wolfenstein.
Before there was Wolfenstein 3-D, there was Catacomb 3-D: The Descent. Before that, there was Hovertank 3-D, but if you'd consider Catacomb 3-D a rough prototype, which I do, I don't know what you'd consider Hovertank 3-D to be. Humble beginnings to a genre that would evolve incredibly fast from here is what you'd call it I guess.
Id Software, developers of Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein, the latter of which will debut in 1992, started their work on the FPS genre by releasing the above mentioned games in 1991 using a prototype of the Wolfenstein 3-D engine. They would improve upon their framework in incredible pace, which you will be able to immediately notice just by comparing Hovertank (April 91), Catacomb (November 91), Wolfenstein (May, 92) and Doom (December 93).
Today's review focuses on the second of those 4 games, which is the third entry in the Catacomb series and the first in first person perspective. The game would be followed by the Catacomb Adventure Series that included three games. These weren't developed by id Software but rather internally by Softdisk, and apart from small improvements and additions, they offer pretty much the same gameplay, so I won't play and review them as part of this challenge.
But here is my review for Catacomb 3-D: The Descent. It will be more negative than I actually am about the game, it's just that from a critical standpoint it's not that good. From a video game historian's perspective, one will definitely appreciate the game for what it is and what it led to.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 1/10
Don't be fooled by the FPS categorization. You don't shoot bullets. You use your hand to shoot magic bolts in a game that has a dark fantasy setting.
You play a high wizard and need to rescue your friend, who is held captive by the evil lich Nemesis. There are 20 levels, some of which have scrolls in them that give you tips on how to progress. At the end of the game, you can just walk up to your buddy and rescue him without even defeating the Nemesis.
So yeah, no story, let's move on.
GAMEPLAY | 10/20
You likely know what the boomer shooter genre looks like. You move through 20 flat levels that are built in a more and more of a intricate maze-like fashion, with areas divided by walls and doors. The controls are set up so that you can move by pressing the keys on your keyboard while shooting with either the left mouse button or the ALT key. Although you can also use the mouse to help, turning is done very slowly in both cases.
You walk through all areas of a level to find keys that open locked doors, which hide portals. Some levels later on have more portals that mostly are there to confuse you and act as puzzles (read: filler). While looking for the keys, enemies - of which there are a grand total of 5 - will appear and will require getting disposed of. On easy, the first enemy, trolls, require 3 hits to die. The second enemy, orcs, require more like 10-15. Then there are mages, bats and red demon-type creatures, which require up to 50 hits. Only mages shoot bolts back, the rest just walk up to you and hit you, so the only real difference here is how many shots it takes to kill them, which should tell you how rudimentary the design is here.
Your bolts have no ammo and can be shot non-stop. That's also a requirement because a big part of progress here is to shoot at every single part of a wall, as some of them can be destroyed and hide key items, like, keys... So once you kill all enemies and still haven't naturally found the key to progress, you start a session of non stop shooting, killing your index finger in the process. It's not that bad actually, the simplicity of this task is definitely much better than having to play poorly controllable platformer game, by far.
You also can shoot nukes and rapid-fire bolts, and will find a large amount of healing items everywhere. The healing system is likely the same as in Wolfenstein 3D, but instead of having 100% health, your health is displayed with an image of your characters head. As he takes damage, he gradually loses the skin on his face and reveals more and more of his skull. I thought that was a nice touch.
Playing this will undoubtedly help in putting into perspective how quickly the genre is set to evolve. I thought it was interesting to see where the boomer shooter subgenre was about to find its foothold, but wasn't quite there yet.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 3/10
No voice acting. The sound design is as basic as the entire game, you know, apart from the fact of starting a new genre, but basic nonetheless. It includes some unpleasant noises, such as scraping against a wall, which was probably twice as annoying because you weren't intended to be stuck there in the first place. The soundtrack literally consists of one song, one that would a month later be used for a section in Commander Keen 4, so hearing that for 2 hours straight was very pleasant, as you can imagine.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 5/10
It's difficult to give this game a fair rating because, on the one hand, it is extremely brief and simplistic in design, with the only improvements over Hovertank being that the few enemies actually received some design attention and the walls featured textures rather than being painted a single color.
On the other hand, this graphics engine was quite revolutionary due to its unprecedented nature. Due to the nauseating movement structure of this game combined with the very little detail present here, I'll rate this lower than I probably will Wolfenstein 3D, but credit where it's due. Which it probably is with Hovertank.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 3/10
The only immersion comes from the fact that this plays in the first person view that players weren't accustomed to yet. There is barely any story or world-building here to really get immersed in anything else.
CONTENT | 4/10
20 levels that all have you do the same thing, just with a little bit more complexity each time. The simplicity of the shooting did feel fun when it flowed relatively well to be honest, and I'm likely going to enjoy the more sophisticated Wolfenstein and Doom quite a lot based on my experience here, but obviously this is very much lacking in depth and variety.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 4/10
You go through levels that become more and more complex as you go deeper and deeper into the 'dungeon'. Unfortunately, late game it felt like filler and unnecessary complexity rather than fun puzzles to tease your brain over. Making enemies bulletspongy enemies late-game is understandable, because how else are they going to differentiate them in these early times, but it's not good regardless, and the fact that you can simply walk past the final boss to find your friend and win the game is an odd, yet hilarious oversight.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 7/10
Similarly to the graphics section, how do you rate this fairly? By saying that Hovertank did it first and Catacomb didn't improve on it in a notable way to earn a high rating? I suppose. That doesn't make the fact that this is very innovative and a great thing that the dev team accomplished, and was about to accomplish from here on out.
REPLAYABILITY | 1/5
No replayability, though there are three difficulty levels. I can't imagine wanting to up the difficulty considering how bulletspongy enemies get in the later levels.
PLAYABILITY | 4/5
Crashed once when I was strafing a bit too much using ALT. Otherwise, works well.
OVERALL | 42/100
Hey, not the worst score in the world. Catacomb 3-D is a game I appreciate for showing what's possible, and for its time in history. As a game, its simplicity offered me with a fun, mindless first hour, but as a game from a critical standpoint, it's not good. If you want to go into id Software games, I'd recommend starting with Wolfenstein, as you don't miss out on anything significant with Catacomb that won't be present in Wolfenstein.
The precursor to Wolfenstein 3D. It's immediately clear what the limitations of this engine are in hindsight, particularly in terms of the "camera." It seems to swing outwards from the player as if on a stick, rather than playing through the protagonist's eyes. It's very easy to feel motion sick playing, even for the most experienced, and I had to step away for a minute after so much slow, confusing spinning.
With all that said, I have to appreciate this game a fair bit for what it was able to do with the technology on hand, and while the levels can be very difficult to keep track of because of the limited textures and even more limited movement options, the design is fairly intuitive and shows an early example of the "red key for red door, blue key for blue door" trope the genre would run with later on.
The game is quite easy with frequent health pickups, unlimited ammo, and stun animations on any enemy meaning that the only skill limitation is how fast you can spam Ctrl. There is a genuine sense of tension that comes from the slow swing of the camera, though where you'll never know if, in the time it took you to swing the camera 360 degrees, an enemy has appeared from around the corner. Turning corners is always a risk because of the difficulty of strafing, and ultimately despite being quite easy encounter-wise I was genuinely impressed with the gameplay.
Also, I was actually able to reasonably complete this game which, for a game of this era, gains it an additional point for not being unfinishable bullshit.
With all that said, I have to appreciate this game a fair bit for what it was able to do with the technology on hand, and while the levels can be very difficult to keep track of because of the limited textures and even more limited movement options, the design is fairly intuitive and shows an early example of the "red key for red door, blue key for blue door" trope the genre would run with later on.
The game is quite easy with frequent health pickups, unlimited ammo, and stun animations on any enemy meaning that the only skill limitation is how fast you can spam Ctrl. There is a genuine sense of tension that comes from the slow swing of the camera, though where you'll never know if, in the time it took you to swing the camera 360 degrees, an enemy has appeared from around the corner. Turning corners is always a risk because of the difficulty of strafing, and ultimately despite being quite easy encounter-wise I was genuinely impressed with the gameplay.
Also, I was actually able to reasonably complete this game which, for a game of this era, gains it an additional point for not being unfinishable bullshit.
Ahh yeah, now we're getting somewhere.
Proto-Wolf3D (so, proto-proto-Doom) but an obvious jump forward from Hovertank 3D. Every level is still just a big ol' square maze, the monsters are super samey, the music is a 10 second midi loop, but whatevs, check me out im wizard pew pew. Consumable items! Colored keys! Secret doors! 3D textures! (Is there any texture more nineties than a wall oozing neon green slime?)
Still more interesting as a historical object than a fun game, but above all it's a testament to the power of persistent iteration. Take another couple swings at it, guys. Pretty soon you're gonna nail it.
Proto-Wolf3D (so, proto-proto-Doom) but an obvious jump forward from Hovertank 3D. Every level is still just a big ol' square maze, the monsters are super samey, the music is a 10 second midi loop, but whatevs, check me out im wizard pew pew. Consumable items! Colored keys! Secret doors! 3D textures! (Is there any texture more nineties than a wall oozing neon green slime?)
Still more interesting as a historical object than a fun game, but above all it's a testament to the power of persistent iteration. Take another couple swings at it, guys. Pretty soon you're gonna nail it.
Orcs and Trolls is the thing you are going to see for most of the game, in level 14 and 15 there's the bats, who cares kill them it's easy. Mages? A joke too, spam balls till they die. Scrolls don't matter, play the god damn game and you won't miss anything except for the secret exit maybe, idk.
You better have been saving your bolts and nukes for these last sections, mostly level 20, which I did not 100% because I'm not gonna kill 50+ demons by spamming.
There's no variety on spells which is kinda sad.
Nemesis, the big bad boy that looks like fake hitler from wolfenstein 3d, can be ignored. Just shoot the back of the room he's in, your friend is there and you can happily end the game.
You better have been saving your bolts and nukes for these last sections, mostly level 20, which I did not 100% because I'm not gonna kill 50+ demons by spamming.
There's no variety on spells which is kinda sad.
Nemesis, the big bad boy that looks like fake hitler from wolfenstein 3d, can be ignored. Just shoot the back of the room he's in, your friend is there and you can happily end the game.