Intrude is a first-person shooter. Your mission is to get in to a long time abandoned base, suddenly taken over by some kind of private military, find your way up and destroy the source of a signal comming from the base. Collect as much data as you can to find out what they are up to.
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While INTRUDE is almost a pound-for-pound, modern, watered-down retelling of venerated classic Wolfenstein 3D, it’s still a fun albeit unoriginal little boomer shooter that not only held my attention valiantly until the end but unfortunately, due to its 2015 release, missed the curve on the boomer shooter craze of the late 2010s/early 2020s.
(WotW Part 1)
The game takes a lot of pride in its simplicity, it understands the little amount of “new” it has to offer and doesn’t take its time playing around with these ideas as the game is pretty short, being a whole 15 levels long (14+boss battle), and I was able to beat it at a pretty less-than-moderate pace in under 5 hours. Alongside this, there are 4 weapons (plus a knife) and five enemy types, all very simple to understand, although there’s one enemy type that’s pretty aggravating to deal with, namely the bots, due to their small hitbox and not being able to move. There is a way to cheese the bots but I’m still unsure if this was intentional or not. The level design here is pretty passable, the unable-to-close doors might seem to lean towards a negative at first due to not being able to close them for cover, but it does wonders for when you’re scouting for keycards/materials and you can cross off places you’ve already been inside due to the open doors. Secrets here are much more of a fuckaround, as instead of simply “activating” them like in Wolf3D, you either have to shoot an adjacent oil barrel or shoot the wall with a rocket, with the latter turning it into a barely rewarding gamble. Most of the levels look very similar to each other, with the third episode only taking a bit of a different approach with its final 5 levels whereas the first two have 10 levels that are all pretty visually indifferentiable.
And let’s get past it here. Through its weapon selection, movement, level design, aesthetic, story, and other smaller things, Intrude could feel to some as a pure ripoff of Id Software’s classic Wolfenstein 3D. This is completely understandable, as it only took me literally before the first level ended to notice this for myself. However by the third episode, as the pace of the game picks up a bit with the difficulty and enemy count, this comparison wears off a considerable amount, and while not feeling unique, distances itself a bit more from its obvious blueprint.
Some levels turn into absolute nightmares for ammo conservation, specifically 2-4 and 2-5 had me nearly stuck because of the sparse amount of health and ammo that was being placed in the levels. Near this point in the game, it obviously wants you to be a bit more balls-out in how you handle enemies, especially with a stark increase in how many enemies the game throws at you, but not only does the game fail to provide an adjacent scaling of ammo, but it starts to feel like the game is giving you less. This is fixed by the third episode, but those levels are still an ugly spot on the game’s otherwise quick and concise runtime.
The soundtrack composed by Mikael Kinnander is good albeit there were only a handful of tracks composed for the game, so these tracks get played through entire episodes and usually get quite irritating by the end. Could’ve definitely aided from some more tracks aside from the 5 or 6 that are in the game, but what’s there is all good, removed from how much they’re forced onto the player.
The final boss rides a fine line between fair, learnable mechanics, and amped-up overscaled bullshit, and I think it’s teetering on the BS side. The mechanics are pretty deliberate and smart, but of the three attacks it has, two out of them are way too quick to react to, especially the chaingun attack, not to mention that one absolutely rips through your health/armour and can kill you in one attack. Also, the health just feels way too much for both its aggression and the amount of ammo the level gives you. Ultimately doable, still. It certainly leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth after finishing it, but not enough to void the good stuff that preceded it.
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“Worst of the Worst” is a series where I’ll be going through the entries in my backlog with the lowest average user rating, and giving my take on if they’re as bad as they’re reviled to be.
INTRUDE - That bad?
No. Definitely not. Its place at the very bottom of the list is probably due to only having, as of writing this, one log on here, giving it a 1/5 average, so I’m certainly not going against a sitewide status quo here, furthermore considering it has a “Very Positive” average on Steam out of a couple hundred reviews. I suggest anyone who’s into this type of FPS give it a try, $4 is more than a reasonable price for it.
(WotW Part 1)
The game takes a lot of pride in its simplicity, it understands the little amount of “new” it has to offer and doesn’t take its time playing around with these ideas as the game is pretty short, being a whole 15 levels long (14+boss battle), and I was able to beat it at a pretty less-than-moderate pace in under 5 hours. Alongside this, there are 4 weapons (plus a knife) and five enemy types, all very simple to understand, although there’s one enemy type that’s pretty aggravating to deal with, namely the bots, due to their small hitbox and not being able to move. There is a way to cheese the bots but I’m still unsure if this was intentional or not. The level design here is pretty passable, the unable-to-close doors might seem to lean towards a negative at first due to not being able to close them for cover, but it does wonders for when you’re scouting for keycards/materials and you can cross off places you’ve already been inside due to the open doors. Secrets here are much more of a fuckaround, as instead of simply “activating” them like in Wolf3D, you either have to shoot an adjacent oil barrel or shoot the wall with a rocket, with the latter turning it into a barely rewarding gamble. Most of the levels look very similar to each other, with the third episode only taking a bit of a different approach with its final 5 levels whereas the first two have 10 levels that are all pretty visually indifferentiable.
And let’s get past it here. Through its weapon selection, movement, level design, aesthetic, story, and other smaller things, Intrude could feel to some as a pure ripoff of Id Software’s classic Wolfenstein 3D. This is completely understandable, as it only took me literally before the first level ended to notice this for myself. However by the third episode, as the pace of the game picks up a bit with the difficulty and enemy count, this comparison wears off a considerable amount, and while not feeling unique, distances itself a bit more from its obvious blueprint.
Some levels turn into absolute nightmares for ammo conservation, specifically 2-4 and 2-5 had me nearly stuck because of the sparse amount of health and ammo that was being placed in the levels. Near this point in the game, it obviously wants you to be a bit more balls-out in how you handle enemies, especially with a stark increase in how many enemies the game throws at you, but not only does the game fail to provide an adjacent scaling of ammo, but it starts to feel like the game is giving you less. This is fixed by the third episode, but those levels are still an ugly spot on the game’s otherwise quick and concise runtime.
The soundtrack composed by Mikael Kinnander is good albeit there were only a handful of tracks composed for the game, so these tracks get played through entire episodes and usually get quite irritating by the end. Could’ve definitely aided from some more tracks aside from the 5 or 6 that are in the game, but what’s there is all good, removed from how much they’re forced onto the player.
The final boss rides a fine line between fair, learnable mechanics, and amped-up overscaled bullshit, and I think it’s teetering on the BS side. The mechanics are pretty deliberate and smart, but of the three attacks it has, two out of them are way too quick to react to, especially the chaingun attack, not to mention that one absolutely rips through your health/armour and can kill you in one attack. Also, the health just feels way too much for both its aggression and the amount of ammo the level gives you. Ultimately doable, still. It certainly leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth after finishing it, but not enough to void the good stuff that preceded it.
_________________________________________________
“Worst of the Worst” is a series where I’ll be going through the entries in my backlog with the lowest average user rating, and giving my take on if they’re as bad as they’re reviled to be.
INTRUDE - That bad?
No. Definitely not. Its place at the very bottom of the list is probably due to only having, as of writing this, one log on here, giving it a 1/5 average, so I’m certainly not going against a sitewide status quo here, furthermore considering it has a “Very Positive” average on Steam out of a couple hundred reviews. I suggest anyone who’s into this type of FPS give it a try, $4 is more than a reasonable price for it.