Wrath's full release is a much more enjoyable and polished game than its early access counterpart, especially with the number of things that don't seem changed. At best, my guess is that the full release decreased the effective health of enemies and tweaked some enemy placements, but that's it. Wrath is so, so, so much more fun to play now that real paced progress is possible between soul-tether-slash-shrine checkpoints. The decrease in sandbag enemies also makes Wrath's lovely visuals, sounds, detail, and weird physics and collision issues, much easier to appreciate.

However, Wrath is not untethered from its most foundational weakness: it is too goddamn long. Wrath's levels have always been long, meandering, marathon slogs. The first hub area alone is more than enough to satisfy what Wrath has to offer the player, but Wrath is three times as long as that. Wrath's gameplay isn't interesting enough to make all 15 (I hope only 15?) stages worth playing, let alone playing twice to beat the game on Outlander. If you've got the stomach for a time commitment or don't care about finishing the game, though, Wrath still has some great ideas, especially from a character and environment design perspective.

This is legit another really solid shooter from the boomer shooter genre. Admittedly, the game starts out really slow. Not movement-wise, the movement is really responsive and genuinely feels really great, but gameplay wise, yeah, it takes about until act 2 before the game really starts to show off what it has to offer. A couple of immediate differences about this game as well are that 1. saving is not automatic. You must use a consumable item to save or save at specific shrines that you can only use once. This actually creates a lot of tense situations, even though the items for saving your game are all over the place, it does take some trial and error to know when is a good spot to use them. 2. The levels are actually crazy long and complicated. This is a huge change of pace from what i've been used to with boomer shooters, which are usually much more linear and directed. It's not as though its pulling any open world type shit, but these levels do get genuinely sprawling, and at times, it will take a bit of time to traverse or to find your way through a level. At first, I considered this a detriment, but as the game picked up the pace and the level of challenge got better, I really began to enjoy these environments and the very distinct way they were all designed. The arsenal too has a couple of stand-out weapons, my favorite being the starter blade that can charge up to do a thrusting instant kill that you can use for platforming and escaping close calls. Overall, this is a really spectacular shooter, and if you like the boomer shooter genre, this is an easy recommendation.

Wrath's greatest flaw is that it's merely fine, and also arguably overlong. My first clear on Hard clocked in at just over 20hrs, with each episode being equivalent in temporal length to other game's entire runtimes.
I still enjoyed my time overall, and even preferred Episode 2 to 1. Which I think is the reverse of most people's preference. The environs do look great but the small enemy roster that's shared across almost the full game, coupled with some really unsatisfying primary fire for the pistol and shotgun, put a damper on my enjoyment. The shotgun primary isn't as big of a deal since you actually want to use the secondary in most cases, but it still feels weightless during those otherwise tense moments were a sudden close quarters encounter needs to resolved with gibs asap. There's significant feedback from the enemies getting staggered or gibbed yes, but it doesn't feel like I'm actually firing projectiles. The pistol is a much bigger issue, there is basically NO feedback for its primary, which I frequently relied on for the Not-Scrags and picking off stragglers from advantageous medium range vantage points. I had to turn on the crosshairs because it was often too difficult to discern if anything was even happening. I think all FPS devs should do some playtesting with the HUD disabled in order to figure out what needs to be changed in order to improve diegetic feedback.

If Wrath had found a way to implement a bit more encounter variety across the later episodes, I feel it would have turned into the longform FPS epic it deserved to become. Standout levels like Shadow Pantheon are definitely an acquired taste, but have served to ingrain Wrath into my memory as an interesting and grueling exploratory dungeon crawl of an FPS.

Worth checking out by dedicated FPS fans with tempered expectations.

Pretty solid boomer shooter. Visuals are nice, boss designs are really cool, and the gore is solid. Music is super lackluster for a title like this. It's basically just enhanced ambiance and it's very disappointing there's no real soundtrack to fuel the carnage. Levels are VERY long on a first go. Like 30-50 mins, which may be a turn off for some. I know it got to be a bit much for me, the game was nearing chore status a bit towards the end, but I muscled thru. It's a solid title for what it is, if you want another boomer shooter to play, can't go wrong with this tbh.

Wrath's appeal is a niche within a niche- the throwback shooter pivots itself on high-octane action inside of short/varied levels usually, and Wrath isn't this. It's high-octane; it's more intense than any other throwback shooter I've played by a heavy long shot, but it doesn't let you cool down. Levels are designed with less focus on a gimmick (arguably to its detriment) and more so with a focus on being gauntlets. Each one clocks in at about twenty minutes to half-an-hour if you're not speedrunning, and the appeal might seem limited given the small enemy roster and lack of variety, but I think Wrath taps into something totally worthwhile once you give it some time. The game slowly feeds you new content, thus demanding you figure out the ideal strategies for each enemy- which might reveal maybe the best weapon/item roster I've ever seen in these types of games. Every weapon has a primary fire and an alt-fire that is practical for the constant hostile ways enemies swarm you, and I do mean swarm you. Some levels clocked in at around 500+ enemies, and that's where Wrath's secret lays. It's as much a Serious Sam as it is a Quake, and it's a lot better than the average horde-shooter, too! Every weapon choice allows for high player expression here because they're pretty much all equally practical; you really need to balance out function and conserving ammo to invent your own ideal combos to put down the increasingly tanky enemies or large swarms. As the game really starts kicking you down with full on armies later on, it's always encouraged to explore for secrets and collect items, which are super utilitarian and I didn't find one of them uninteresting. Importantly, items are so limited that collecting them (and ammo) across multiple levels makes the entire game a resource-management challenge, as opposed to just one level usually. Saves themselves, being turned into an resource, also fixes one of the things I dislike most about classic PC gaming: the encouragement of save-scumming. Yeah, they could've dumbed down the number of Soul Tethers you get quite a bit, but just the notion of them and the Shrines is great. All of Wrath feels like a trial of reflex and moment-to-moment wit to me, and I love it! You might find it repetitive/padded, and I wouldn't blame you, but I loved Arcane Dimensions.

I want to love this game so much, bu there are some big issues that made me abandon it, even tho there are some extremely good things in this game.

The Good:
- Artstyle: it is amazing. The game "feels" like it came out the same year as Quake and that's saying something. It just looks authentic and really really good. The enemies look good too and when they explode it feels amazing (not as good as "Cultic" tho)
- The Melee Weapon: I didn't use the knife much as an actual weapon in combat, but the alternative fire (long jumping) just feels really nice and the maps are built in a way that using the knife to jump around just feels good
- The shooting and weapons: The weapons all feel unique and useful. I think there was not a single weapon which I didn't regularly use in combat, even tho the shotgun will always be my main weapon. The shooting feels good too
- GOG version available, always a plus

The Bad:
- Hit Feedback: Shooting at enemies can either feel amazing or really lackluster, depending on if there are good animations. I don't know why but with some weapons there are like zero animations when you hit an enemy and it just feels bad
- Getting out of water can be really annoying

The Ugly:
- The maps are way too big. I am usually a fan of bigger maps in boomer shooters. But holy damn those maps can get huge and take more than one hour to beat. I mostly enjoyed the maps in the first hub world but starting with the maps in the second hub world it all starts to be very "samey" and the game starts to feel like an endless slog eventually
- The enemy variety is not good at all. I would say you see almost 90% of all enemy types in the first hub world. I think the enemy variety has been ok for the first hub, but afterwards it's just not enough to keep me interested.
- The second hub: I talked about this already but the second hub with all its levels just doesn't do it for me. I am not a big fan of the theme and all maps feel the same. It feels like you have to play through one huge 5h+ long map and it got me to abandon this game unfortunately.

Conclusion:
If the game would have smaller, more varied levels with more enemy types it would be absolutely amazing. It would be a contender for best boomer shooter for me.
Unfortunately it doesn't, which really is a shame because there is a really damn good foundation here. But the huge, samey levels just killed every fun I had beginning in the second hub.

Late to the party from its entry into early access back during the boomer shooter revival, Wrath was well worth the wait in spite of a few setbacks.

The Great
Wrath's sheer atmosphere and sense of scale is unparalleled for a game in its genre. Levels are huge, often broken up into several distinct segments, and the sheer artistry at play with its designs and architecture are something to behold. The game's low-poly 3D style and colorful textures paint a vivid masterpiece every ten minutes that you can't help but stop to admire. The game has three hub worlds, each with entirely distinct themes that give the player the feeling of traveling to ethereal, ancient worlds. Movement is ace in this game as well, thanks to a great sense of momentum.

The Good
While the game is built on a modified version of the original Quake engine, the game's combat pace has its own, unique flow. You will be bobbing and weaving between showers of projectiles just as often as you're backing away from hyper-aggressive melee attackers and walking around mines. Your weapons are fairly lethal, though larger enemies require you to mix and match your arsenal to take down quickly. Most fights can kill you in seconds if you aren’t crafty. Added into the mix are a set of inventory items, similar to the trappings available in Heretic. These artifacts are far more limited in availability, but can make an otherwise hopeless situation trivial with strategic use. The selection wheel slows down time while active, which makes them easy and convenient to use. Each episode also contains special powerup gates, which grant the player a unique ability to help traverse the map for a limited time. The game has a unique saving system as well, with a limited save item used in combination with checkpoint altars that keeps the action engaging as you progress through a map. The saving system can be disabled in favor of traditional quicksaves, if preferred.

The Bad
As beautiful as Wrath’s sprawling environments may be, the game heavily suffers from the lack of any kind of automap system. Certain levels, especially those taking place in catacombs and tombs, can be outright hellish to navigate without any way to track your progress. As dense as these levels are, I found myself taking breaks periodically throughout single levels, only to have to re-learn the map’s layout by the time I came back to it. Every now and then, especially in the third episode, there might be one specific path in a room of four that I’d overlook and end up circling around the map over and over until I noticed it. Either an automap or a guidance system like in Elden Ring or Quake 2’s remaster would alleviate this frustration. The soundtrack (or lack thereof) is another mildly low point for me. A lot of it is haunting ambience - which sets the mood well for when you’re exploring, but in the thick of combat with enemies surrounding you some of the thrill is lost without any sort of music to accompany the combat. Finally, I found the journal to be rather underwhelming. The Bestiary and Weapons pages only offer artwork, without any sort of notes or descriptions.

The Ugly
The controller support in this game feels very primitive by today’s standards. There’s no ability to remap your buttons, with only a few presets on offer instead. More damning is the lack of a weapon wheel - which has proven to be an absolute necessity for games like this with large arsenals and frantic combat. Something to be aware of if you plan on playing on Steam Deck, or just using a controller in general.

In Conclusion
Wrath is an incredible tribute to the art of level design, made up of a unique blend of gameplay elements that kept me coming back time after time until the end. It feels like a modern spiritual successor to the original Quake, and that alone should tell you everything you need to know. Easy recommendation, even if it can feel a little rough around the edges.

I review Wrath: Aeon of Ruin as an individual enamored with video games. In recent times I am especially drawn to video games of the “boomer shooter” archetype—a selection of games centered around fast-paced, point-and-click FPS action that is in the midst of a bonafide golden age—but to speak broadly I am a student of all video games and video game design. I am an avid appreciator of the tricks that game designers use to pull the player into their world, to invest them, to create feeling and tone and palpability. We each play games for different reasons, and we play different games for different reasons. Those who share this mindset will find Wrath to be a novel and surprising video game. Wrath: Aeon of Ruin is a child of the aforementioned boomer shooter craze: a labor of love that, after the release of its sizable demo levels in 2019, brewed and gestated for five long years in development. Meanwhile, the burgeoning indie scene spat out gem after lauded gem: DUSK, Prodeus, Amid Evil, Ultrakill, Project Warlock, Postal: Brain Damaged, Nightdive’s remasters, Hedon: Bloodrite, Ion Fury, the last of which was stated to be main competition to Wrath by Wrath’s developers, before their own game’s numerable delays.

Understand first the context of Wrath’s release. In 1996, id Software, the developers of the foundational Wolfenstein 3-D and DOOM first-person shooter video games, released a seminal masterwork rivaling even these: Quake. Quake, with its at-once iconic Lovecraftian atmosphere, labyrinthian 3D DOOM-core action-shooting gauntlets (with freshly-minted room-on-room level design), moody dark-ambient Trent Reznor soundtrack, and massive multiplayer base, took the PC gaming scene by storm. The game was influential on a level that is hard to fathom in today’s industry; modern releases such as Counter-Strike 2, Apex Legends, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 still have little pieces of Quake code bouncing around in their game engines (for a fun rabbit hole, search up “Quake family tree.svg”). As for Wrath: Aeon of Ruin, it has more than a little: Wrath is the first game to be released in almost 20 years that is built entirely in Quake’s engine. While computing power, development tools, and general design knowledge have all marched dutifully on since 1996, the very same internals power this 2024 release.

Using the Quake engine to develop a game with modern sensibilities is an unequivocal restraint, even as those same sensibilities seem to be trending back toward the past. That Wrath, in the state of its release, works at all is a technical achievement, let alone that it works pretty much flawlessly. I experienced no bugs graphical or otherwise during my playthrough; it is clear that much of the lengthy development was spent achieving a level of polish rivaling not only Wrath’s inspirations, but its contemporaries as well. There are a bevy of graphical options such that you can essentially paint the game—to your liking—as a 90s-era Quake sequel or a modernized tribute. In one forum thread asking about players’ preferred settings, developer KillPixel Studios slyly responded “I use ReSade [sic] and HD texture packs because the pixels are old and ugly :(“

KillPixel’s—and more broadly, the indie boomer shooter scene’s—infatuation with both the look and feel of the Quake games to the point of hero worship is well-documented. 3D Realms, Wrath’s publisher, brought onto the project a number of Quake modders, mappers, and modelers familiar with both that game and its development tools. The result is a game that, to quote Jeremiah ‘KillPixel’ Fox, “draws heavily from the combat of DOOM, the interactivity of Duke Nukem 3D, the spatial awareness of Quake, and the darker theme of Hexen.” And indeed, from the crunchy pixels to the radical guns to the demonic enemy hordes (to the framerate sophomorically capped at 666) and beyond, Wrath bleeds its 90s influence right through the computer monitor.

But Wrath is far from a game stuck in the past. The array of ridiculous weapons, alternate fire modes, trapped item pickups, and entire hordes spawning from thin air all call to mind 2000s horde shooter offerings such as Serious Sam and Painkiller. Its rogue’s gallery of bold, identifiable foes and entirely avoidable damage reflect the more modern design trends codified by heavy-hitters like DOOM Eternal and even Ultrakill. These deft design decisions paint a picture of a team of designers that has kept a close pulse on their target market over the course of their “development hell.” But, profoundly, Wrath’s unspoken biggest influence isn’t a ‘90s action game. It isn’t even a first-person shooter. It’s Dark Souls.

There are two things that anybody familiar with modern boomer shooter trappings will notice immediately about Wrath: Aeon of Ruin: it’s lack of a quicksave feature, and its ridiculously, maximalistically long levels. These two elements have drawn the ire of players and critics alike both before and after the game’s release. Terms like “exhausting”, “tedious”, even “long-winded” have been thrown around regarding the pacing of the game. In my own original review, penned in frustration after a casual three-hour opening session with the game ended in having completed—by the skin of my teeth—about two-and-a-half levels, I wrote that “I love this game in the way that a parent unconditionally loves their disappointing child.” The one-two punch of navigating a seemingly-endless labyrinth, AND each death costing valuable minutes of game-time now spent retreading the same ground and fighting the same battles, is enough to make every death brutal. For those playing the game like Quake, having played Quake, and expecting 2024’s Quake II 2 in the Quake engine, these deaths throw water onto the sapling of exasperation that is planted as soon as you see the first level’s enemy count of 377 (for reference, the entire first episode of Quake, consisting of eight levels, has 354 enemies on normal difficulty).

When you start playing the game like Dark Souls (having played Dark Souls), it will click. Maybe immediately. In that game, progress is broken up by checkpoints known as bonfires. When you safely defeat (or run past) all of your enemies to the next bonfire, you can rest there, saving your progress to this physical location and restoring your character’s health. Wrath uses this system explicitly with its shrines—when you step under the canopy of one of these gazebo-like structures, your screen flashes, your health replenishes, and a save file is stamped to this spot in the level.

Wrath makes an addition to this system that is at once interesting and controversial: soul tethers. Essentially, the game has three ways to save: autosave (performed automatically by the game when entering a level via one of the portals in the hub—essentially as a failsafe), shrines (checkpoint/bonfire equivalent), and soul tethers (a somewhat-common consumable item that can be placed down to create a save, separate from that created by the shrine). By three ways to save, I mean to say three separate ways to save. These three save files exist for your game in tandem, allowing you to reload from the previous level entrance, the previous shrine visited, OR the previous soul tether placed, at any time. This is an intelligent design decision in that it prevents the player from “soft-locking” themselves completely in the way you might in a conventional boomer shooter: by exclusively using the quicksave feature until you trap yourself in an unwinnable scenario, hours removed from your previous “hard save.” In theory, it prevents locking yourself to a shrine as well; while these saves completely replenish your health it is still well possible to save at a shrine when starved of ammunition and surrounded unwinnably by a pack of enemies.

What this good stroke of design doesn’t diminish is the immediate frustration felt by myself and other connoissieurs of the genre at the prospect of being unable to quicksave. So what do the shrines and soul tethers accomplish? I mentioned before that video games use different “tricks” to invest the player. If you are willing to meet Wrath on its terms—which, so it happens, are also Dark Souls’s terms—you will find that its design lends itself to an experience you would be hard-pressed to find in an equivalent shooter game. At best, you would have to impose on yourself the level of tension and fear that Wrath: Aeon of Ruin integrally weaves with the language of its gameplay.

The enemies in this game aren’t just scary. They’re dangerous. They’re dangerous in a way that DOOM and Quake enemies are not, because they are every inch as threatening to your player character, but you, the player, have no option but to claw and scrape past them to your next checkpoint. They don’t just kill your character, they take your actual, real time away from you. The player’s inconvenience is a resource. The soul tether system, combined with the sheer length of each level’s layout, transforms Wrath from a standard fast-paced action game to a relentless gauntlet of endurance. Wrath’s foes are smartly designed with unique glowing colors and shapes and attack patterns—and you learn them. They become your enemies, in a way not usually denoted by the use of the term in gaming parlance. You learn to recognize their painstakingly-crafted, grotesque faces as though they are actors playing a role in each arena, in the same way that you would recognize Steve Buscemi’s face across different films.

Hidetaki Miyazaki, creator of the Souls franchise, once said about the perceived difficulty of his games: “I have no intention to make the game more difficult than other titles on purpose! It's just something required to make this style of game. . . .I've really been pursuing making games that give players a sense of accomplishment by overcoming tremendous odds.” He goes on to say that “having a certain level of difficulty adds value to those because they incentivise players to experiment more.” This is the heart of Wrath, the essence of its intention. The struggle that each location embodies is your struggle to grapple with. The shooting becomes personal.

The locations of the game are also your enemy. There are fifteen of them, three hub worlds with five levels apiece, and each with a little bonus boss encounter at the end. They are not only long and labyrinthine. They are unpredictable, in a way that Quake’s weren’t. Don’t be mistaken, there are still the hallmarks of level design that have come to define boomer shooters since the inception of the genre, especially the key-and-door rhythm of exploration and an over-reliance on corridors. But not all levels are built equally in Wrath. Some lean heavily into wide open spaces. Some are death traps to be defused with buttons and levers. Some have unique gimmicks. One memorable level in the second world is entirely nonlinear and requires the player to power a central obelisk by solving a platforming puzzle at the end of three separate gauntlets. The only thing you reliably know when you enter a new level is that it is going to be a lengthy endeavor—but even then, you don’t know just how long. You might blitz through a level with minimal resistance; my fastest level completion was 30 minutes on the dot in game time, but this does not account for time lost to deaths and subsequent reloads. You may find your entire gaming session—or even two of them—consumed with the challenge of scaling a metaphorical mountain, with every soul tether you pick up hastily nailed to the ground at your feet like pitons in a cliffside. This rhythm of gameplay, this frantic ebb and flow of adversity, this “mountain”, is entirely foreign to Wrath’s genre, but part and parcel of the Soulslike experience it revels in.

I want to compare and contrast the levels of Wrath with those of another first-person shooter renowned for its lengthy levels and lack of saves: DOOM 64. Let’s be clear that they are still on different playing fields; DOOM 64’s longest level is about as long as Wrath’s shortest. DOOM 64, in its original release on the Nintendo 64, did not have quicksave functionality and in fact saved progress only at the beginning of each level (I suspect this contributed to its reputation). DOOM 64’s levels, from the second one all the way to the twenty-eighth final level (disregarding secrets), follow, without fail, a strict formula: go to the red key, go through the red door, find a button to reveal the yellow key, go to the yellow key, go to the yellow door, find a button to reveal the blue key, go to the blue key, go through the blue door, find a button to reveal the exit, go to the exit. If this sounds tedious only because I wrote it out tediously, allow me to append my reassurances that it is equally tedious to play through, even with the quicksave functionality offered by the more recent re-release of the game. There is no mystery or suspense in these levels. Present here is the same risk of losing your real-world time to an in-game death, in a general sense, but there is no nonstop action, no push and pull, no scaling of a mountain. Each DOOM 64 level flatly presents the same challenge—a DOOM level—differing only in terms of layout and enemy placement. It’s like defusing the same bomb twenty-seven times, each time with some variable number of wires to prune.

If you love video games because of DOOM or Quake, Wrath: Aeon of Ruin gets a tepid recommendation from me to you. If you love video games because of video games (and also Quake), it would be irresponsible for me not to whole-assedly recommend this game. Even if you don’t finish it—and truthfully, many won’t—you will take something valuable away from it. I would imagine it to be impossible to play Wrath for any significant period of time and not form a strong opinion about it. About its pacing, its items, its sprawling labyrinths, its shrines. It is a video game that invites conversation in a way that DUSK and Ion Fury do not, because it dares to step outside of the skin of the forefather that it literally wears.

I love Wrath: Aeon of Ruin. I love it like a child I’m proud of. It’s one of my favorite shooters of this or any year. I encourage you to let your guard down, let yourself feel the ways that this game makes you feel while you play it. Tucked away in the game settings is an option to allow infinite saving. Use it, if you like. It’s your copy of the game. I won’t rattle on about the “intended” experience of playing a video game. If the developers hadn’t added this feature, it likely would have been modded in within hours of release. You won’t be robbing yourself of a good time by using it, but you will be robbing yourself of something pretty damn unique. Playing on the normal difficulty, I had a truly transcendent experience in the level Shadow Pantheon. This is where my doubts about a soulslike boomer shooter washed away and I let this video game put the fear of God in me. I finally felt Wrath in my bones and reveled in the tidal struggle between man and demon. I finally got it.

Wrath is the real Quake II.

In most ways, the game is just pretty good.

There are 9 weapons, all with alt-fires, separate ammo types (meaning no weapon gets superceded), and large differences in how they operate. Great.
Unfortunately, they all feel just a tiny bit too weak, the feedback when hitting enemies is underwhelming, most of the alt-fires aren't too useful, a lack of weapon wheel or even ammo display means you spend a lot of time just scrolling through them to keep track of your resources, and the effort put into making them all useful for the entire game resulted in the arsenal feeling fairly flat. There's no weapon you get to use as a treat, you're never stuck with a gun that's difficult to use for a certain situation, no gun is particularly hard to incorporate into your fights. It's solid and just varied enough, but not too exciting.

The enemy designs are good. There are different types of attacks and projectiles they use, different types and speeds of movement, and the encounters are mostly well designed.
On the flip side: some enemy types outstay their welcome, none have weak points worth aiming for, and none are weak to particular weapons or require very specific strategies. Taking damage also staggers some enemies, but the mechanic is pretty annoying due to its inconsistency.
Oh, and I'm not the biggest fan of how they behave - most enemy types keep attacking you for a really, really long time without taking a break, as long as you don't break the sightline. That means there's no organic rhythm to the combat that you might find in many modern games that like putting you up against overwhelming numbers of foes.

This "good, but not quite there" pattern is applicable to other aspects of the game, like the save system (it's pretty unique, but doesn't lead to anything interesting in practice) and movement (it's fast and the melee weapon's dash allows for some rad platforming, but the physics completely fall apart on sloped and bumpy surfaces).
However, the real draw of this title is in the level design. It feels like the levels were made by someone who started Quake mapping in '96 and simply never stopped.

The maps are very large and have impressively elaborate layouts, great attention to detail, strong art direction, good encounter design, tons of secrets, and opportunities for small skips, optimisations or sequence breaks around every other corner.
If anything, the levels feel a bit too ambitious at times - the freedom to sequence break can mess up some spawn triggers, levels take a pretty long time to finish, the amount of secrets can cause you to explore so thoroughly that you sequence break on accident a lot, and because there's so much to find, the actual rewards you get have to be pretty mild to avoid breaking the game's balance.

Still, if you love pre-Half-Life FPS level design, this is probably where that style has reached its peak.

WRATH might still be in Early Access, but there's a lot to say about its excellent art, its daring rationing of saves, and it's deceivingly poor level and enemy design.

I say deceivingly poor because the guns, levels, and enemies feel so good -at first- that you might not notice on higher difficulties. Enemies are visually interesting and ferocious. Levels are lovingly detailed, daunting, and intricately brought to live. The weapons are unique, clear to use, and generous with their screen time (you'll be using all of them often). As far as first impressions go, Wrath does well.

However, the actual play of these levels starts to fall off pretty quickly. Levels a huge and detailed and feature many interesting nooks and crannies, but are surprisingly linear. There are swooping, looping, serpentine paths through most levels, and the game will make you traverse them in their entirety. There are many sections where the player will travel a great distance, fight hordes of monsters, and spend many resources to ultimately move only a few feet forward. The player's progression speed relative to how much danger they have to go through is very slow.

Despite having quite a few lovingly rendered and presented enemies, Wrath relies on only a small handful, and how these enemies get used is surprisingly boring. Wanna jumpscare players? Heretics. Wanna force high-risk close-range situations? Heretics. Wanna snipe the player from far away? Heretics. In combination with poor enemy pathing logic and an over-reliance on enemy groups (Heretics and Stricken usually appear in groups of 3-5 and 1-3, respectively, despite their large threat and resource cost), it feels like 20%-25% of enemies in Wrath simply wait by a corner for the player to walk through before mauling them. Enemies are well suited to their level locations for killing the player, but not necessarily for a fun and interesting game experience.

Both of these problems are compounded heavily by the game's limited save system. I respect the absolutely gigantic balls needed to publish such a system, and I think Wrath's Soul Tethers are one of the better executions of limited saves. Giving the player so much control over their ability to save allow players to choose what fights, what checkpoints, and what landmarks matter to them. And Soul Tethers aren't really that rare either, so it rarely feels like it's impossible to save.

The issue with Soul Tethers (other than the standard accessibility issues of not being able to exit the game when needed) is that it amplifies play-session length. The large, meandering levels fade into grueling slogs when the player feels that they're not allowed to stop. Soul Tethers can only be regained by making more progress, so a player's only way out of having to play is to continue playing. Players don't make slow, footdragging progress to objectives, players make slow, footdragging progress to getting to move on with their day. Players don't get ambushed to death and lose progress, they get ambushed to death and lose all the work they didn't even want to do in the first place to leave. Soul Tethers exaggerate Wrath's main issues because they add extreme risk and stakes to every single fight the player engages in.

I will say that the levels are absoultely beautiful. I haven't seen boomshoot crunch combined will genuine level detail in such a unique and complete way before. If anything, Wrath's gigantic and inspiring levels make play feel like a genuine adventure. The colossal challenge presented to you feels daunting to face, but not insurmountable.

Given that Wrath's issues are deeply built into its already huge (and I'd assume complex) levels and core mechanics, I doubt the issues I have with it will improve by the time this game is out of Early Access. But, Early Access is Early Access, so time may tell a different story. I guess we'll see.