Indie games frequently look at the past for inspiration. It’s why we have so many SNES-era two-dimensional platformers and Metroidvanias. And for as much as Axiom Verge was like Metroid, Project Warlock is like the original Doom. It’s aiming its double-barrelled shotgun squarely at first-person shooters from the mid-1990s where you’re never reloading and never not sprinting. Project Warlock embraces those influences to craft an arcadey, nostalgic throwback with satisfying gunplay that proves why those games were so inspirational in the first place.

Read the full review here: https://www.gamerevolution.com/review/448201-project-warlock-review-a-super-shotgun-loaded-with-nostalgia

Using single floors (mostly) and right angles only in the map design Project Warlock invokes Wolfenstein as its core base of influence rather than Doom/Duke/Quake etc. and in doing so, creates a game that is delightfully simple and extremely compulsive. Each chapter is split into four groups of levels and then a boss and you have to clear these with a limited amount of lives - no quicksaves! - to progress. Experience points from kills and finding secrets let you level up your magic abilities and weapons, eventually gaining some seriously OTT firepower, is a nice loop that keeps things interesting for the duration. Very little fat on this one, which although means few unique ideas it is mostly killer from start to finish.

The genesis shooter and dungeon crawler stitched with talent and love.

And then you get to level 4.
and then you die.
and then you go back to the title screen.
oh my god, the rogue-like shit it all

This twisted craft of levels did not need a rogue-like approach, since the construction of the video game itself, in theory, should stand on its own

A high 3, though: this is a surprisingly good first effort for a young programmer, taking the classic flat FPS a la Wolfenstein 3D and expanding on it with new weapons, better enemy variety and magic while keeping the large enemy counts and lots of secrets.

It's got a few rookie blunders like some poor optimisation (I had to run it in Low detail on an RTX 2080) and some balacing issues but looking at the Steam page for PW2 I can see that these are all known, and in hand. Can't wait.

Great buy at three pounds or so on the Steam sale. Give it a go if you need to shoot some stuff.

Now this is some quality! Music? Great. Art? Great. This big-ass axe I found? Great.

The progressive character leveling and lives system push very hard in the Arcade-trope direction, and while I think that's a super interesting concept to pursue, Project Warlock doesn't quite capitalize on it.

Upgrade and leveling decisions are permeant, and some of them are quite bad. This wouldn't be a problem, since they reset on game reset, but a game reset isn't common enough on normal (Hard or lower) difficulties for this to come up, so it only really shines in Hardcore.

Trouble with Hardcore is that it's an ironman. I don't like ironman modes in general, and even with Project Warlock's bite-size campaign, it is to play in one sitting, so a death at almost any point will feel like a frustrating waste of time.

But, ya know, the actual game is still good.

Wolfenstein 3D with lots of hectic chaos, gore, beautiful pixel art and a leveling and upgrade system for its massive arsenal of guns and spells. If that sounds good to you, go in without fear.

You level up by killing enemies, collecting treasure and finding secrets, which usually contain upgrade tokens you can spend on unlocking new spells and forking each gun into two possible upgrades: want your double barrel shotgun to become a quad barrel shotgun, or do you prefer adding a napalm effect to each shell? Want your laser gun to become a laser rifle or a devastating railgun, and so on?

Leveling nets stat tokens which can be spent on melee damage, health, ammo capacity and spirit, which regulates your mana reserve as well as the MP cost and potency of your spells. Every five levels you get one perk token, which unlocks powerful passive bonuses with stat requirements, a few examples being one that lets you walk though enemies and never be stuck in a corner, or one that makes you move faster, or receive an extra random stat point for each level up. There is serious play style customization here, which creates replay value.

It even includes an endless horde mode for when the 8-10 hour campaign is done, although it is little more than a perfunctory afterthought: it's a single map with a very limited enemy roster, no spells and a fraction of the available weapons. Its drops are so incredibly random that making it anywhere into this mode is little more than a roll of the dice: you will drop very little health and hundreds of ammo boxes for weapons that you will never have, along with mana bottles which would fuel spells that are not available. I reached wave 30 before calling it and it was so incredibly easy by that point, without any higher level enemies ever spawning in, that it was going absolutely nowhere. It feels like the mode is only there to tick a box since every other boomershooter has an endless mode after Dusk had one.

From a presentation standpoint, enemies are well drawn and highly varied 2D sprites which are also beautifully animated, though you'll be excused for not noticing, due to the absolute chaos most levels will throw at you. The design of the levels themselves is largely straight out of Wolfenstein, with mostly right angles and a deliberate lack of verticality. This is never a problem, as the game is built around enemy encounters and ambushes rather than complex exploration.

There are boss encounters and these vary a bit in quality: while they're always a visual spectacle, their difficulty curve is all over the place: the second boss is pure chaos with plenty of splash damage and minons spawning in but the following ones are much easier affairs where proficient circle strafers will have a hard time getting hit. These would have definitely needed a bit more tweaking to make them more challenging.

Of particular note is its permadeath mechanic: instead of featuring a typical save system, the game makes you tackle levels in batches of two, three and even four, only saving at the end of each batch. This is never a problem since levels can usually be completed in less than five minutes, ten if secret hunting. If you die you lose a life, which is detracted from your total amount, and if you run out entirely, your run is over. You can however choose to not spend any lives and just start the level batch over, so the system is not too intrusive and highly adaptable to player preference.

On paper an interesting idea but in practice it wasn't balanced all too well: the arsenal is so powerful that the game feels a bit too easy on normal, meaning you'll likely get to the end with 20+ lives to spare. Higher difficulties ramp up to higher challenge and even unreasonable odds on the highest setting, in which permadeath happens after a single fail state.

All weapons sound suitably punchy and the war cries and meaty splattering sounds of the enemies are visceral, though the music is uneven and tends too loop a bit too much, resulting annoying here and there. Luckily it's easy to turn it down or off entirely in levels where it happens to grate on you ears.

Project Warlock is a fun shooter that can be played in short bursts and offers plenty of satisfying action. Highly recommended to retro shooter fans.

So, I was all the way up to the Episode 4 boss, playing on Standard difficulty, just having a grand time. I LOVED this game, I was having a blast. And then I lost all my lives to the Episode 4 boss.

Know what happens when you lose all your lives?

FUCK YOU THAT'S WHAT. YOU START FROM SQUARE FUCKIN' ONE AGAIN. KISS ALL YOUR UPGRADES, SPELLS, AND PERKS GOOD-FUCKIN'-BYE.

It's like someone made a delicious, massive spread with all your favorite foods and more. But then, some psycho runs in from off the street, jumps on the table, and just shits all over the food with projectile diarrhea.

Why on EARTH did they think it was a good idea to put in a god-forsaken lives system?
WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

Fuck this game with a goddamned rusty anchor.

This Wolf-like tries to mix rogue-lite with a fast shooter, in what it does, tries really hard to be punitive to players. Project Warlock can seem like a waste of your time when faced with its Game Over screen, as the game forces you to restart your playthrough from step one. Surely, there could have been a better way to challenge players.
Graphics are merely disappointing, the game looks mismatched in style, trying to mix elements of newer games with retro games; its dynamic lightings look out of place, as well as certain textures, being at odds with the two-dimensional cardboard sprites. Robots, pharaohs, knights, body horrors - it seems the developers could not settle for a thematic for their games, it's all there nonetheless. All in all, the experience felt unnatural in one too many aspects to be enjoyable.

Project Warlock is another one of the many boomer/retro/throwback FPS I've been playing through. So far it's the first FPS of recent memory to take most of its inspiration from Wolfenstein 3D. While this leads to some impressive pixel art and sprites, it also takes a hit in the level design as there's only so much you can do with strictly horizontal Wolf 3D levels.

The game consists of 5 episodes which take place in different settings, and in each episode there are 5 chapters which usually have 2 to 4 individual levels each which can be completed pretty quickly, hence the reason for the game having over 60 levels to begin with.
Other pros of PW include the soundtrack and the upgrade system, which adds a level of experimentation to the game. Each weapon can be upgraded to one out of the two given choices through unlock points scattered throughout the levels. You can also upgrade your character statistics, such as melee strength, ammo capacity, mana capacity (known as spirit) and health. You earn upgrade points for your character through levelling up which can be done by collecting gold and killing enemies. Occasionally you will get a player perk point which you can use to buy a perk if you have reached a certain level for a particular stat.
Most of the weapons in the game feel great to use. The shotgun with its full auto upgrade can shred through hordes and the super shotgun can reliably delete enemies in a few shots. The minigun is also good at shredding through anything that gives you a dirty look. Dynamite and the rocket launcher are great explosive additions to the arsenal as the screenshake and gore effects make them hit even harder. The flamethrower can easily melt enemies in a second, making it great for those many sudden monster closets that appear later on when the game is done messing around and literally wants to murder you for collecting a key.

However, there are aspects of this game that I'm mixed on. One of them is the balancing for spells and weapons. In a game like this which is littered with upgrades for almost every aspect of the player, there is bound to be options that are objectively superior. Even if you disregard the upgrades, some weapons in your arsenal go mostly unused throughout the game due to how lacklustre they are. The pistol is only good if you upgrade it to a .50 Magnum and even then you still won't be using it a lot. There's also a crossbow, a laser rifle and a staff I didn't use a lot because the minigun, flamethrower and shotgun, all with the right upgrades, makes these weapons useless. The spells are even worse, as there's only two spells that are just objectively better than the rest, those being the freezing spell and the lightning spell. The lightning spell is ridiculously overpowered if you've upgraded your mana as it becomes so good at clearing rooms that the BFG-9000 equivalent of the game becomes overshadowed.
There's also some questionable level design and enemy placement. The 4th episode plays like a complete mess as the game throws so many projectile and explosive enemies in the cramped Wolf 3D style levels that the damage is unavoidable. There's also a surprisingly high number of levels which start with you getting attacked by a horde of enemies before you even have time to react.
The game also suffers from glitches and performance issues. Don't be fooled by the game's looks, your frame rate will tank in the more hectic battles, which is just completely unacceptable for a game that looks the way it is. Lastly, I encountered a fair amount of bugs and glitches. One of the bugs included a secret switch which I could repeatedly press to exceed the secret count for the level as it logged a secret for each time I pressed it. The more common bug I came across was elevators and moving floors just cause me to fall off the map. I could even easily replicate this bug falling through the map and it amazes me that this wasn't patched.

Overall, Project Warlock is an easy recommend for anyone who wants to try another boomer shooter in the always expanding line-up of throwback FPS games, just don't expect to be able to max out all your upgrades and stats in a single playthrough, this game is honestly perfect in length and would only take 5-6 hours to beat.