SÓ PRODEUS HEIN?

Prodeus é frenético como outros jogos do mesmo gênero porém o game não sai muito da sua "zona de conforto".

Prodeus é um jogo que arrisca pouco e acaba não conseguindo se diferenciar de jogos do gênero que já existiam a 20 anos atrás.
Ele traz uma estética meio genérica (Parece um Doom clássico em HD com gráficos neon), uma trilha sonora totalmente padrão e uma narrativa irrelevante num nível que você nem entende direito o que tá rolando.

Porém como nos jogos clássicos antigos do gênero o game acerta principalmente no seu level design e numa jogabilidade familiar.

O level design se complementa a loja do game. Alguns segredos das fases contém uma moeda própria do game (Tem muitas delas em determinadas fases). Além de servirem para comprar armas, o jogo oferece algumas habilidades para compra, como o pulo duplo por exemplo.

O jogo consegue ser interessante mas não significa que é um baita jogo...Tá aí um dos jogos já feitos...

PRÓS(deus):
- Level design muito bom.
- Armas legais.

CONTRAS:
- Jogo "seguro" demais, não se arrisca muito em nada.
- Um pouco repetitivo demais.

I'm fuming. First BoundingBox mutilated what made secrets a compelling level design technique in the first place by changing most of them from powerups that aid in your completion of a level into a collectible shop currency. Then they have the audacity to start locking these currency locations behind powerups stuck in the ingame shop. What makes this extra fucking obnoxious is that Prodeus is so mind numbingly easy that only scoreplay has a hope of being compelling. Scoreplay that you cannot effectively engage with until you've 100%ed the game because there are no leaderboard categories and these powerups and unlockable weapons provide players with new advantages. The utter incompetence of design on display here is genuinely fucking infuriating. There's not even any ingame communication to aid the player in figuring out how the actual scoring system even WORKS. It's the laziest possible implementation I've seen in a long time.
So now I'm paranoid about wasting my time in a level searching for ore that I might just not be capable of collecting without the double jump. This doesn't compel me to explore thoroughly, I'm just going to look up a 100% guide because this is fucking stupid. No part of the experience is enhanced by having a shop system. Even the shop is badly designed. Rather than a quick to access menu it's a physical time wasting fluff "level" that requires a loading screen. Every level suffers from a unity loading screen. Even restarting them.

The entire production is riddled with cripplingly idiotic decisions. Community maps are locked behind a third-party account. Unlike in any of the actually well designed id shooters that Prodeus is unimaginatively aping.
Nexus Points are Vita Chambers and Vita Chambers were never good. There's no in level saving systems because the devs genuinely couldn't figure out how to implement one into Unity. I'm serious. That's their excuse. There's supposed to be an update "soon" that finally implements saving.
Nexus Points mean that there is absolutely no middle ground between "this game is mindless and uninteresting garbage" and "merely barely okay on max difficulty if you always full restart after death". Speaking of difficulty. It's the lazy boring method of tweaking enemy HP and Damage values by percentages. It's the same low enemy counts regardless. I think maybe they also get more accurate? But I can't be bothered to test because Very Hard was already too much of a snooze so I lack a solid point of reference. The devs claim that they designed Prodeus around "medium". l o l

What's most frustrating is that every part of Prodeus that isn't unique to Prodeus can be some occasionally fine Doom action. It looks good. The guns are fine. The music is pretty good. The levels are "okay".
But every single design decision that deviates away from the source material of Doom only serves to make the game worse. Even the map system is bad. Having an agonizingly slow scroll speed.

Prodeus will never be better than "just fine", and even then only under extreme self imposed challenge.
- - -
Now that the "Prodean" enemies are being introduced more regularly there's been an extreme difficulty spike, however when it comes to dying in a split-second from the trickier encounters near the end of a long level I just wish I could have a normal checkpoint for my first run.
- - -
Yeah the deeper I get into the campaign the angrier I get. The nexus points are a serious problem and it's absurd the devs left early access with them implemented even though they're the most common complaint levied against the design. Dying in a split second near the end of 20 minute mission is awful, but continuing from a nexus point feels cheap. I detest every single defender of Prodeus who claims that any of this is fine because it's a "score attack game" meanwhile the devs have carelessly slapped every single difficulty onto the same leaderboard and effectively declared that you aren't allowed to play the "real" Prodeus until you find all of the worthless macguffins. Every single time I begin to enjoy a level it's ruined by my hyperfixation on just how irredeemably awful the overarching design is. I'm torn on refunding it because I can see that it does eventually become fun.
I just realized precisely why I hate this. Prodeus is the Euroshmup of FPS games. It fails to understand score design. Implements a worthless shop mechanic, and in the spirit of giving the player a health bar just makes the player immortal. Dying is such a measly score penalty that you can often see people who didn't pull off a deathless run on the max difficulty placing in the top 50 spots. Fucking unforgiveable, and I wish to reiterate, there is NO ingame indication of how well you're doing scorewise until after you finish a level, and I only believe that headshots contribute to score because a random forum post claimed they did.
This entire game needs an overhaul.
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I gave up on performing deathless Ultra Hard clears after the prodean enemies became common occurances. The "elite" units among them can be just mean on Ultra Hard. Which is especially frustrating given the average length of the lategame missions.
The penultimate mission was really good though (no prodeans). Now if only the rest of the game was also good. The game still feels unfinished. Not all of the weapons were properly implemented. You never acquire anything for the second and third energy weapon slots.

Prodeus is a fun Doomer shooter that I think feels like a mixture of classic DOOM and NuDOOM. There are like 15 weapons, and I cycled between most of them regularly. There is a 3D map that shows the whole level (gotta get the auto map for the level first) and thats really cool, but I do find it very overwhelming to look at so I didnt. I think the main complaint I have is that for like 50% of the game (the beginning half), the maps are mostly same-y and only does the later half switch it up. Also you don't get another punch/melee weapon. The weapon chart makes it seem like you could get one, but thats probably so it looks uniform, disappointed me.

The game also has a built in map editor and community section so you can just play community maps and its very simple to do so thats neat. The tag searching functionality sucks though.

You know how FPS games used to be called "DOOM clones"? Well, this is the first FPS in 25 years that's actually first and foremost a DOOM clone rather than an FPS.

Not as distinct as other boomer shooters that come out recently, and certainly doesn't hold a candle to wonderful New Blood catalogue of games. 75% of the game is visually very brown and red, even if levels are different. Speeds up by the end with icy, space, and church levels, but they're each like a level as opposed to the factory that's going on for most of the game, for some reason.

Wish it had more of an identity, but it still looks and sounds quite good and has wonderful punchy combat.

I forgot to log this when I beat it lmao

Pretty fun boomer shooter! I feel some levels are kinda whatever and almost feel samey to an extent, sometimes being cluttered and claustrophobic for some unfair deaths, but others feel more tightly designed and have a better sense of fairness to it imo. The enemies are nice and varied but specific ones I seem to have more issue trying to kill, especially the more enhanced Prodeus units which are more annoying.

That said, it is a really fun boomer shooter especially with a friend and it's got a good flow to it's combat and platforming.

I wrapped the campaign on this retro-FPS yesterday and am pretty torn on the whole package. It was clearly initially inspired by DOOM 2016, but seems to evolve into its own thing by the end of it. Level design is extremely inconsistent throughout, with the first 10 or so levels being quite dull before opening up to some genuinely great Tech Bases. Early on in their development, the team picked up Dragonfly, a very well-regarded DOOM mapper to work on levels. I don't know the level breakdown, but there's such a stark shift in map quality about a third of the way in that I wouldn't be surprised if that's where Dragonfly stepped in and took the reins.

Unfortunately Prodeus kinda fumbles a bit towards the end, with a weird insistence on swapping out actual ammo pickups in later levels with little pads that just passively refill your ammo infinitely? I really don't like this change, as it basically means that you can use your rocket launcher/grenade launcher or any other scarce-ammo weapon to your hearts content in the back stretch. If used sparingly - this could've been a cool cathartic moment, but unfortunately it just comes across as kinda bland.

My other big gripe with the game is the enemy roster and encounter design. They do better towards the end of the game, but on Normal difficulty, the encounters are never protracted enough to make them feel worthwhile. Their idea of ambushes throughout the whole campaign is dropping a few Imp-equivalents and calling it a day. It's just super limp. They borrow almost their entire enemy roster from DOOM, but I don't think they do as good a job of differentiating enemy roles as was done in their inspiration. In DOOM, every enemy type serves a very specific purpose, and they just never realize that in Prodeus.

Also, this is a minor gripe, but the dynamic music paired with short encounters means that tracks almost ALWAYS end too soon. It's WEIRD. Other than that, the game's presentation is great. It looks phenomenal - I really like the chunky pixel look they have going, and while it definitely suffers from visual clarity, the ways that enemies explode like viscera balloons is immensely satisfying in the moment.

Overall, it's a better game than it initially appears, but really doesn't stick the landing. I probably wouldn't recommend it to folks that aren't genre diehards, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited for the upcoming DLC

You know how sometimes a game gets remade and it looks exactly how you remember the original looking, but then you look at the original and the remake looks WAY better in nearly every way? Prodeus is that for Doom. That's the short of it.

The long of it is that this is one of the best bomber shooters of the last 5 years. It doesn't lean into movement as much as something like Dusk, Ultrakill, or Turbo Overkill. When I say it's like the original Doom, it is almost just as grounded gameplay-wise. But what it lacks in any focus on platforming or areal combat it gains in satisfying secret hunting and gunplay. Not only are secrets well hidden, but many of them are easily found, but are behind high ledges and far jumps that later abilities will allow you access to.

And the gunplay itself is just SO good. It's chunky in the way shooters of the Build engine were in the early 90s, but enemies just POUR our blood to an absurd degree. Even the smallest dudes shoot geysers that literally end up dripping from the ceiling. I'm no gorehound, but the extreme violence makes the gunplay feel all the more satisfying, with rooms and arenas being covered in various fluids at the end of every combat.

And the game does look like Doom, but it's not strictly pixel-based. I read somewhere that the game uses 3D models but puts pixels around them. Its effect makes it so that each side of every model looks a bit like a 2D image, but has multiple 2D images to show for each possible angle you look at a model at. It's hard to explain, but striking as soon as you see it. But beyond this novelty, there are a lot of really neat visual setpieces to see throughout the game, and despite skipping though all of the text and ignoring the story, these visual flairs were more than enough to keep me engaged until the end.

There's nothing all too unique about the game mechanically, or artistically, outside of what novelty is gained by sticking so much to its old-school shooter roots. But it does a lot with this tried and true formula, and I was very happy to eat this whole bag of comfort food down to the last crumb.

I cannot tell you what Prodeus is about or any plot details; the game is narratively spartan. But goddamn does it feel amazing to play. There were certain shootouts where the entire room, from floor to ceiling, turned red (or blue) with blood. This game has some of the most satisfying gore, it is perfectly thick and red and leaves trails in the environments; tasteful as fuck. Despite certain guns being numerically better than others and the sheer quantity of them, I still used almost the entire arsenal in each level. Each gun is useful in a very specific case and the developers do a good job at varying enemy placement and environment layouts to ensure that there each gun is given its time to shine. Furthermore, the sounds of each gun are titanic. Certain guns boom, others whoosh or thock. When shooting different guns in quick succession, the guns create an unmistakable rhythm of death.

Prodeus is a very light game: pop in, play a couple levels, quit. It really does not have enough material, story or variety beyond its (admittedly rad) visual gimmick to sate the price tag, but if you see it in a bundle, it is worth giving a shot.

É.. maneiro, a estética toda é muito agradável, a gameplay é tranquila, dinâmica, mas tem muitos tropeços.
Repetitivo demais, o final é bem anticlimático, o ritmo não é lá essas coisas, não tem bosses, as armas são meio repetitivas.
Tipo, esse jogo foi pós Doom Eternal, eles REALMENTE quiseram deixar o pulo duplo e o dash pra comprar na loja pra forçar uma rejogabilidade pra pegar moedas pelo jogo e comprar na loja.. Eram necessários 50 colecionáveis pra pegar o pulo duplo e 70 ao todo pra pegar o dash, resultado: zerei sem o dash.
Escolhas duvidosas, mas como um todo, foi uma boa experiencia, vale a jogatina.

Prodeus is a retro (but not really) boomer shooter. It's fast and frantic with excellent feeling weapons and some great gibs. Expect to be zipping through ugly environments, finding secrets, picking up keycards to open gates, and, more often than not, exploding motherfuckers with giant shotguns.

The action ramps up as the game goes on, but the thirtieth level is very much like the first, and you're never really doing much except shooting things and turning them to mush. Having completed Doom Eternal earlier this year, this feels simplistic by comparison. Boomer purists who didn't get on with Eternal's more complex mechanics may see that as a positive, but I found it a little repetitive. It's also a bit too long - those thirty-odd levels start to drag towards the end, and with a game this intense, it can become overbearing; I found it difficult to devote an entire evening to it and have been playing a level or two here and there over the past month or so.

That simplicity, however, makes it easy to dip in and out of, and with its very forgiving checkpoint system (if you die you just respawn, the only penalty being to your end of level score, which I wasn't fussed about) it's a good game to have on the back-burner when you're in the mood for switching your brain off and basking in some good old fashioned ultraviolence.

As somebody who is usually quite critical of boomer shooters, Prodeus pretty much fits with how I want these kind of games to be; hard hitting, highly dynamic and varied shooters with a strong audiovisual character. But despite its unique qualities, Prodeus' fundamentals are a bit too reliant on its influences, to the point of limiting its potential.

First things first, this game simply looks amazing. The mix of classic Doom faux-3D style sprites and id Tech 4-esque 3D graphics never feels anything less than pleasing. It's very cool that they allow you to customize some aspects of the art style, like having 3D models or 2D sprites for the enemies. I also love the gore-y details, like blood and viscera dripping from splatters on the ceiling.

The dark, somewhat edgy atmosphere of the levels are supported quite well by the ambient soundtrack. The only part of the audiovisual experience that I don't enjoy is the metal soundtrack, which usually pops up in the more elaborate enemy encounters. These tracks are just not interesting enough.

The gameplay is as you would expect from a game like this. Run and dodge projectiles, avoid getting too close to melee enemies, pick the right weapon for the job, and try to maintain your accuracy as you move around. Prodeus particularly draws inspiration from Doom 2016, and it's very visible. Its enemy types, weapons, level design philosophy, and so on. It's not a bad thing to copy one of the most popular and influential shooter in modern times, but I really wished Prodeus had more original ideas to spice up its fundamentals. Sometimes it can feel like a merely neat-er version of Doom 2016, rather than being a new game.

I do appreciate how tight the main campaign is compared to its contemporaries. The individual levels feel more than distinct enough from each other, and it never feels like the game is just repeating the same tricks. For the most part, the pace and length of these levels are also very digestible, and most of them never overstays their welcome. It's also quite short, maybe no longer than 8 hours. Not to mention the absolute lack of intrusive non-fundamental elements, like story or lore.

I think a lot of boomer shooters overrate how good their gameplay loop really is, and end up boring me with just a bunch of uninspiring enemy encounters that feel endless. There's also a lot of them that design their exploration to be a bit too cryptic, and it would ruin the pace of the levels. Prodeus never does any of this, and it's nice to finally find a boomer shooter that fits me like a glove.

I still have to complain about the campaign's lackluster ending, but that's probably the only thing that's definitely bad about it. The quality of the levels themselves are not exactly mindblowing, but none of them are obviously bad. It's a consistently fun campaign overall.

As it stands, Prodeus' highly focused execution of its ideas are more than strong enough to carry itself above most of its peers. It's not original enough to set its own legacy, but it does solidfy the strength of its influences.

What would happen if you took Doom (1993) and Doom (2016) and fused them together with cosmic radiation? Prodeus might be as close as we ever get to an answer. The game casts you as a nameless warrior and drops you into a war between Order and Chaos. You’ll blast enemies across a range of faux lo-res environments, from decaying power plants and cities to frozen wastelands and orbital satellites.

Though the baddies you face primarily take their inspiration from Doom, other influences have also crept into the mix. Fireball chucking Xenomorphs appear in spades, and later you’ll encounter enemies that would fit in among the ranks of Starcraft’s Protoss. Why are all these mutants and monsters going berserk on you and each other? I never quite figured that part out, but the visceral action and joy of watching rival factions mow each other down more than made up for the lack of story.

Why sit back and watch enemies tear each other to shreds, though, when you could join the fun yourself? The action in Prodeus moves fast; the weapons look and feel great, and each has a secondary firing option to boot. The Shredders – dual SMGs – let you fire one with reasonable precision or unload both at once to pulverize aliens that get up in your face. Shotguns, meanwhile, come in multiple flavors – my preference is the Super Shotgun, which can fire four shells at once to drop nearly any monster, big or small. There are also rockets, grenades, energy weapons, and last but not least the Chaos Caster. The Caster’s primary firing mode is a lightning attack that leaps between nearby enemies, while its secondary fire option turns it into a sniper rifle.

Yes, I said sniper rifle. But make no mistake: You’ll never find yourself hunkering down in a foxhole and waiting for enemies to pop out of cover. Prodeus plays hard and fast, the level design always funneling you forward. There are few puzzles or mysteries to ponder over, unless you want to uncover all of the secrets.

Unfortunately, many secrets are only reachable with extra abilities – abilities you only unlock late in the campaign. Realizing that I wouldn’t be able to find all the hidden collectibles in a level on my first visit completely disincentivized me from hunting for them. There was nothing more depressing than spotting a precious chunk of ore only to realize that I wouldn’t be able to grab it without a double jump.

I do have a few other nitpicks. The controls on console are a bit wonky, even after tweaking. The game was clearly built for keyboard and mouse first. Also, the difficulty balance feels just a bit off. Using the respawn points makes the game too easy, but disabling them makes the later levels overly punishing. I wish there was a compromise between the two options.

All in all, though, Prodeus is a spectacular throwback FPS. It takes the frantic action of newer shooters and effortlessly blends it with the nostalgia of the 90s classics you know and love. Every aspect from the gameplay to the soundtrack oozes with style. The dissonant synthesized drone of the stage select music will stick in my memory for months if not years to come.

Prodeus is Doom 2016 without the glory kills nonsense. Kickstarted by a handful of ex-Raven Software and Irrational Games people, it's mechanically solid and has great music, but some baffling design decisions hamper its potential, namely overly spongy enemies, locking some of the best ugrades behind well-hidden secrets and, above all else, the fact that you essentially cannot die.

That's right, in every level except the arena that serves as a final boss, whenever your health reaches zero you instantly respawn out of a conveniently placed checkpoint, with full health and ammo and no penalty whatsoever beyond giving up some of your score, which serves no purpose beyond leaderboard placement.

When Prey did something less forgiving than that in 2006 people got incensed, when Bioshock did it one year later people dismissed it, and now that Prodeus does it nobody cares, despite the fact that it pretty much demolishes any semblance of challenge the game might present. All of the tension of combat is gone once you know you can just die and respawn and pick up where you left off, and it is, in fact, far more efficient to just die and respawn than it is to waste time and effort looking for health and ammo pickups. Usually the respawn points are in the same room as the big encounter that might kill you, so there really is no penalty to you losing.

How is combat then? It's good, as mentioned before it's Doom 2016 with the key difference that guns are designed to actually kill enemies, instead of putting them in a drowsy state for an unskippable Mortal Kombat fatality animation every few seconds. The gallery of monsters is precisely what you expect: zombie, shotgun zombie, fireball imp, chaingunner, chunky melee-oriented monster, kamikaze lost soul, flying blob that shoots fireballs, flying blob that vomits kaamikaze lost souls. It's Doom, except for how much of a damage sponge each enemy is. It takes two point blank shotgun shells or three headshots with the plasma rifle to down the most basic zombie and sometimes up to four for a shotgun zombie. This eats through your ammunition fast, especially considering the low max stocks (30 shells for your shotgun without a costly upgrade) and how high the fire rate is with certain weapons, especially the minigun, which can drain your ammo reserves in a matter of seconds. If there's something that both Doom and Serious Sam taught us is that economizing ammo is antithetical to the fun factor os a fast paced shooter like this and should never be a major concern. It is no surprise then that the most entertaining levels in Prodeus are those late games ones that contain ammo refill platforms, which removes the penny pinching needed to conserve your ammo and allows you to cut loose and have fun.

The arsenal is what you'd expect: pistol, shotgun with sniper alt fire, super shotgun, rocket launcher with grenade variant, plasma gun with the homing beacon alt fire from Resistance Fall of Man, railgun doubling as a tesla gun from Wolfenstein, plus a number of unlockable weapons you are unlikely to ever use, since they are locked behind the discovery of an ungodly amount of secrets around the levels, as are mobility upgrades such as double jump and airdash, as well as an ever so necessary bandolier to carry more ammunition. Both the plasma gun and super shotgun need to be unlocked, and you'll want to do so, as they are easily the best guns in the game, even though the way the latter was handled is bizarre to say the least: ever since Doom 2 introduced the super shotgun it's been a tradeoff between increased firepower vs double the consumption of ammo and slower reload, which didn't make the basic boomstick obsolete; here you have this quad barrel beast which can fire without delay, reloads faster and deals more damage per shot than the basic conterpart while firing the same amount of the same ammo (wrap your head around that one), plus it can discharge all barrels at once to deal massive damage to even the strurdiest of foes. There will be no reason to ever use the normal shotgun again, unless you need the precision alt fire, a role shared with multiple other guns.

Locking mobility upgrades behind secret hunting is a questionable choice, as many players might never find enough hidden tokens to afford them, thus missing out on the best the game has to offer in term of movement: when you're zipping around double jumping over acid pits and airdashing out of the way of incoming fire it's some of the finest moments a shooter can offer, too bad these are missable upgrades and as such the levels can't be designed with them in mind.

On the tecnical side, the game is less than stellar: while the game aims at a steady 60 frames even on consoles, performance is poor, with frequent and long load times, common frame drops around the 30fps mark and even occasional freezes lasting up several seconds, guaranteed to get you killed (don't worry though, remember: no consequence for dying...). The art style is bizarre to say the least: in the ocean of retro-themed shooters on the indie market, it is not uncommon to see intentionally low resolutions and low detail models and sprites, but Prodeus takes it to the next level by replacing all of the enemies with sprites that do not billboard like in most 1990s FPS, rather they can be viewered from sixteen different angles per level, meaning at eye level, from above and from below, which must heve been a massive amount to work to get working.

Unfortunately, for all that effort, the gimmick doesn't even look very good: stationary objects especially will jerk around unnaturallyas you strafe around them and I suspect this was not what the developers had intended for the visual effect. Not only that, but I can't think of a single 90s shooter that did this, so it doesn't even look authentic for what it pourports to mimic. Fortunately you can toggle an option which replaces all enemy sprites with polygonal models, which is an absolutely massive improvement, which sadly does not affect dropped weapons and item pickups.

There are around 30 levels in the base campaign, with a lot more content available for free in the workshop menu, thanks to a robust map editor. What comes with the base game is well designed, with very Quake-like multilayered fortresses and moon bases filled withs ecrets. It's great stuff, but easy to get lost in due to the flatness of the color scheme, usually a belend of brown and greys that ends up feeling doisorientating due to lack of signposting. Thankfully an 3D automap is present, which is composed of a low-poly version of the current level, which you can noclip through at will, to get your bearing that way.

In conclusion, Prodeus is a mixed bag: while the action is solid and frenetic, its acts of self-sabotage keep it from being a truly excellent shooter. Maybe if they reworked the difficulty to remove the instant respawns, increased damage output just a tad and optimized performance a bit more it could really be something special. Even so, it's a good retro shooter that is worth playing, especially if you were frustrated with the Doom reboots and wanted the same thing but without some of their most glaring flaws.

I really like this game. It's trying to look like a 90s Boomer Shooter but plays like Doom 2016. It's a combination of that really comes together nicely. I didn't like any of the weapons. They all felt slightly off. But the ending rivals Rage for most disappointing. It's probably worst to be honest. Rage got a cutscene that didn't make any sense. Prodeus gets a text box telling you you beat the game. I thought that maybe like the Boom Shoots of old there was some separate episodes available that wraps everything up. There isn't, games done. Baffling.