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.

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.

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.
- - -
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.

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.

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.

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.

quick note, i got this from @duhnuhnuh 's list of free steam keys. very nice of em. the only requirement was a review, which i already do. go look through it if theres anything you want. i see classic doom's still not taken, which i'd totally recommend.

peakdeus or poodeus?

i cant tell! seriously, this game is such whiplash for me. on one hand, its got the worst unlock system ive played in any shooter, has some of the same aesthetic problems as doom 2016, and also shares a lot of gripes that i have with doom 64. on the other, when the game fully leans into its strengths, and you get in a good groove, it rocks.

so first off, lets talk about the shitty shop system. try saying that 10x fast. in keeping with the classic doom tradition, theres a heavy emphasis on exploration of levels to find secrets and stuff. this means that the game's currency, ore, is scattered around levels and you have to find them to unlock certain guns and abilities. by itself, this wouldnt be a big issue. my issue comes from the fact of just how much ore you need to collect for these upgrades. for the SSG and energy gun, you need 15 ore each. if youre someone who likes exploring everything, you can probably get these within the first 5 or so levels. but for me, i prefer linearity in my shooters. so it took me about 75% of the first map to unlock. when i say first map i dont mean first level, theres a kinda dnd system where you have a mini guy that moves around a map to access levels. theres like 4 of these total in the game, 3 of which are relatively short. so when it takes me that long to unlock an energy gun/SSG that kinda pissed me off. whatever, ill just grind out the ore to get what im really after: the dash and double jump. after using a guide replaying many early levels to find all ore, i was able to get the SSG. great, just gotta replay like 5 more levels or so and ill have enough for the dash/double jump. except, thats not the case. those things cost more than the ssg/energy gun. this peeved me off. i decided fuck it, ill play the entire game like 2016 instead. because i didnt want to waste another hour replaying levels for vital tools of your moveset which should have been unlocked through gameplay.

note: the next paragraph had to be rewritten cuz i lost about 30 minutes of work on it. i don't like this draft as much as the initial but what can you do?

hell, even if they didnt, at least make them the first thing you can buy from the shop. when casually looking for ore, it took me about 12/22 levels to unlock the dash. that's way too long in a boomer shooter that clearly takes more from eternal/dusk than it does 2016 in its design. the level design in this game is weird tho. nothing in the game requires you to use the double jump or dash, but it's clearly begging you to use them. this puts it in a weird limbo, where the game ends up feeling incredibly easy, since most encounters are designed around only sprinting and shooting, but made significantly more fun when using the dash and djump. about 90% of levels i beat with 10 deaths or less, and about 50% of levels i beat with 5 deaths or less. i played on hard. the games also easy bc of the way respawning works. in most shooters, when you die the enemies of that encounter reset. the nexus points in prodeus make it so that if you kill it once, it stays dead. this whole system makes the game braindead and i wish encounters could simply reset with you. again though, this decision might have been made bc of how its the game's design doesnt rely on shop unlocks, so if someone collected zero ore, then it might be pretty difficult for them to get through encounters without the enemies staying dead. yet another reason the fucking dash and djump should have been unlocked in levels. the djump i had only unlocked before the penultimate level this leads to another thing. my muscle memory to use both the dash and djump was never developed due to the game not requiring you to use them, and also being incredibly short. by the time i was finally getting into a groove i was already basically done. this shit sucks, bc the game would probably be A LOT more fun if levels were fully designed around djump and dash. but idk, bc of the easy gameplay it leaves it feeling not satisfying.

there is one level that denies this philosophy, though. the "final boss". the final boss is just a huge gauntlet that kinda randomly ends and supposedly the story will get finished in the dlc. hopefully with a real boss too. anyway, the gauntlet requires you to move like there's no tomorrow, and is the only relatively challenging fight in the game due to no access to the nexus points. this fight is where the game shares a huge amount of dna with doom 64. in doom 64 the final fight is complete ass and i only beat it bc of spamming BFG shots at the end. here, the enemies are a bit more bearable once you get used to them, but even with the djump finally unlocked it was a bit of a struggle to find my footing in that fight, constant projectiles and hard to see whats what.





as for the gunplay, it feels incredible even with all these setbacks. not only do the guns feel powerful, which ill talk about later, but when you get into the groove with enemies its awesome fun. however, it does fall into that trap that many shooters experience. rocket spam, and no gameplay reasons to have most weapons. in the later half of the game, theres plenty of rocket spam, which if you know me youll know i hate in shooters, why make all these fucking weapons at all if in late game you just end up spamming rockets and shotgun? not every weapon needs a "set" purpose like in eternal, but at least something like ULTRAKILL where every weapon and every alt type of weapon has a fun use. like with ULTRAKILL its so fun to keep swapping and killing everything in crazy ways. in eternal you need to swap to stay alive. but in prodeus, i hardly see a use at all for the pistol past even the first level. i dont see a difference between using the energy blaster and the machine guns. i think the MGs are hitscan, but you rarely end up out of ammo to swap through everything. except a few cases where your ammo supply is bone dry and its incredibly hard to kill things. why do the fists exist? honestly they shoulda just made the pistol the default weapon with infinite ammo. i just dont see why half the weapons in the game exist. rocket spam does exist for a reason tho, and thats just cuz it still is fun as fuck to jump around the map shooting rockets, even if not the most engaging.

as for the ost, it really surprised me,seeing how im not the hugest hulshult fan(or so i thought, being how i didnt remember most tracks from his eternal dlc work or dusk). in reality, i found his work on prodeus insanely good. i think he just put a poor taste in my mouth with dusk bc that was mostly atmospheric stuff which i dont care for. i love reflections of violence off dusk. hes great here and i think its primarily because of the dynamic(? dunno if thats how to correctly describe it) ost in prodeus. you got your BORING atmospheric ambient tracks but they seamlessly transition into crazy good heavy metal tracks during fights. some favorites include cables and chaos, spent fuel, and dark matter. i definitely wanna give his doom eternal stuff another shot when i happen to replay it, whenever that is.

lets talk about the aesthetic. i mentioned in my first paragraph how it shared some problems with doom 2016's aesthetic. the aesthetic in that game is mostly just orange and brown, which leads most things looking samey. the same is true for prodeus, but the game has an ace up it's sleeve, the sprite work and sounds. the level of artistry to make every sprite at every angle is insane, i honestly think it cancels out how everything in this game is either red, blue, or black. like seriously the aesthetic rocks, cuz the sprites make it unique and stand out. thats not to mention the gore and blood effects which further make it stand out. in doom 2016 and esp eternal the gore was relatively cartoony and over the top, but in prodeus it's dripping with this edginess that isnt present in the doom games. it looks insanely good while you melt down rows of enemies with the machine guns... and dear god do they got the sound design on point, too. the reload noises for each weapons is great, and you feel the impact they bring. the energy gun, too. impact of every weapon is nice and meaty, the only one i didnt initially like was the SSG sfx, but it definitely grew on me.

i feel im going in circles now so i hope you can now see why im at an impasse with this game. i had a lotta fun at points, but at the same time, there's a lot holding it back from its true potential. i think im gonna give it an 8 for now, but could very well change.

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 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.

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.

A lot of great individual ideas that are sadly brought down by the full product.

The artstyle is incredible, with its beautiful pixelated sprites. The weapons might be the most unique I've seen in a boomer shooter, with every weapon being really fun to use.

However, the overall game is not that great. A hub-map that is incredibly slow to traverse; a shop level that you need to backtrack to, then when you're in the level you still have to travel a good bit to the actual shop area; the story is quite non-existent, with the ending literally just being a note popped up on the screen with no payoff or any sense of reward for completing; the collectibles require items from the shop that you can't get until you're halfway through the game, requiring backtracking in order to buy some of the endgame items; the soundtrack is not bad, but nothing special that I'd listen to outside of the game; a Unity load screen between doing anything that removes immersion; no save points, but instead vita-chambers from Bioshock, so death has no downsides.

I still completed the game, as all of these issues I mentioned don't make the game unplayable in any way, but it just brings down the experience. Everything this game does just feels like it's done better in DUSK.

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.

Prodeus is a smooth game in terms of combat and everything but there are a lot of problems with the game as well.

The respawn option is crap. you restart and you go back to your "nexus" point or your checkpoint with full health and all the monsters you killed are still dead. The only way to circumvent this, is to do a full restart which will restart you from the very beginning.

The monsters are basically straight-up rips of Doom monsters. The lack of variation makes the game seem generic.

I like the implementation of the leaderboards and the map creation and this game is by no means terrible, It's a decent game.

It's not super memorable, but a good way to pass the time.

Great aesthetic, sound design, game feel. Whenever I'm in the rush of combat, I have absolutely zero notes on how this game. It's fast, frenetic, and ripping and tearing its hordes of (demons?) never ceases to entertain.

When I'm not in combat, a lot of this game wears... There's the cheap mobile game aesthetic of the menu design, the odd pacing where levels are broken into short <10 minute chunks that spit you back into a world map afterward, the weapon bloat of the inventory (there's 2-3 weapons of every ammo type, often leaving the weaker/earlier variants totally obsolete but nonetheless cluttering your inventory).

Enemies are too beholden to Doom's own—everything is zombie soldier, imp, cacodemon, lost soul, pain elemental, pinkies, hell knight, chaingunner. I don't think there's a single unique enemy until the final third of the game! Pair this with an aesthetic that bears a little too much resemblance to Doom 2016's space station grays and reds, and the game feels in real need of its own verve.

In the last 5 levels of the game they finally start experimenting. There's alien worlds with shifting walls and floors that really bring some life into the design, breaking it away from the tired Doom 2016 riff of the prior 20+ levels, but it's a little too little too late.

If the game had that energy from the start, paired it with some more unique enemies, and a significantly pared down weapon selection (take real inspiration from Doom and pare it down to just the necessities. each weapon should fill a unique singular role; if two weapons overlap, cut one.) it could really be one of The Greats of the genre. As is, it's some pretty damn fine fundamentals in need of a better package.

I never had a gaming experience ruined by a checkpoint system before.

I should actually call it a teleport system, because when you die you don't restart the level from the last checkpoint, you just teleport back with the enemies you killed staying dead. This means that difficulty is irrelevant since you can just brute force your way forward. They tried to mitigate this by implementing a score system that penalizes deaths but that is only relevant if you care about scores, which I do not. This all wouldn't be a problem if they included an option to play with them on or not.

Everything else about the game is pretty solid but I completely lost my desire to play after this.