We love fixed attack angles! As fun as it can be to control hordes of enemies coming in at every angle, there’s an equal amount of joy in jockeying player characters with limited angles of attack into a perfect position against deviously placed enemies. And there’s no better example of this dynamic than controlling a SUPER VEHICLE-001 METAL SLUG.

The firing angle of your Slug’s turret turns as you move (or hold up/down), which makes the act of realigning your firing angle intrinsically tied to movement, and in turn intrinsically ties it to every other threat in the game that’s locking down your position. Backing up to turn your turret backwards may not always be safe when there’s a grenade or mine behind you. That the Slug’s cannon can only fire towards the right side of the screen creates an asymmetric situation where enemies coming from the left must be handled differently than those from the right. Given this fact, you’re always trying to figure out how to maneuver enemies in front of your cannon. Figure it out, and you’re rewarded with juicy damage. The coolest example of this has to be the stage 4 boss in Metal Slug 2/X, where if you narrowly avoid being hit by its cannon shells, you can have your Slug ride the shockwave of the explosion to propel yourself upwards and so get a perfect cannon firing angle at the boss’ weak point. Therein lies the joy of controlling an unwieldy massive thing: of getting it to do exactly what you want to and using it to systematically dismantle situations at full speed. Having to deal with multiple high-HP targets approaching you from multiple uncomfortable angles is where Slug combat shines.

With your angles of attack being limited, naturally the game keeps placing enemies in off-angle positions. The uneven stage terrain is crucial to making this dynamic work. Stage elements like barricades, slopes and trenches aren’t merely decorations, but actual hazards that serve to obfuscate getting a clean shot on the enemy (and vice versa!)[^1]. After all, in a game where your main attack angles are limited to the cardinal directions while on-foot or a limited turning speed in the Slug, controlling a situation where the stage terrain is completely flat would be too straightforward. If the enemies directly spawned into your line of fire, you would only need to hold down the fire button and move forwards without a thought. This is precisely why during moments where the terrain is flat, Metal Slug prefers to spawn enemies from above or below rather than from the left or right, playing with the fact that you can only shoot directly upwards.

Another key to making this dynamic work is there is no single weapon that can easily or consistently cover large parts of the screen. All weapons you get via POW drops are weak in at least one area[^2], and you can only carry one at a time. Arguably the Slug has the most versatility with its all-range Vulcan Gun and powerful Cannon blasts, but this means having to pilot the big unwieldy Slug. The fact that no weapon can quite consistently cover any given situation is what forces the player to engage with the dynamic of negotiating terrain and enemy placements at all, instead of it turning into a game holding down the fire button and running forwards. Powerful screen-covering weapons like Contra’s Spreadgun or Ninja Spirit’s Kusarigama work well within their own “shoot down enemies coming from every direction” context, but in the “jockeying for the proper firing angle” context of Metal Slug, it’s easy to see how such powerful weaponry could negate a lot of Metal Slug’s mechanical nuances.

Now controlling a big unwieldy thing with limited angles of attack is fun and all, but that still leaves the question of how you are supposed to avoid getting hit in such a thing. Metal Slug’s answer is as follows: ejecting from the Slug gives you a generous amount of i-frames, and the Slug will not collide with any enemy attacks if you are not piloting it. It’s these details that render Slug combat playable at all and what prevent it from turning into a battle of attrition. Consider the following. As enemy attacks in Metal Slug had to be designed to be (mostly) reactable and avoidable on-foot, being unable to avoid such clearly avoidable attacks in the Slug would not feel right on a visceral level. The amount of babysitting that would be required for the Slug to not take any hits would at worst be borderline impossible with the already cramped screen space of the game, and at best reinforce an incredibly slow and passive playstyle if you want to keep your Slug. That ejecting from the Slug makes you briefly invincible and the Slug does not collide with any attacks is the magic glue that gets around these issues and makes the interplay of on-foot/vehicle combat all work. (Which only makes it even more baffling that the game doesn’t really tell you or show you something as essential as ejecting from the Slug making you invincible…)

While we’ve covered the dynamics of jockeying for the right firing angle, we haven’t talked much about how to deal maximum damage once you get that firing angle. This is where things start getting dicey…

You see, grenades deal a lot of damage, but normally there’s a projectile limit of two grenades on-screen per player. However, this means that if you throw grenades at an enemy point-blank so they detonate right as you throw them, you can essentially throw grenades as fast as you can hit the fire button. That means that if you position yourself in an enemy’s face, you can deal ludicrous damage.

This gets even more nuts when you’re piloting a Slug, because while crouching in the Slug you throw grenades instead of firing cannon shells, and while in the Slug, the on-screen projectile limit for grenades is completely lifted! This technique is so powerful that you can demolish barriers in seconds and speedkill certain bosses before they can even get a real shot off! This gets particularly interesting against flying enemies such as the stage 2 boss or final boss, as you’re first trying to climb (your Slug) up platforms where your grenades can connect with the enemy aircraft. It’s an identical dynamic to what I described at the start of this article (w/r/t aligning your Slug’s cannon with a boss for bonus damage), except this one can also be done while on-foot. The only thing that keeps this technique in check is that you don’t have infinite grenades, as they can only be replenished from saving certain POWs or as drops from specific enemies. Sounds cool, right? Well…

It is cool that it gives you another avenue for optimizing damage and clear time, but there’s also such a thing as too much damage. If the nadespam technique is so powerful to the point of letting you skip otherwise fun and interesting encounters, then its existence is more of a net negative than anything. That said, skipping or bulldozing encounters outright can be acceptable if it’s challenging to pull off (which most applications of nadespam aren’t) or if it involves skipping encounters in the first quarter of the game that were easy by design and pose no huge challenge to experienced players anyways. The developers must have realized how overpowered this was, as they nerfed this starting from Metal Slug 2/X[^3]. Of course, one can simply choose not to use nadespam in order to keep these challenges intact. To reference the Xeet of the official Doom Xwitter account: “you control the buttons you press”. But this also comes at the cost of depriving yourself of the otherwise fun dynamic of point-blanking grenades for bonus damage! It’s not that it is inherently unfun, merely that it is unfortunately overpowered and creates balance issues out of the wazoo.

When you can stockpile and spend a powerful resource to such an extent, it is not only too powerful, but also leads to an incredibly all-or-nothing power curve that’s impossible to balance around[^4]. Take the final boss, for example. If you enter with a Slug and a good stockpile of grenades, it’s an excellent boss fight! You’re constantly jockeying your Slug up the platforms where you can get in position where your grenades and cannon shells can hit the boss, all the while dealing with homing missiles or direct shots impeding you--having to always calculate if it’s safe enough to squeeze in more damage or if it’s time to GTFO. But if you enter on-foot or die during and are reset to your peashooter pistol with only 10 grenades? WORST BULLETSPONGE BOSS EVER. An excruciatingly long fight with little means to optimize your damage as you’ll be out of nades immediately unless you get lucky with the item drops from the POWs (who only spawn in at bosses during set but long intervals). Then you get the stage 3 boss. Without nadespam you get a fun fight about dodging lasers from below and mines to your sides, but with nadespam you can kill it before it even fires its big gun. That’s the problem with all-or-nothing power curves: do you balance the game around the player being full power, or not? You could somehow try both as Metal Slug did, but it’s not a satisfactory solution. At the start you get encounters and bosses that are tuned to be still fair even if you die and can’t nadespam but die easily if you do, and at the end you get the exact opposite. Encounters are then balanced around nadespam or entering with your Slug by having enemies with tons of health, meaning they become painfully drawn out if you do end up losing or wasting all your grenades, Slugs, and weapons.

Is it then the fact that you lose most of your resources on death that lies at the root of this all-or-nothing power curve? For experienced players it might be, but for new or learning players who have yet to learn a route optimizing item drops? I doubt it. An experienced player will know when and where to use grenades, and knows how and when to get item drops from POWs. But once a learning player runs out of ammo/grenades or gets their Slug blown up even without dying, then what? Optimizing damage with grenades or your Slug, ejecting from your Slug as a makeshift defensive maneuver--those are dynamics that are now temporarily gone[^5]. The fact these are based on limited resources (that aren’t easily replenishable) means that running out not only depowers you but also gives you less tools to play the game with. This could work if grenades were easier to replenish and Slugs easier to keep with you, but that is simply not the case.

Even without the harsh punishment on death, for new players there’s still a necessary memorization burden that needs to be overcome if you want to not die and face a challenge with all the tools in your arsenal, but what exactly is gained from placing such a “you either know or you don’t” burden on the player? Of course, there will always be optimizations in games that are largely a matter of knowing, but to then make them mandatory if you want to play the game with all tools at your disposal? All that accomplishes is expediting the learning process—it doesn’t make the game more interesting. It certainly might be more profitable to an arcade operator, though.[^6]

If anything, I would say the real problem with Metal Slug is that it treats elements like the Slug or grenades or your weapons as limited power-ups rather than as core parts of your toolset. By designing the game around them being limited, or more specifically, around them possibly not being available to you at all–the game inherently limits the scope for how they can be used and how the game can challenge your usage of them. The game cannot–without severe concessions–design challenges around something you may have no access to at all. It is not that they are limited by resources at all that’s the issue, but rather that it’s a realistic possibility that you might not have access to these tools for noticeable periods of time. Nearly all PC FPS games in the 90s had limited ammunition for their weapons, but they were usually still designed in a way where if you played reasonably, you’d always have more than enough ammunition for your workhorse weapons. Encounters could be designed around the assumption that the player at least had access to those weapons, and that is precisely something that Metal Slug cannot assume. For example, a stage specifically designed around Slug combat can never really go all-out with the encounter design because of the risk that the player ends up permanently losing the Slug (which is partially why Stage 4, which gives you a Slug from the start, feels like it’s holding back the whole time). It can only clumsily try to design around them being both available and unavailable, which inherently limits the scope of the stage design than if it was something that was always readily available or almost never at all.

If these limited tools in Metal Slug were then more easily replenishable or weren’t limited by resources at all, then not only would it lighten the memorization/routing burden significantly, but it would also provide a more predictable set of tools to design stages around. If grenades are a tool that are nearly always available to you, then it’s easier to set enemy health values balanced around the existence of nadespam, and to have stages more thoroughly explore the application of grenades. If the Slug was a tool that was more readily available to you, then we could have more stages that more thoroughly explore the possibilities of vehicle gameplay or on-foot/vehicle interplay.

This would all require a more radical re-examination of Metal Slug’s gameplay formula, which at a glance is unfortunately not something I’ve seen the sequels try to attempt. Metal Slug’s formula certainly has potential that certainly shines through, but if it really wants to get there it should treat its own tools more as fixed parts of its toolset. I should note that it is still possible to take the long-term resource management route, that your ammo and the state of your Slug(s) carry over between stages and have multiple nuanced means to be managed, but this is also something that, again, requires a radical re-examination of the formula.

I give Metal Slug a THANK YOU! out of YOU'RE GREAT!

Footnotes:

[^1]: Slopes especially affect your Slug, as the firing angle of your cannon is relative to the orientation of your Slug.

[^2]: For example: The Shotgun is powerful and fires in a wide cone but lacks range and rate of fire. The Flame Shot penetrates enemies in a straight line but lacks damage. The Heavy Machine Gun can cover diagonal angles but also lacks damage. The Missile Launcher homes in on enemies, but it has an on-screen projectile limit that effectively limits its rate of fire at longer distances.

[^3]: In Metal Slug 2/X they added a maximum rate-of-fire limit to throwing grenades from a Slug specifically (there the rate of fire isn’t even tied to the number of grenades on-screen like when you’re on foot, so whether you point-blank nadespam in a Slug or not doesn’t matter!). In doing so they curbed the maximum potential power of this technique, but this also added the interesting nuance where if you do want to nadespam, you’d have to eject from the safety of the Slug and dump grenades point-blank on foot.

[^4]: Now, I do think it’s possible to make games with an all-or-nothing power curve without it turning into a balancing nightmare, and I think it relies on the speed with which you go from 0 to 100 and vice versa. Take something like Psyvariar, where you’re always playing on the razor’s edge of grazing bullets for brief but absolute invincibility as a reward. In Psyvariar you get real powerful real fast, but it requires constant focus to keep up and can be lost just as quickly. Designers can reasonably predict the player’s power levels and balance encounters around this, as the player can go from 0 to 100 at any time. Metal Slug’s power curve by contrast is slowly built-up using items you pick up throughout the stage. Once you’re fully powered-up it’s hard to lose your advantage, but if you do, the recovery from death is lengthy and crushing. Playing well then feels too rewarding while making a mistake feels too punishing. Encounters are either balanced around you being at full power, or they are not. Deaths can thus quickly spiral into a game over; staying at full power ends up feeling less like a reward and more like a requirement.

[^5]: Such ‘debuffs’ where you are temporarily locked out from using certain tools or moves can be interesting, as they can force you to change and improvise your strategy in the middle of a perilous situation. One example I like is how getting hit by Pukers in Dead Space 2 briefly disables your ability to sprint, thus forcing you to stand your ground against enemies instead of trying to create distance as you normally would. However, these kinds of debuffs only make the game more interesting if they still leave you with enough tools to let you approach a situation in interesting and nuanced ways. A debuff that for example transforms you into a weak character (such as a chicken) that can only do one or two moves is likely not going to bring many nuances to the gameplay. A pistol-only Metal Slug run then won’t have the same depth as if you had access to your full arsenal, let alone the appeal of what makes Metal Slug’s gameplay unique.

[^6]: Arcade games do tend to be unfairly put down as ‘quarter munchers’ by Western audiences (even though there is actual precedent for that in Western arcade halls specifically, but that’s a story for another time), however the fact remains that for arcade operators credits need to flow one way or another. One common resulting design tendency in arcade games was to look the other way when it comes to deaths spiraling into one another–something that’s also known as Gradius Syndrome. Games by Irem (the parent company that Team Nazca, the developers of Metal Slug, split off from) were rather notorious for this. You’d get a ton of games that–if you were at full power–were still technically fair, but if you died once you’d better hope you died at a spot where you could still recover your items, otherwise you could kiss your run goodbye. Arcade-style games originally developed for home systems have been less likely to exhibit this tendency, now that they no longer operate on actual quarters.

Once again, the Markdown markup for footnotes will remain as is until Backloggd adds support for them.

What if Resident Evil 4 did away with tank controls in favor of ‘modern’ controls? That’s the question RE4make is trying to answer, and from which many of its other changes flow. After all, it’s precisely that control scheme which lent the OG many of its unique dynamics. Yet it is also an overwhelming reality of convention and industry standards that makes tank controls in a modern game an incredibly hard sell, which no doubt influenced RE4make’s decision to move away from it. But, I do not believe that tank controls are irreplaceable to the OG’s success. If there’s any opportunity a remake has, it’s to twist the original to see what happens, and RE4R sure has done some twisting. Now freed of tank controls, what are the consequences of that in the remake?

The most noticeable changes by far are that Leon can now aim and reload while moving, and sprint in any direction. In RE4 this was restricted to put more emphasis on aiming as an action and your main method of interaction with the world, as if you were playing a light gun shooter (not unlike how stealth games make your player character poor at combat to emphasize stealth, or how games with a melee focus restrict the usefulness of ranged weapons). In the remake, this was done away with for the sake of appealing to intuitiveness and player comfort. However, by having it play and control more similarly to other shooters on the market this came at the expense of identity. Not that identity and uniqueness really impacts the quality of the game, but people do not experience games by just their ‘objective’ quality. So on RE4’s launch many fans called it “not a real RE game” precisely because of how differently it played to older RE games, whereas nowadays the definition of a “real RE game” has become much looser. It may be a silly and illogical and inconsistent thing, but humans were never perfectly logical creatures to begin with. To mitigate this loss of identity by taking away what makes something unique, you're better off also giving something unique back.

These changes also have several other knock-on effects on a mechanical level. Ranged attacks are now much less oppressive since the player can now simply sidestep most of them, reloading your gun now leaves you much less vulnerable, and the range of enemy melee attacks had to be readjusted to keep up with the player’s newfound mobility. On top of that, there’s the fact that RE4R was designed from the ground up to be a multiplatform release, and thus had to be designed with keyboard/mouse controls in mind. RE4 was designed mainly around the limited movement speed of the crosshair to give you more accuracy on a gamepad; enemies would slow down when they got close enough so you had the proper time and space to line up a shot. Playing RE4 with KB/M controls on PC or motion controls on the Wii then made target acquisition and targeting specific limbs much faster, leading to a different experience where the player could more easily control any given situation. Removing tank controls from RE4 as is would result in a more toothless experience, contrary to the survival horror vibe it wants to go for.

So how does RE4R make sure enemies can keep up with the player’s newfound mobility? For starters, enemies are much more aggressive and harder to control. They initiate attacks from further away, have more tracking on their attacks, and their attacks cover a greater distance. More enemies can attack you at the same time, and most encounters tend to feature more enemies than in the original. RE4R also implements RE2make’s crosshair bloom, making it harder to land hits unless you stand still to steady your aim (unless you have a laser dot equipped on your pistol), but also having a fully steadied crosshair give your next shot enhanced properties on hit.

The most important, and potentially most interesting change by far is that Ganados now take multiple shots to stagger (more prevalently the case on Hardcore difficulty and above, most of this piece is written with the higher difficulty settings in mind). It’s a necessary change considering the ease of target acquisition with the new control scheme. Otherwise automatic weapons would become even more busted than they were in RE4, but also because being able to move while holding the knife would let you set up a lot of staggers for free. What makes this change so interesting however is how it could in turn interact with the ammo economy, reload management, and the new focus shot system. The player could double/triple tap a Ganado for a quick stagger, or they could risk standing still for a moment to line up a focus shot for a guaranteed stagger using only one bullet--saving up on ammo in the long term and staving off a reload in the short term. This way RE4R could have emulated the control constraints of the original in a way where the player wants to not move while aiming rather than being forced to do so, providing a best-of-both-worlds option where the original light gun-shooter dynamic can be preserved in a way that’s also intuitive to most players. Plus, said “focus shots” could be applied to the knife as well, again incentivizing rather than forcing you to stand still for enhanced attack properties. Not only that, but the fact that you’d have to consider firing more shots at once rather than doing one-tap-into-roundhouse repeatedly would add some more nuance to reload management and decision making than RE4 did[^2]! At the same time, the increased aggression of enemy encounters and enemies themselves would make it harder than in the original to stand still and line up a shot, so it’s not as if lining up focus shots would be completely free.

Now, note that I am speaking entirely theoretically. In practice, RE4R doesn’t work like what I just said at all. Focus shots do not cause guaranteed staggers, they only slightly increase the critical hit chance and stagger value of the next shot, which is only a minor reward for a major risk. It makes steadying your aim not worth doing outside the accuracy benefits. Even worse is when you apply the laser dot upgrade on a pistol, which automatically makes every shot a focus shot and makes the stand-still/focus shot dynamic largely irrelevant for pistols (just like in the original Deus Ex, for example). Here I wish the game had adopted a hybrid crosshair system where you had both the OG laser sight and the RE2R crosshair bloom/focus shot dynamic, but alas.

But perhaps the most damning design choices in RE4R for me are the following two combined: the pistols have a relatively low base rate of fire, and enemies can’t be consistently flinched (i.e., a hitstun reaction without a melee prompt) even upon being shot in the limbs. What this means is that even if you do want to double/triple-tap an enemy into a stagger, the time it takes to get off enough shots is so long that in most cases enemies are about to hit you before you can get a stagger off anyways. In a system where one shot guarantees a stagger a la the original, having a low rate of fire to emphasize careful aiming makes sense, but in the current system that asks you to shoot multiple times for a stagger, a low rate of fire is just painful. At the same time, you cannot create additional time and space to set up staggers by flinching enemies, because whether an enemy will flinch on hit is semi-random[^3]. This wouldn’t have been as much of a problem in games where your workhorse weapons had a higher rate of fire (it’s why in games with RNG-based hitstun like Doom, a fast-firing weapon like the Chaingun is your go-to stunlock weapon), but the opposite being true in this case only exacerbates the fact that trying to control crowds in RE4make is generally unreliable and too slow to match the Ganados’ new aggression and numbers.

As a result of crowds becoming more unreliable to control, it turns the original’s pseudo-beat ‘em up gameplay of enemy state manipulation and well-timed i-frames into something more akin to horde shooters like Devil Daggers and Serious Sam. When the state of an enemy or a group of enemies becomes harder and more inconsistent to manipulate, the player will naturally tend to mitigate as much inconsistency as possible by keeping their distance from said uncontrollable threats. Crowd control is now less a matter of creating CC/i-frame opportunities by manipulating enemies to your benefit, but rather trying to out-kill an onslaught of enemies before they overwhelm you. In the original you could play aggressively right in the thick of enemy crowds thanks to the many i-frame/CC options at your disposal, but in RE4R this has been significantly nerfed: vaulting over walls/through windows or climbing ladders no longer gives you i-frames, contextual animations have next to no exit i-frames after you’ve regained control (i.e. still being briefly invincible after Leon recovers from being knocked on the floor or after doing a suplex), and kicks have a smaller hitbox and a smaller effective range on account of enemies tending to be more spaced out from each other now. Being caught in the middle of a crowd in RE4R has a higher tendency to snowball into you being stunlocked to death now that enemies are more aggressive, i-frames aren’t as easy to get, your context melee moves not being as useful for CC anymore, and stuns not being as reliable. While RE4R might have done away with tank controls in favor of more “fluid” controls, trying to control the situation has never been more difficult.

That said, me being Serious Sam’s strongest online defender, I don’t think this kind of gameplay in a RE game is inherently problematic, but when you view RE4R through the lens of a horde shooter you can start to see why it doesn’t really succeed at being one either. For starters, RE4R makes it too easy to kite enemies forever. While there was nothing preventing you from doing so in the original, it’s something that didn’t come as naturally to do on account of Leon’s backwards movement speed being slower than his forwards speed. If you wanted to create some distance, you had to turn your back towards the enemy and so lose sight of the situation. But in RE4R Leon can run towards the camera, allowing him to see his pursuers while running at full speed, thus rendering that original dynamic void. As most enemies in RE4R cannot catch up to a sprinting Leon (outside of Garradors, who only appear sparingly), whether you can kite them forever depends on whether the level you’re in gives you enough space to do so. In RE4R that is the case most of the time, outside of setpiece encounters where you get gradually boxed in from every direction (like the village and cabin fight). The original also made kiting come less naturally to do simply because the context melee moves were that useful, and made you want to stick closer to enemies to take advantage of a stagger before the enemy recovered. Not only was it free damage, crowd control, and invincibility, but it also saved ammo. On paper this is still the case in RE4R, but as mentioned before, context melee moves are now much less safe to do in the middle of crowds, and less rewarding.

Furthermore, RE4’s and by extension RE4R’s enemy cast were never designed to be that interesting to fight from a distance. The nuances in fighting a group of Ganados wielding a mix of one-handed, two-handed or no weapons at all become significantly less pronounced when you aren’t in melee range. Pressure units like Plagas spawns, Chainsawmen and Brutes were not meant to be that threatening from a distance, and ranged enemies with crossbows and grenades were designed to complement regular melee Ganados rather than be any interesting to fight on their own, which is why they have lower HP. There are no real long-range pressure units outside of Crossbow Brutes to make kiting harder to pull off, and Crossbow Brutes only appear in the last third of the game. As a result, target prioritization often feels like a matter of targeting whoever happens to be closest, while occasionally focusing on the ranged Ganado here and there. The constantly shifting threats and priorities that RE4 had with its close-quarters combat or Serious Sam has in its diverse enemy horde compositions is a large part of what kept them engaging, yet RE4R feels like it has neither. For this new horde shooter-ish gameplay to really tick, RE4R would need more enemy types that can control space from different ranges as if it were Doom 2 in order to fit the more ranged focus of its combat, rather than stick with the original enemy roster where most enemy types are melee combatants.

The main consequence of how kite-heavy RE4R’s gameplay turned out is that fights now feel a lot more homogenous, despite many encounters being largely identical to their original counterparts! The nuances that the tank controls and pseudo-beat ‘em up gameplay brought to each encounter are largely gone, and what’s come in its place doesn’t truly fill the void (however, with more radical changes to the original formula, or by bringing it more in line with the original instead, it could have done so). While it’s true that fights in the original could easily be boiled down by doing headshots into roundhouses ad infinitum if you wanted to, the system still allowed for a high degree of control and aggression the better the player got, which combined with the nuances in enemy behavior and controlled injections of RNG kept the game fresh and engaging even across multiple playthroughs. RE4R’s system on the other hand relinquishes potential player control in favor of creating uncontrollable chaos, resulting in a more defensive and reactive game where reasonably skilled play is identical to higher skilled play simply because there is less space for expression. Playing “lame” is what RE4R’s higher difficulties push you into by default. Again, this style of gameplay that you commonly see in horde shooters isn’t inherently problematic, but RE4R doesn’t have the enemies or spaces or tools or target prioritization to make the process of planning around and dismantling hordes that interesting.

To give you a (sharp) edge amidst all this chaos, the game thankfully gives you room to breathe using the new knife. Now that moving away from tank controls would take focus away from the original light gun-shooter feel and thus by extent Leon’s signature preference for pistols, RE4R absolutely made the right call by instead focusing more on Leon’s signature knife. New knife moves include being able to perform takedowns on stunned or knocked down enemies, which instantly kills regular Ganados and deals massive damage to higher-tier Ganados, while also preventing Plagas spawns. You can backstab unaware enemies using the new stealth mechanic, which felt like something Leon should have been always able to do, what with him being a special agent. My favorite new interaction is how takedowns work together with the new wallsplat state: carefully aimed staggers or kicks that cause enemies to stumble backwards into a wall puts them in a wallsplat state, during which you can execute a knife takedown on them from the front for big damage. It adds a new and interesting dimension to fighting Chainsawmen and Brutes where you’re trying to position yourself correctly to chain multiple takedowns together, and so get rid of them quickly while saving up on bullets.

Of course, it’s impossible not to bring up the new knife parry[^4]. It works as you’d expect. Time a parry right--you escape damage. Time it perfectly–you get a free stagger on top. It’s the only tool in your arsenal to let you play with any degree of aggression rather than endless kiting, so regardless of your feelings about the prevalence of parries in modern action games, the knife parries are arguably a net positive inclusion in RE4R. Thankfully RE4R is sane enough not to have parries be the answer for every attack: you won’t be able to chain parry a stream of arrows/bullets, a knife won’t help much against fire or explosives, chainsaw swings can only be blocked with your knife and usually end up breaking it in the process, and hammer swings and grabs can only be ducked or ran away from rather than parried. Sounds good, right?

Well, there’s actually two major caveats that end up kneecapping the usefulness of parries in larger fights. One is that while perfect parrying attacks gives you some reward, successfully ducking grabs gives you nothing. Second is that unarmed grab-happy Ganados are present in almost every encounter, and you can increase their numbers if you disarm a Ganado holding a weapon. So what does this have to do with parrying? The issue is that even if you’re trying to play with some measure of aggression by parrying a group of enemies in their faces, the presence of unparryable unarmed Ganados will make parrying an unsafe choice compared to just kiting the entire group. You’ll parry one, and then you get grabbed immediately afterwards from behind. You could of course focus on the unarmed Ganado by doing a well-timed duck, but this in turn leaves you vulnerable to any other kind of attack, nor do you get any reward out of well-timed ducks. And even if perfect ducks gave you a free roundhouse kick like perfect parries, it still wouldn’t be an effective CC option with how nerfed the effective range of kicks has become and enemies being more spaced out in general. It’s a deadly mix that’s not worth getting close to.

While creating dynamic situations where some player options are less or more optimal than others is what action games should strive for, here we have a situation where next to no option except one (the almighty kite) ends up being the correct one, which is just as bad as one option being so strong that anything else is just redundant. It’s something that could have been avoided with more consistent flinch/stagger rules on (unarmed) enemies. If anything, that’s already how it works against Ganados with throwables in RE4R! You may not be able to parry explosions or fire, but you can shoot a ranged Ganado’s projectile to make it prematurely explode/deflect or shoot them in their arm to momentarily disable them. That way you can proactively create safe opportunities to deal with melee Ganados without having to keep kiting for an opening. Instead, you’ll just have to deal with the chaos.

As to why the developers chose to make RE4R more a game about being subjected to chaos, one can only guess, but mine is that it was done to bring it more in line with the Resident Evil 2 Remake that the team previously worked on. RE2R was unabashedly about risk mitigation and being subjected to RNG, also as a way of minimizing player control over situations for the sake of creating horror. How many shots it took to kill a zombie there was even more random! But the key reason it worked there and less so in RE4R is because of RE2R’s traditional survival horror structure. You could kite zombies, sure, but the even scarcer ammo management discouraged killing every zombie you see in favor of running past them, whereas the narrow halls of the RPD made running past zombies easier said than done. The fact that your objectives made you backtrack through zombie-filled rooms you already visited added more long-term considerations on whether to spend ammo on zombies in a room you’re likely to revisit often, and on how to plan your route through the map. Add an invincible pursuer enemy to the mix, and you get gameplay that really tickles the noggin’. The micro-level dynamics of dealing with individuals or groups of enemies in RE2R is simpler than in RE4R, but what kept RE2R engaging was the macro-level resource management and routing gameplay on top of that. RE4R being more of a linear action game means these macro-level dynamics couldn’t be as present. It’s probably why RE4 added more nuance to how micro-level engagements played out to keep the linear gameplay interesting, even if Leon roundhouse kicking and suplexing enemies would make the game end up feeling less scary. The remake then trying to make the horror more pronounced again by downplaying player control over situations without adding anything to fill the void probably wasn’t the best choice.

Overall, while the new additions from RE4R to RE4 are generally okay, the changes to existing elements end up feeling haphazard. It doesn’t quite try to refine/emulate the original, but at the same time doesn’t try to do something radically new either. Perhaps the intention was to bring it closer to RE2R in terms of gameplay, but in a linear action context that would never quite work. When changing a core element such as tank controls, especially in a game as mechanically lean as RE4 was, there will be a lot of ripple effects. Some will be obvious, but a lot will be more subtle. As it turns out, a lot of the subtler ones are also the little details that helped make the original tick. Without a clear vision on where to take the gameplay in a new modernized context, and without thorough knowledge on how the parts in the original moved and worked, it’s easy to end up with what feels like a stilted translation of an old text. At the very least, it is interesting to see how experiments like this pan out as a way of reexamining what made the original (not) work, and for trying out what-if scenarios. I did expect a remix of RE4 rather than a comprehensive reimagining, and that’s largely what I got.

I give it a 5/5 S.T.A.R.S.

Addenda:

The new ammo crafting system may feel like a thoughtless modernism, and perhaps it indeed was one, but I think it ends up being a major net positive. Basically, by introducing more crafting items with a high drop chance to the enemy loot table, you end up reducing the chances of you getting healing or ammo drops. The more items there are in a loot table, the lower the theoretical maximum drop chance of any given item is going to be. But at the same time, these crafting items let you mitigate these lower drop chances by giving you more direct control over what kind of ammo or grenade you want to craft. It’s a brilliant two-birds-with-one-stone solution! It makes resources more scarce to more often push outside your comfort zone and reconsider every shot (especially in comparison to how lenient RE4 could get ammo drops, even on Professional). At the same time, giving extra control over what resources you get prevents the game from feeling like you’re at the total mercy of RNGesus. It also has the hidden benefit of smoothing over and covering up the ammo rubberbanding the game does under the surface, which helps diminish the notion that you can expect the game to automatically start dropping extra bullets for your gun if you happen to almost run out.

Footnotes:

[^1]: Incidentally, the original already has a near-identical dynamic when it comes to the time it takes to target different limbs. Because of how OG Leon always recenters his aim to head-level when deploying his guns, it means that it’s always faster to move your crosshair over an enemy’s head (for doing headshot into roundhouse kick for crowd control) than it is to move it over their shins (for doing legshot into suplex for big single-target damage). Re-centering your camera upon aiming down sights is another one of those things that you absolutely could not get away with in a modern game, even though it comes at the potential expense of cool dynamics like these.

[^2]: Rather than one shot guaranteeing a stagger or a flinch reaction depending on the enemy hitbox you shot and the state they were in, now there’s a hidden bar for staggers and flinches that fills up the more damage you inflict. How much stagger/flinch value a shot inflicts is calculated via an obtuse formula which depends on the base stagger/flinch value of your current weapon, the damage of that weapon, whether it’s a focus shot, and some additional random deviation. Basically, as you upgrade the damage on your weapon, the more often it will inflict stagger/flinches on hit. What this means is that in the early game stuns are triggered inconsistently as all hell, and throughout the game it becomes difficult to intuit what exactly the minimum and maximum shots required to stun is, which becomes even more complicated since some enemy variants have different stagger resistances on top of that. Then to throw another wrench in the works, enemies in the Island get increased stagger resistance overall.

[^3]: Reloading is one of those things that gets taken for granted in most shooters, yet RE4 forcing you to stand still while reloading already makes it a more interesting implementation than those in most other games. When you consider that reloading and limited magazine capacity is the shooter equivalent of stamina systems in action games, you can start to see how barely any games try to do anything interesting with it and just include it for realism’s sake. Basically it’s an inevitable cooldown where the player can control when and where it gets reset. In RE4 this led to several interesting decisions, where sometimes it would be better to forego knifing a downed enemy in favor of reloading your gun so you were prepared once all other downed enemies woke up. In other situations where reloading was too unsafe to do, it’d push you to switch to another weapon that either doesn’t really fit the situation or uses an ammo type you’d rather not spend, which ended up creating cool moments of improvisation. RE4R having smaller base magazine capacities and making you expend more bullets at once would mean reloads have a larger presence in combat, but being able to freely move and even run while reloading cuts out most of the risks associated with reloading. Annoyingly there’s also the tendency on top for most shooters to just let you upgrade reload speeds and magazine capacities to the point where the downtime of reloads becomes irrelevant, which includes both RE4 and RE4R.

[^4]: Though I’d hesitate to call parries being new to RE4. The original already had parries, it was called “shoot an enemy in the face right before they hit you”. This even worked against Chainsawmen! Normally they tank blows to the head as a pressure unit should, but shoot a Chainsawman in the head right as he’s swinging off your head, and you get a guaranteed stagger! Then again, this is a bit easier said than done considering enemies would rear their head back right as they swung at you.

The Markdown markup for footnotes will remain unmarked as-is until Backloggd adds support for them like any sane website made in the Reiwa era.

There’s a tendency amongst some to analyze games by comparing them to another similar game that functions as a platonic ideal for how games of that kind should play like, but to me it’s precisely deviations from such a platonic ideal that make a game fascinating to me. Ninja Spirit/Saigo no Nindou is one such run ‘n gun game filled with minor oddities that you’d rarely see in both classic and modern run ‘n gun titles, but nonetheless ends up creating something interesting.

For one, you cannot walk while shooting. At first, this comes off as a rather arbitrary restriction. As enemies in Ninja Spirit constantly respawn from random sides of the screen, the more you stand still the more enemies get to respawn, resulting in what feels like a game with annoying staccato stop-start pacing. However, this changes when you realize that you can move and shoot at the same time while jumping.

This is where other oddities of Ninja Spirit begin to rear their head: you can hold the jump button to jump higher, but the game also has a very low gravity and weak mid-air control. Jumping is your main defensive move against enemies that cannot be shot down before they get into range, and the higher you jump the safer you are. But you must eventually come down, and the low gravity combined with weak mid-air control locks you in a weakly adjustable falling trajectory for a significant amount of time, during which you’re highly vulnerable to enemy attacks. This means that ideally you shouldn’t jump more or higher than necessary to minimize risk, but at the same time enemies and stage hazards force you to jump, and taking constant mini-risks by doing constant short hops forwards minimizes the overall time you have to spend on the respawning enemies![^1] Most of your deaths will be while falling, yet you must jump to survive. Accordingly, enemies in Ninja Spirit will attack different parts of the screen, forcing you to do short/medium/high jumps in different times and positions once multiple heavier enemies start to emergently overlap their attacks in unpredictable ways. This creates a unique player-enemy dynamic that would be nowhere as effective under standard run ‘n gun control conventions; the vulnerability of falling down would nowhere be as pronounced under higher gravity, and the player would have less reason to commit to inherently risky jumps if they could just shoot while walking.

This leads to another oddity about Ninja Spirit: most stages are almost completely flat! Stages 1 to 3 are next-to-completely flat, and only stage 4, 5 and 7 have some actual platforming going on. This sounds lazy, but remember that part of Ninja Spirit’s whole deal is jumping different heights/arcs as the situation demands: this is only any effective if you have the space to jump different heights/arcs in.[^2] The higher the floor and the lower the ceiling are, the more restricted your jumping options are. And because the stages are so wide and open, Ninja Spirit accordingly compensates by filling the screen with respawning enemies coming at you from every direction. Rather than the enemies being threatening when placed in specific spots in specific stage layouts a la Castlevania, enemies in Ninja Spirit are threatening because of the other enemies they’re combined with—taking a more Serious Sam than DOOM approach regarding enemy-level dynamics.

That is not to say Ninja Spirit does not (try to) do something interesting with its stage design, however. For example, while stage 4 has elevated floors and ceilings, it adds a twist by having enemies spawn and attack you from underneath the floor and the ceiling, and the latter half of the stage has the floor be broken up by bamboo pits that force you to advance by flipping your gravity and walking on the ceiling. However, your options are more limited on the ceiling, as you cannot jump while walking on the ceiling—pressing jump while ceiling-walking will simply make you fall back to the floor, which isn’t ideal if the floor is a bamboo pit and if the ceiling is being threatened by a heavy enemy that you cannot shoot down in time, thus making foresight a necessary skill to see if you can cross over a large pit safely.[^3] After that, stage 5 is a vertical mountain climb where the only way to progress is constantly jumping up narrow platforms, marking jumping as not just a defensive maneuver but also essential for just being able to progress at all. Moving on, stage 6 has the simplest yet most treacherous twist to the stage design: an uneven floor. Slight height variations in the layout irregularly force you to jump or fall to move forwards, which, when combined with the most intense enemy spawning the game has to offer, creates a recipe where your foresight will be pushed to its limits—doubly considering some enemies will also high jump rather than walk forwards if there’s a slight incline in their path. All the more to consider![^4]

That said, stage layouts are only one half of stage design in games--that other half being enemy placement—which in Ninja Spirit’s case may seem like haphazard chaos. Although enemies do constantly respawn from semi-random parts of the screen, Ninja Spirit does show some restraint in the type and number of enemies spawned. The enemies that constantly respawn from everywhere can all be taken out in one hit of any weapon, and the projectiles they fire can be canceled using your Sword or Kusarigama. Even though their spawn positions are semi-random, they can still be consistently dealt with using the tools at your disposal. Their function is more to add random noise to the mix and keep you on your toes while dealing with the heavy enemies, who present the bulk of the actual challenge in Ninja Spirit, as they cannot be easily burst down before they get into range. Per section, there are different enemy types that are allowed to be spawned, different limits to how many are allowed to be on screen, and different limits to what parts of the screen they’re allowed to spawn in from. There’s enough intentionality behind the enemy composition in Ninja Spirit to prevent every stage from feeling like an indistinguishable clusterfuck, even when the stage layout is just (almost) completely flat.

But, so far I’ve described Ninja Spirit more in theory—when it comes to how Ninja Spirit actually plays there are some caveats I must list. For starters, once you understand how absurdly powerful and versatile the Kusarigama is[^5], stages 1 to 3 and stage 5 can be played by and large on auto-pilot. These stages lack the environmental constraints of stage 4 and 7 or the multiple overlapping heavy enemy spawns of stage 6. A single heavy enemy spawn and the chaos created by fodder can’t really pose much of a threat to the all-mighty Kusarigama. Even if you limit yourself to using the Shuriken or the Bombs, the lack of pressure in the stage design would still persist. The boss fights also by and large lack the aspect of overlapping threats that the stages themselves can offer, with only the stage 4 boss (what with it being a 2v1 fight) and the final boss posing an exception.[^6]

One thing I’m trying to get across here is for everyone to more thoroughly examine mechanical oddities, especially when they deviate from some kind of platonic ideal for the genre. It’s easy to dismiss a game when its mechanical oddities don’t really have a narrative justification, or if some elements of it appear thoughtless. It’s easy to look at Ninja Spirit’s inability to walk while firing, its low gravity, its flat stage design, its weird air control, and conclude that you’re dealing with an unintuitive control scheme in a lazily designed game. In the name of intuitiveness, control standardization and quality-of-life improvements, these kinds of oddities that potentially enable new dynamics can easily become buried. Sure, the mechanical oddities may deviate from what makes [Trendsetter Game Most People Consider Great] great, but perhaps they also enable something new that the platonic ideal could not offer. Hence why it’s all the more important that when you criticize a game, that you should do so on its own merits, and not by how well it stacks up to something else. Nor should simply being different give something a free pass, but it certainly makes them extra worth examining.

For that reason I do recommend to everyone Ninja Spirit a look, to see how its randomly spawning chaos drives gameplay, how it manages to have Castlevania-esque committal jumps in a chaotic RNG-driven scenario, and the “enemy hell” feeling Ninja Spirit evokes by throwing legions of enemies from all directions at you. Stage 6 is really something that should be felt in person.

I do however wish that beating the game didn’t reward you with an epileptic seizure...

[^1]: The part of the game that really hammers this dynamic home is the swamp section in the second half of stage 3, where wading through the swamp (and the intensified number of enemies spawning in) slows your movement to a crawl until the monks forcing you to jump make you realize that moving forwards by bunnyhopping through the swamp lets you progress at standard speed. The swamp section is akin to Mario Bros.’ very first screen when it comes to wordlessly tutorializing an essential part of the game, which Ninja Spirit really should have done in the first stage rather than the third.

[^2]: By contrast, more typical run ‘n gun games have more limited potential jump arcs, but they compensate for it by letting you duck, and having more movement options and platform placements that help extend the possible amount of paths you can traverse on screen.

[^3]: The asymmetry of being unable to do regular jumps while walking on the ceiling and instead being forced to fall to the floor when jumping may seem like another inexplicable oddity. However, I think the developers made the right call there. In a game designed around variable commitment via variable jump heights, being able to escape over-commitment and the recovery of your slow falls by landing on the ceiling would feel like a betrayal of that, instead possibly turning a game of measured jumps into a game of ping-ponging constantly between the floor and ceiling as enemies struggle to keep up with you. Being forced to fall from the ceiling when jumping reintroduces that recovery again, turning the ceiling into more of a temporary safe haven that you can snap onto when the floor looks too hot. But because of this asymmetry you want to be walking on the floor when possible. There are good reasons to have walking on the floor and ceiling in 2D games be symmetric regarding your movement options (in Alien Soldier, this was done to maximize the player’s movement opportunities to compensate for the large player/enemy sprite already taking up most of the screen real estate), but in Ninja Spirit it’s better off being asymmetric for the aforementioned reasons.

[^4]: And then right before the final boss of Ninja Spirit there’s the infamous and abominable Ninja Pit, a section so indefensible and justly hated by everyone who lays eyes on it that we will not speak of it further, but for the sake of warning and good faith must be mentioned in passing.

[^5]: In Ninja Spirit you can freely switch between equipping your Sword, Shuriken, Bombs, and Kusarigama, which can respectively be characterized as Absolute Defense, Absolute Range, Absolute Damage, and Absolute Screen Coverage. The fact that the Kusarigama can be repeatedly whipped 240 degrees around you, cancel most enemy projectiles caught in the circle, and cover over half the screen doing so (on top of your two shadow clones echoing your Kusarigama whips as well) makes it very much too good at controlling the screen to the point where outside of specific situations there’s generally little point in using the Sword for its defensive capabilities or the Shuriken for their range. At the very least Bombs are still useful against single targets.

[^6]: The latter especially does something unique by throwing homing projectiles at you that can box you in and must have their trajectory be manipulated by your jumps. It’s actually a very cool fight once you get to grips with it, but it’s a complete bitch at first because manipulating projectile trajectories is a skill 95% of the game never expects out of you (what with the Kusarigama and Sword being able to cancel most projectiles anyways).

A supreme victory! Housemarque and twin-stick shooter genre pioneer Eugene Jarvis team up to create what might very well be the best twin-stick shooter to date.

One of Nex Machina’s strongest points is the immense variety in its room/enemy design. Rooms are not mere square boxes á la Robotron 2048, they can take on all kinds of shapes and paths of progression. This can range from winding linear stretches to ring formations, to dense rooms populated with (in)destructible geometry, to half-circles with enemies in the middle, to certain platforms being locked off until you destroy specific enemies, to the standard squares where enemies spawn all around you, to even a chase sequence where you’re being chased by a massive rolling boulder.

The variety in enemy design is just as amazing. Enemies can impede you directly or indirectly, by directly chasing/aiming towards you, aimlessly moving around the stage/covering the stage with bullets or lasers in a straight line or a sweep, and/or spawn bullets/enemies around them on death or kamikaze towards you. All archetypes can come in high-HP variants which demand more commitment to dispatch than others. Some turrets are invincible, which means that at times you just have to deal a sweeping laser across the entire stage. Then there’s all the enemy types related to scoring, which requires its own separate section to explain. Nex Machina makes all these enemies work by staggering enemy spawns behind intervals or certain triggers, while also pre-spawning in several enemies. This way the player has the breathing room to take in their surroundings and form a plan of action, but it also allows Nex Machina to recontextualize the same areas by simply spawning certain waves of enemies in certain positions.

While there might have been room for more complex stage hazards or enemies, one should consider that Nex Machina’s non-stop arcade pacing and “easy to pick-up” nature wouldn’t work as well with gameplay elements that aren’t immediately understandable. All new elements that Nex Machina does introduce rarely deviate from the basic “shoot everything to move on to the next area” setup. Sometimes your progress in an area is locked until you destroy a new enemy type (so you can get a better look at what it does), or they’re introduced gradually alongside previous elements in areas that lower the intensity a bit. Either way, both approaches allow beginning players to properly get eased into the systems, while returning players can simply speedrun through and remain engaged because of the scoring system.

Nex Machina’s core and stand-out mechanic has to be its dashing. These grant total invincibility, can be chained up to three times, let you shoot while dashing, and have a (relatively) noticeable recharge time once fully depleted. On this own this isn’t a terribly interesting system, but what makes it stand out is the Dash Explosion. Namely, each dash generates a small lasting explosion that can instagib any non-boss enemy and cancel any nearby projectiles. Enemies that will otherwise take a massive beating before going down can be deleted in a second if you simply dash into them. This is especially useful against enemies that spawn smaller enemies on death, since the lasting property of the explosion means that all its offspring and revenge bullets will also be immediately deleted. And even against bosses it remains useful by being able to dash in and out of bosses for extra damage. So dashing in Nex Machina has not just a defensive, but an offensive usage as well. Playing aggressive means phasing through bullets and enemies while one-shotting high-HP targets, and then getting out to safety as you spend your last dash charge.

While triple dashes + dash explosions make dashing immensely powerful, it remains balanced because of how crowded the stages can get with enemies, bullets, and lasers. The small AoE of the explosions means that dash explosions cannot reliably clear out entire crowds of popcorn enemies, and thus shouldn’t be used for that purpose. In larger rooms there can be a significant amount of distance between you and a high-priority target with bullets/enemies between, so spending several dashes just to gib that enemy can leave you in a terrible position with no leftover dashes and no hope of survival. Sweeping/aimed lasers, expanding energy circles, and dense bullet vomit regularly force you to dash at the right angles and moments, so you cannot always mindlessly spend all your dashes on offense. What’s more, in the later stages Nex Machina throws another curveball by having certain enemies fire distorted lasers, which cannot be dashed through at all! All these combined makes dashing a versatile yet situational tool that can be used creatively but must be used intelligently.

What makes Nex Machina really gel even across many replays is its highly optimizable scoring system. Each area not only keeps you occupied with a legion of baddies to shoot, but multiple layers of scoring objectives. The main one is ‘human chaining’, where you get more points the more humans you chain (a bonus which maxes out when having chained 20 humans). Here it’s not about grabbing all humans as fast as possible, but rather spacing out the rate at which you grab them so that your chain meter won’t go empty before you clear the area. This is then complicated by tankier enemy types that will try to capture your humans if left unattended for too long, making you prioritize either taking down those enemies or simply grabbing the humans right before they’re captured. The second major part of the scoring system is the multiplier, which multiplies the score you get from everything (Including humans) and is raised by killing enemies or finding multiplier tokens. Because the multiplier is global, you want to prioritize raising it and picking-up multiplier tokens where possible before picking up humans, which can be tricky given that your human chain meter depletes within six seconds. Some areas even come with pre-placed multiplier tokens (extra life spawns turn into multiplier tokens if you have the max. amount of extra lives, and some areas have ‘multiplier blocks’ which drop a token but can only be opened using a subweapon) which score-hungry players can risk prioritizing over all else. What’s more, each area gives you a Level End Dash bonus if you dash right before you get teleported to the next area. On its own, this may seem like a nifty and easy QTE to get some bonus points, but when you consider the context of trying to get the multiplier tokens and humans at the last possible second, where you are often dashing towards the last human before time runs out, cleanly clearing areas with a level end dash suddenly becomes a whole lot more complicated!

And then there’s all the secondary scoring objectives! Beacons are scoring targets placed near the edges of the screen, whose high base point value makes you want to delay destroying them as late as possible when your multiplier has been raised as much as possible. Visitors appear in the middle section of fights to move through the stage in a set path and drop a multiplier token when all of them are destroyed. Secret exits are hidden in some areas that require you to commit to shooting them either up close or with your subweapon, and upon being triggered will send you to a secret bonus area after clearing the current one. Disruptors are passive enemies that will try to run away from you of which only 4-5 can spawn per world and one per area, but the areas in which they spawn are randomly picked, with the intent to (as their name suggests) disrupt your precious route by introducing more chaos to the mix. Areas can also feature secret humans, which refill your chain meter by ~8 seconds rather than the standard 6, thus enabling more flexible chaining opportunities where you can grab the secret human first to get as many multiplier tokens as possible before the chain depletes or leaving the secret human for the last so you can enter the next stage with an overcharged human chain meter. You also receive a time clear bonus at the end of each world, so not only do you want to do all the above, but you also want to do it as fast as possible. And as for the micro-est of optimizations, destroying background objects also gives you tick points, so yet on top of all this again you want to cause as much background destruction as possible.

The result of all the above, combined with the existing legions of baddies coming at every direction, is gameplay where you are making a ludicrous number of micro-decisions per second. At any time and place there are multiple scoring objectives at different edges of the screen begging for your attention and enemies from every angle begging for your death. High-priority enemies that fill the screen with bullets are combined with high-priority enemies stealing your humans are combined with high-priority Disruptors/Invaders that are only on-screen for a limited amount of time are combined with secondary scoring targets that should be destroyed before the stage ends are combined with enemies that spawn revenge bullets/extra enemies on death are combined with an ever-depleting human chain meter that’s seconds short of running out. Replays of Nex Machina remain engaging because of just how intense and demanding it is, with almost no downtime to speak of. It’s pure and utter arcade.

What’s often the case with arcade games like these is that the spur-of-the-moment decision making they encourage eventually devolves into rote memorization as players try to beat 20-50 minutes of non-stop carnage more consistently, but Nex Machina remains chaotic to the point where improvisation is a more valuable skill to have. The way it accomplishes this is by combining highly volatile mechanics (i.e. mechanics where increasingly smaller differences in input create increasingly different outcomes) with minor (pseudo-)RNG-driven impulses in order to force a deviation in inputs, and so create unpredictability--or chaos for short.

Something similar was done in Ms. Pac-Man. While the original Pac-Man had a lot of volatility due to the way the ghosts would react to the slightest difference in movement, it was also 100% consistent, and the Ms. Pac-Man developers noticed how high-level Pac-Man play would revolve around executing the same ‘perfect’ route, thus largely doing away with the improvisation factor what drew most people in at lower and medium levels of play. To counteract this in Ms. Pac-Man, they had the ghosts move towards a random corner in the scatter phase at the start of each round, before resuming their standard non-random AI routines. This way, the player couldn’t solely rely on preset routes to survive but had to read and predict ghost behavior on the fly. It’s RNG, but it’s so minor that it’s only noticeable at higher levels of play. The minor RNG in Nex Machina serves the same purpose: making improvisation still relevant on higher levels of play, but without introducing too much inconsistency at any level of play. Of course, memorizing a strategy or a route still plays a large part when chasing high scores in Nex Machina, but it’s not all memorization, and that’s what helps keep it feeling fresh.

Nex Machina has volatility in spades. Because hordes of enemies and bullets moving towards you is a near-constant factor, the slightest deviation in inputs easily spirals out into unpredictable situations. The inaccurate nature of the twin-stick control scheme means that aiming or moving in the exact same directions each run is hard to consistently reproduce. The presence of long-term systems like the human chain meter and item bar means that micro-differences in input have future micro-consequences: entering an area with 25% chain meter left instead of 50% affects how long you can afford to delay grabbing humans or how much of a priority they are, which in turn affects future decisions and decisions after that. The item bar being filled by destroying enemies means that because of the massive and dense waves of enemies, you can only roughly predict where exactly an item will drop. Forgoing to kill optional enemies in turn makes it harder to memorize when said items might drop. Enemies that spawn bullets or smaller enemies on death add even more stuff on screen that makes things harder to control. On Master difficulty enemies will on death shoot revenge bullets towards you, thus making small deviation spiral out even more noticeably (in addition to enemy types that do on-death attacks on any difficulty), and both the player and the enemy move faster, increasing the pressure and making it more likely to make imperfect inputs. On Hero difficulty you must deal with even faster/denser revenge bullets and every power-up drop spawning an expanding laser circle, whose positions you can also only roughly predict.

Then there’s the little pockets of RNG. Some enemies move in random directions or have a slightly randomly offset spawn position, which combined with the way item drops work makes their spawns even harder to predict in advance. Humans don’t completely stand still but instead randomly and slowly roam about their spawn point, which then affects where human stealer-type enemies will go and which human they will prioritize, on top of you having to adjust your human chaining routes. Some enemy types begin bouncing or shooting in random directions or orientations on spawn. The most notable example of RNG are the Disruptors, whose placement and appearance are certainly randomly picked out of a handful of preset solutions.

What then prevents Nex Machina from feeling like uncontrollable chaotic nonsense is that the player has the tools to deal with everything consistently, and that Nex Machina does not demand absolute precision. The most notable example of this is how often Shield pick-ups are dropped (provided the player has all other item upgrades), which means that small one-off mistakes do not result in immediate death spirals. Similarly, the game is quite lenient with extra lives, which are completely divorced from scoring and can be found in secret spots, of which there are about 2-3 in each world. The human chain meter is also quite lenient in how fast it depletes (especially when compared to other chaining systems like those in the Dodonpachi series). Each area is designed to always have a close-by human near each starting point that you can always reach in time, provided you nail the level end dash of the previous area (which replenishes a bit of human chain meter when nailed). The triple dash gives you a lenient amount of i-frames to dash through bullets and enemies with, and recharges relatively fast. Subweapons allow you to dispatch multiple tankier enemies at once, and your primary shot with the spread upgrade is wide enough that aiming accurately isn’t that important. The RNG in Nex Machina does affect potential clear time and the potential end-of-world score bonus you get for clearing the world quickly, which might suck if you’re speedrunner. But thankfully, this score bonus always caps out at 4 minutes and 30 seconds. If you clear it under that time, you will get the highest possible score bonus, meaning that getting slightly subpar clear times (because of RNG) won’t be damning to your score. To conclude, even if some details are unpredictable or have random deviation, it’s well within your toolset to deal with them.

It's when you don’t have that toolset that Nex Machina feels like some straight bullshit, which the Single World mode nicely showcases. There you start each run in a world of choice without your upgrades--your triple dash, weapon spread, dash explosion and weapon range--leaving you only with a narrow peashooter and limited mobility. For the first world this is relatively doable since it’s designed around you starting naked, but in the later worlds (or starting the first world on higher difficulties) you are increasingly dependent on the random upgrade item order to give you the actually useful upgrades first (triple dash and weapon spread) because of how quickly things spiral. I often find myself having to restart a dozen times in the first world after making a small mistake that with all my upgrades either could have been avoided or compensated for.

Not all implementations of RNG in Nex Machina are ideal, of which the random upgrade item order is the most noticeable. Some upgrades are more helpful to the survival of your un-upgraded ass than others. Triple Dash and Weapon Spread, for example, make it much easier to control crowds than Weapon Range or Dash Explosion. Shields seem useful to have at first, but the other four upgrades are better at preventing you from being in a situation where you’re in danger of being hit to begin with. The upgrade order is completely out of the player’s control, and scoring/survival can deviate strongly because of that. For that reason, it would have helped if the upgrade order was static (where Triple Dash and Weapon Spread are preferably the first two), or if the player could control the upgrade order somehow, or if power-ups were styled a la Cho Ren Sha 68K/Crimzon Clover where it’s a spinning circle of all possible power-ups from which you can pick only one.

The chaos that Disruptors create is also not used as effectively as it could have been. If Disruptors spawn close enough when you teleport into a new area, then you can gib them in a second and deal with the rest of the enemies as usual, which makes Disruptors not disrupt much of anything. It then would have helped if Disruptors did not spawn immediately when the player enters a new area, and if Disruptors always spawned outside your range or behind other enemies, where it could then sow more chaos. It would have also helped if Disruptors could never spawn in the penultimate areas leading up to the boss fight of each world, which are intentionally always easy breezy to build up the boss fight coming after. Disruptors then spawning in those areas feels like RNGesus giving you a freebie, which is why they’re better off always spawning in the ‘real’ areas of each world.

Although the boss fights in Nex Machina are built up as the climax of a world, they ironically feel more like moments of rest compared to the intensity of regular gameplay. Human chaining and secondary scoring objectives cease playing a role during boss fights, so the only optimizations left are not getting hit and dealing as much damage as possible. The target prioritization and crowd control of regular gameplay barely play a role in boss fights, as bosses instead opt to throw bullet patterns at you. Combine the lack of scoring opportunities with the relaxed intensity, and you end up with boss fights in NM feeling like a lesser mode of gameplay. Arcade games with chaining systems do often relax scoring requirements during boss fights or slightly alter how it works for bosses only (since it’s hard to ‘chain’ a single enemy), but they make up for it by having the boss be more intense to fight. In Nex Machina, the only truly intense bosses are the TLB and the fifth boss; the former takes the kids’ gloves off the bullet pattern design and goes all out, and the latter attacks you from multiple angles using multiple destroyable parts, which is more in line with regular gameplay. It could have been neat if chaining humans was still a thing you had to do during boss fights, either by spawning more of them in as the fight progresses or by relaxing the depletion rate of the chain meter for bosses only. Having boss fights be designed around spawning multiple targets (like the Architect fight) would also make them more in line with the strengths of the rest of the game.

One downside of Nex Machina’s reliance on secrets for scoring is that it creates a massive knowledge barrier if you want to begin scoring semi-competently. While most arcade games feature scoring tricks that’s more a matter of knowledge than being able to apply them, at least you usually won’t know about their existence and what you’re missing out on. Secrets in arcade games can be useful for staggering the rate at which the player is taught about the game instead of overwhelming them from the get-go, but having too many secrets can turn people away due to the sheer amount of stuff they need to memorize. This is further exacerbated by the fact that you’re made very aware of the existence of secrets in Nex Machina. At the end of each world, you see all the secrets you missed, which is psychologically more deflating than if you never knew you missed some to begin with. Thus, it gives off the feeling that the game wants you to go look up all secrets beforehand. This goes double when you consider that extra lives aren’t tied to scoring, but that they’re placed in secret spots you must shoot. Even if you just want a basic survival clear, memorizing the spots of all extra life pick-ups becomes essential, and having to look up external videos or analyze replays just to learn about the secrets is a hurdle more suited for score-chasers than people who just want a basic 1cc.

Second problem is that the discovery of secrets isn’t that interesting either. Your main methods of interaction with the world are moving around and shooting things, meaning that discovering secrets for yourself involves having to keep the last enemy alive and shoot/explore all edges of an area (all 70+ of them) to see what yells and what doesn’t. It’s a tedious and boring process. Watching a YouTube video or an in-game replay speeds things up, though arguably not having to consult external resources for a basic survival clear at all would be more useful. Nex Machina doesn’t have much in the way of exploration or puzzles or hidden interactions to make the discovery of secrets feel more exciting, nor would there be much potential to make discovery interesting within Nex Machina’s limited design scope. If there’s no way of making discovery of secrets more interesting, then it might have helped to make the secrets more obvious or announce their presence in one way or another (like how the presence of a Disruptor is announced at the start of each round), or to rework them to no longer be secret (f.e. having extra lives no longer be tied to secret spots).

One curious thing about Nex Machina is that its human chaining system is objectively an arbitrary system completely divorced from survival or normal gameplay, yet wanting to save the humans seems to come almost intuitively. The rate at which you gain extra lives is fixed, and the rate at which items are dropped does not increase the more humans you grab. But even so, you still want to try and save them (or at least, I hope you do). Why is that? The trick is entirely psychological: you care because the objects you must grab appear like fellow humans, even if they are a completely abstract representation of a human being. Rescuing humans feels good, and seeing humans get captured in front of you feels worse. The fact that the subject involves fellow humans instills more feelings than if it had been some featureless geometric shape. Even if rescuing abstract representations of human beings wouldn’t instill any feelings by itself, having them be actively taken away from you and having that loss be shoved in your face is certainly a feeling you would go out of your way to avoid. It is this appeal to humanitarianism that drives people to engage with an otherwise completely optional system that rewards you with nothing other than extra arbitrary points, which just shows how powerful and all-encompassing the indomitable human spirit is (although Mars Matrix proves that appealing to human greed and having to grab gold instead of human beings is just as effective).

I bring this up because scoring systems, or any gameplay systems for that matter, can appear arbitrary and forced when they don’t come “naturally”, leading to people refusing to engage with it or even despising its inclusion. If the base game has a certain gameplay/narrative goal (f.e. staying alive, or looking cool), and the system involves doing something that has nothing to do with that or even the polar opposite (i.e. letting yourself get hit and killed, like in Battle Garegga), then it’s quite literally counter-intuitive. The scoring system could objectively make the game more engaging, but people would nonetheless bounce off it or believe it’s overdesigned. The issue here too, is entirely psychological.

There must be narrative framing or synergy with existing gameplay systems to make systems feel more intuitive and feel natural. In Nex Machina, if you are good at not getting hit and keeping your shield, you are rewarded with a wider primary shot. Narratively that’s arbitrary, but gameplay-wise being rewarded for not dying comes naturally, since ‘not dying’ is in part what you are trying to do the whole game. In JRPGs, enemies are usually not resistant or weak to arbitrary shapes or colors, but rather real-life elements like fire or water. That fire creatures take more damage from water attacks doesn’t appear as an arbitrary rule (even if it technically is), it’s just common IRL sense that fire is weak to water. That flying enemies in Doom Eternal take more damage from the Arbalest does on the other hand appear to be completely arbitrary, because there’s nothing to suggest why they would take more damage from it or what makes the Arbalest so special. But if you reframed the flying enemies as being perpetually on fire and the Arbalest shooting ice stalactites then suddenly it feels a lot more intuitive, even though the underlying mechanics haven’t changed. Appealing to intuition is important for helping a player understand the game and intrinsically motivating them to engage with systems. In Nex Machina, that intuition is “humans should be rescued” and that intrinsic motivation is “saving humans makes me feel good”, and sometimes that’s all you need.

Visually Nex Machina can be unreadable nonsense with its many enemies and particle effects, but the user interface and sound design goes out of its way to make the game readable. So the player and all enemies have outline highlights to make them stand out from the backgrounds, off-screen enemies are telegraphed with arrows at the edges of the screen, your dash and subweapon gauge are displayed around the player character when used and play sounds for when they’re empty/recharged, the last enemy of an area is always highlighted with pink (in case you need to grab all remaining human first), enemy spawns are always telegraphed with silhouettes, the positions of humans are highlighted with arrows stretching from the player characters towards them, those arrows will blink red when the human is about to be captured by an enemy, and the state of your human chain meter (normally shown on the top right of the screen) is displayed double on each human in the form of a ring around the human that slowly shrinks the more the chain meter depletes, so you don’t have to take your eyes off the action to check a bar in the corner of the screen. About the only thing missing is a progress bar showing you the % of enemies you have killed per area, to give you a better idea of when you should draw out grabbing humans and when you should grab them ASAP.

It must be however said that despite being visually readable, Nex Machina’s visual style really does not lend itself to this kind of game. There is a lot of detail in the background and enemy design that, because of the speed of the gameplay and zillion things demanding your attention at once and the crazy neat particle/voxelization effects on top of everything, the player simply has no time to really appreciate or even take in the visuals. Like driving 200mph in a racing car, all the background and finer details turn into a blur, to the point where I feel that all the effort in the backgrounds and enemy design has been wasted. Shoot ‘em ups like the Raiden or Darius games can afford to have beautiful, detailed backgrounds because their scrolling speed is usually slow enough that you have the time to take in all the background details. In Nex Machina, I only started to notice the details on repeat playthroughs or when watching videos/replays. The zoomed-out top-down perspective is essential for the gameplay to work, but it also means you won’t often get a good look at the backgrounds or the enemies from up close. Enemies are thankfully distinguishable enough because of their silhouettes, but design-wise most of them come off as red blobs, which in turn comes at the expense of character. Here I wish that Nex Machina had a more abstract art direction to allow its designs and backgrounds to be fully taken in even at high speeds and under multiple layers of particle effects filling the screen. It might have helped with getting the player to connect with the game at a more personal level.

In conclusion, Nex Machina is a wonderful example of how well-designed scoring systems, little bits of RNG, and a love for humanity can further elevate an already great set of core systems. It looked for a while that this might have been the final high note Housemarque was about to end on, but it seems that with Returnal they intend to continue to enrich the world with more of that arcade goodness.

Ne, ne, nex machine
Finland’s greatest arcade machine

ELEX marks Piranha Bytes’ sixth take on their tried-and-true Gothic formula. For the non-Europeans those who have never played any Piranha Bytes games before, here's a quick introduction. PB games stand out from other RPGs through their small yet dense game worlds. Players progression is soft-gated through high-level enemies rather than physical barriers. This way skilled enough players can edge their way into parts of the world they’re not supposed to be in yet. Then there's a progression curve that–relative to most RPGs–has you start from level negative five. You will start off as such a useless sod that even a basic oversized chicken is a major threat to your life; something you must grow to overcome by running away and kissing the boots of those stronger than you. This time, the world is one of the biggest PB has ever made, and you get a jetpack right at the start of the game. How does it pan out?

The exploration in ELEX is downright addicting. What starts as a short stroll in the woods towards a quest objective turns into a constant string of “oooh, what’s that?”`. You'll end up taking detour after detour, going from one interesting landmark to the next. After scavenging everything you can find–only an hour later will you remember what it was you came here for in the first place. Despite the size of ELEX's world, it’s consistently dense with stuff to explore, and there's always another landmark in sight of another. The only exception is the region of Ignadon, which f.e. has only half or 2/3rds the amount of quests compared to the other two main regions, despite being as large. It also helps that the quest design in ELEX is good at sending you towards different parts of the world where you can (hopefully) get sidetracked.

ELEX’s world is on an intrinsic level appealing to explore because of the jetpack. In past PB games the main obstacles you faced were enemies blocking your path, but now the terrain itself is a major obstacle. The world terrain features much more vertical variation compared to previous PB games, as there are way more structures and landmarks that make you go “can I climb that?”. 99% of the time, you can, and 99% of the time you’ll also find an item up there as well! There are almost no invisible walls in ELEX that get in the way of your exploration; the only limit is your jetpack fuel.

One would think that a jetpack would trivialize combat and exploration, but turns out it's quite well balanced! The jetpack only allows you to gain height for about six seconds, and takes about three times as long to recharge from 0 to 100. Fuel only recharges if you’re standing on a solid surface. Infinite flight isn’t possible, and fuel takes too long to recharge to spam the jetpack in combat. Climbing terrain then isn’t a matter of ‘hold spacebar to climb’. It does take planning and fuel management to fly over gaps and climb buildings. In combat the jetpack doesn’t have much use outside of running away or shooting enemies mid-air.

With flight being a thing, PB was finally forced to address the longstanding issue of using high ground to cheese enemies. PB made the decision to give almost all enemies ranged attacks that can lead you. Meaning, they shoot towards where you are moving towards rather than where you are. As most combat in ELEX takes place on open plains or hills, this is definitely a sensible decision. This way you can’t just fly or circlestrafe to cheese most enemies, now that they can snipe you out of the sky. There are other ranged attack types (such as homing/interruptible hitscan) that ELEX could have used to vary things up, but sadly it never does.

Though the exploration in ELEX is great, its rewards are rather disappointing. Expect to find a lot of junk items, healing/mana potions, some cash, some crafting materials, or a piece of lore. Sometimes you will find an actually powerful piece of gear… with such insane stat requirements that it takes 10 more hours of leveling to equip. All the above is of course still valuable, but the fact that most places in the world yield more of the same makes it rather predictable and unexciting. Of course there must be more low-value than high-value finds to make the latter feel appropriately rewarding, but in ELEX that ratio is too skewed towards the former.

That ELEX reduces the average value gained per square unit explored does make some sense, however. In earlier PB games the worlds were relatively smaller, so for every square meter explored you were more likely to find a high-value item. In ELEX the world is larger, yet just as dense with items. This results in a greater total amount of items to discover, which for a game like this makes the difficulty curve and economy much harder to balance. If ELEX kept the same low/high-value find ratio of the old games, there’d be so many good items to find through a bit of exploration that the player would become too strong too early, likely resulting in the player being bored as they steamroll through most of the world without too much effort. Thus it was necessary to reduce the value you get on average out of exploration. Yet, the end result of the rewards for exploration not being exciting persists. The design challenge here is as follows: How do you maintain a reasonable difficulty curve and keep rewards for exploration exciting, while having a high density of discoverable items spread out across a much larger surface area?

One method ELEX already uses is to ‘split’ high-value items into parts and spread them across the world (akin to collecting Heart Pieces in The Legend of Zelda to create Heart Containers). For example, the world contains a lot of Natural Elex that’s not that useful on its own, but you can combine several pieces to craft Elex Potions for attribute/skill points. There’s also Gemstones, which you can slot into gear to give you minor stat boosts. Smaller Gemstones can then be combined to create larger ones which provide greater boosts. This way there’s a noticeable sense of progression without rewarding the player with too much power for exploring a small part of the world. The implementation of those ideas in ELEX are rather flawed (certain vendors can sell infinite amounts of Natural Elex to the point where finding Natural Elex in the wild doesn’t feel as rewarding anymore, and Gemstones are so rare to find that even in my semi-completionist playthrough I only had enough Gemstones to make one (1) Large Gemstone), but the idea behind them is sound.

ELEX also prevents you from being able to equip powerful gear you find until you meet certain stat requirements. These are necessary in games like this to some extent, but in the context of ELEX they are absurdly balanced. In practice, you often won’t be able to equip that nice gun you found until ten or twenty more hours of leveling up. The costs for increasing your stats increase the higher the stats themselves get (when a stat is over 30 it costs 2 attribute points to raise it by one, and when it’s over 60 it costs five points to raise it by one), so if you also factor in that all armor/weapons have requirements for two different stats, and that most of the gear you find have requirements around 50 or higher, it’s going to take a little while until you get there. To rub more salt in the wound, even if you do finally meet the stat requirements, you’ll find that most high-tier gear you find in the wild isn’t even that good compared to what you can buy from the store and upgrade yourself–on top of having more reasonable stat requirements to boot! In fact, one of the most powerful melee weapons in the game is just a fully upgraded store weapon. So you often can’t use a lot of weapons you find through exploration, and by the time you meet the requirements you’ve most likely found a better alternative already.

This is where the ‘split’ method could be applied to gear. By ‘splitting’ gear into components spread out across the world, the player can still feel a sense of progress for having found a part of a powerful item that can later be combined into one. This should reduce the need for absurd stat requirements in high-tier gear as well. Dividing a high-tier item across several high-level areas or from materials dropped by killing high-level enemies should already pose enough of an implicit stat requirement of its own.

Splitting items has its limits when there’s not that many items to split to begin with, so another solution is to add more items by introducing more item categories. The currently available equipment categories in ELEX are for weapons, shields, body armor, helmets, leg armor, one ring and one necklace, but so you could also add categories for things like gloves, boots, belts, another ring, earrings, or cyber-implants. Since finding a new piece of equipment in the wild only feels valuable if it’s better than your existing gear or if it has an unique use case (like masks that offer radiation/poison resistance, or can be broken down into useful crafting materials), scaling out horizontally by adding more types of gear allows you to populate the world with more equipment that feels unique and valuable. The player being encouraged to multi-class in ELEX is also a good extension of this idea. It means that more weapon types and thus more items one finds through exploration are more relevant to one’s playstyle, whereas earlier PB games tended to focus more on pure builds with a single weapon category. The only caveats to scaling out gear horizontally is that the difficulty curve of the game should factor in the player having an item equipped for every category, and that the economy should factor in the player being able to buy an item for most categories. Keep also in mind that there’s only so many equipment categories you can make: a massive amount of categories could devalue each individual item category, the equipment system could become Armored Core-levels of complicated in a way that doesn’t suit what the game is going for, and having a humanoid player character be equipped with so many different items and baubles could feel a bit silly.

Another option is to scale out vertically by adding more equipment tiers per equipment category. That way there’s a lot more stuff to find per equipment category before you get your hands on the highest-tier gear, thus keeping the world populated with useful items that aren't immediately too powerful. ELEX already applies this by having most weapons come in four minor tiers of power, on top of major tiers per weapon category that have actually different names but the same moveset. For this to properly work, there would also need to be more enemy ‘tiers’ to exercise this newfound power against (be it through new enemy types, variations of existing enemy types, or a pack of lower-tier enemies that you’d have to fight all at once). If mid-tier gear is enough to deal with endgame enemies, then the higher equipment tiers are overkill. You could balance the highest equipment tier around the highest enemy tier, but if you then try to squeeze in a 1000 equipment tiers even though there are only 5 enemy tiers, then the end result is an incremental sense of progression which feels like the only difference between an old and a new weapon is that it does +1 damage. It’s hard to appreciate new gear you found if it’s barely any different from your old gear. You need to strike a good balance between the amount of enemy tiers and weapon tiers, depending on how many assets (weapon/enemy models, animations) you can afford to create and how large you plan to make the world.

Finally you can add another dimension to itemization by letting the player modify and upgrade existing gear using upgrade items. This reduces the need for horizontal scaling by introducing more equipment-relevant items that aren’t actually equipment items. It also reduces the need for vertical scaling, since being able to make low-tier items as strong as high-tier ones would reduce the amount of equipment tiers necessary. Such upgrade items can function as one-time consumables or reusable modifiers you can equip onto equipment, like the aforementioned Gemstones. These upgrade items themselves can also be tiered, split into parts/upgrade when combined, and either apply to all equipment categories or some/one of them. Care must be taken to not make upgrade items too powerful and versatile, otherwise there’s little point in finding better tiers/uniques of an equipment type (beyond slightly higher base stats) when you can already upgrade a low-tier weapon to be as strong as a high-tier one. ELEX manages to avoid this by limiting the amount of Gemstone slots on a weapon by its weapon tier, where higher weapon tiers have more slots to put gemstones into compared to lower tier ones.

To sum it up, we’ve added more item categories, added more tiers per item category, relaxed the stat requirements for items, introduced upgrade items that can modify items, and also split all aforementioned items in parts and recipes for good measure. Will that be enough to populate a large world with useful but not-too-powerful items in a way that’s satisfying? Well, no. Populating the world with useful items like upgrade potions and higher-DPS weapons is one thing, but populating it with interesting items is another. If the only thing better items do is the exact same thing as the previous tiers but with a higher armor/damage value, then all you’ve done is establish more progression for the sake of progression. Such number-goes-up itemization holds nothing new and no surprises by itself, leaving no sense of excitement to be had.

The secret ingredient behind what makes upgrades exciting is precisely all the new gameplay opportunities they open up. Exploration in Metroid wouldn’t be as rewarding if Energy/Missile Tanks were the only items you could discover, since they usually don’t open up any new opportunities. Stat upgrades like Energy/Missile Tanks or all the methods I listed above only serve to make the world feel less empty by populating it with useful rewards, but they cannot be a substitute for creating interesting rewards.

ELEX’s gear rewards aren’t very interesting because the only new things better gear offers is usually just a higher attack/armor value. There is no leg armor that does anything but increase your armor stat, most helmets (aside from sunglasses and the Protective Mask) only increase your armor stat, and all body armor also only increases your armor + poise. Rings and amulets are a bit more special in this regard because they can boost your skills or attributes, but given the aforementioned insane weapon stat requirements, I ended up mostly wearing rings and amulets that let me equip a better weapon. Even unique weapons with special names don’t do anything special. First, they are always based on an existing weapon that you can buy in a store, and thus don’t have any unique moves or modes attached to them that other weapons of the same type don’t have. Second, they might come with elemental buffs or gemstone sockets pre-applied, but since you can craft those on any weapon yourself it hardly makes those “uniques” unique. Aside from the sunglasses and the hilariously broken amulet that lets you survive one lethal blow (an effect you can reset by re-equipping the amulet), most gear does not provide any unique effects or synergies or anything that can change the way you play, like in Diablo or Baldur’s Gate. Since finding a better sword by itself isn’t as satisfying as it is in Gothic or Risen, giving weapons more unique and interesting effects (both in combat and outside of combat) could allow one to populate the world with a greater amount and variety of equipment items without having to scale equipment out horizontally/vertically as much. Either ELEX should have introduced new gear properties/systems to justify strewing so much gear around the world, or it should have shrunk down the world to accommodate the gear potential it already had.

While Gothic and Risen took an even more basic number-go-up approach than ELEX to gear progression, it ironically did work out better for those games. One reason being that each better equipment item that you did get was a major and noticeable upgrade because there were less equipment tiers. Every armor set in Gothic/Risen represented a major milestone that required you to do several quests and save up a ton of money just to be able to unlock it. They wouldn't be as impactful if you'd get more new armor sets in the same timespan. The second reason is that Gothic/Risen's worlds were filled with gatekeeper NPCs who would gib your unarmored underleveled ass if you got too close. Putting on better armor posed an immediately noticeable increase in your chances of survival against them. The excitement from finding better gear in those games stemmed from all the new areas and potential for exploration that opened up for you, much like finding a key item in a Metroidvania. Of course, finding better gear in ELEX serves a similar purpose, but that sense of progression is way more incremental and thus less pronounced due to the greater amount of equipment items, categories, and tiers present in ELEX–not to mention that ELEX has way less clearly defined gate(keeper)s to test your newfound strength against.

The larger world of ELEX has not only caused the value of itemization to be stretched out, but enemy design as well. I’m not upset at the fact that enemies are reskinned at all–that is simply an inevitable reality of game production–but rather that there is not much variation in enemy behavior and attack design. It's a problem that applies not only between enemy variants, but whole enemy archetypes as well. Whether it’s a Biter or a high-level Stalker, how you approach them is identical: dodge their attacks and stunlock them during the gaps in their attack strings for as long as your stamina and surrounding enemies allow. The only variables that change is the HP/armor/damage on the enemy, whether they have ranged attacks at all, and the animations + punish/dodge windows in their attack strings. Dealing with melee attacks is mainly a matter of timing your backstep/roll button, and rarely about positioning, which curbs the potential variety in enemy melee attacks. Ranged attacks too almost often only come in the form of a projectile with leading, but never spreadshots/lasers/homing/area-of-denial attacks/etc. There are only a few NPCs that use explosives, but that’s about it. Enemy behavior (such as how aggressive they are, how they respond to your actions, whether they can interact with other enemies such as by buffing others or use group tactics) also remains the same throughout. Enemies trying to impede you indirectly (such as by inflicting debuffs, altering the environment, etc.) is also something that rarely ever happens. Only humanoid enemies behave differently from wildlife since they can block your attacks and prefer to use ranged attacks at range. While there are several firearms with unique firemodes and spells and stims available to the player, humanoid NPCs don’t seem very interested in using these. The end result is that once you’ve gotten familiar with the combat system and gotten some decent gear, each fight will play out similarly. For a game where you’ll be doing a lot of fighting, that is not exactly a boon to making each part of the world feel unique.

Even if the enemy NPCs and their variants were more varied in behavior and how you had to fight them, there’s still the issue of having to spread them out across the world in a way that’s not repetitive. There’s only so many enemies and variants that can be reasonably put in the game after all, especially with Piranha Bytes’ AA-level budget and manpower. For this reason it’s important that existing enemy types are combined with each other to create new unique combat scenarios with the same assets, and that enemies are designed in a way where they can synergize and play off of each other to facilitate this approach to encounter design. This may sound asinine to bring up (especially if you’ve read my other reviews), but it bears repeating in ELEX’s case. External modifiers (things like difficult terrain, weather, environmental hazards, interactable environmental objects, or other magic nonsense) can be overlaid on top of a combat zone to multiply the amount of mileage you get out of the few enemy types you have. This would however require that enemies more often attack you in groups/packs, and that they aren’t as susceptible to being picked off one-by-one. That would otherwise defeat the entire point of combining enemies to create new combat scenarios. Of course, even with the above there’s only so many combinations you can make, but at that point you should ask yourself whether your world isn’t just too big to accommodate what little content you have.

That brings us to the second main culprit of ELEX’s lackadaisical balancing: it’s utter and total devotion to non-linear progression. ELEX takes the non-linearity of its forebears even further by letting you go anywhere you want after you exit the tutorial zone, with almost no invisible barriers or story gates holding you back. Such non-linearity doesn’t need to be a bad thing at all. If anything, ELEX’s quest design massively benefits from being able to progress quests out-of-order by being able to find key items or deal with key NPCs before having even started the relevant quests (unlike prior Gothic games where said items/NPCs only spawn after having started the quests… in locations you’ve already explored). Rather, the issue with ELEX’s approach of total freed.om of progression is that it makes it significantly more difficult (but not impossible) to balance character progression, item progression, story progression, and enemy populations, since the player can tackle most content in any order. It’s possible to predict non-linear outcomes and entry points to smaller isolated entities like quests and dungeons, but how do you as a designer predict such things for a massive overworld?

Prior PB games were renowned for their freedom of exploration (especially relative to most mainstream RPGs at the time), but they were–for good reason–not that free. The crux lies in how the games handle how the worlds of those games changed as the main story progressed.

In Gothic I, when the main story moved to a new chapter, most of its world got refreshed with new content. Wildernesses would be repopulated with higher-level enemies (but lower-level enemies would not be despawned, thus not screwing you over if you didn’t systematically exterminate every single NPC for XP per chapter), and NPCs would offer new quests. This meant that the world by hand adjusted itself to match the player’s progress in strength, and also helped the world feel alive by having it respond to changes in the main story. Yet, this approach of refreshing the entire world can only realistically work when its surface area is small enough and when the new content itself is fresh enough. The greater the surface area, the more content would need to be refreshed, which from a production standpoint becomes exponentially more taxing. Not to mention that the player would be expected to sweep most of the world again just to come into contact with the new content, which is something that increasingly feels like forced backtracking and padding the larger the world is. This approach also only works if the refreshed content has truly new story/gameplay ramifications, otherwise it too will come off as padding.

Gothic II had a larger world compared to its prequel, and instead of periodically refreshing the entire game world, it instead cleverly decided to refresh only one part of it. The way that worked is by structuring the world around a central hub–the Khorinis Mainland. In one chapter the player would explore the mainland, then the next chapter a hard-gated border zone would be unlocked (the Old Valley of the Mine, Jharkendar) featuring higher-level content appropriate to the player’s expected level at that point in the main story. The main story then expects the player to explore and do quests in that area, after which they’re led back to the Mainland, which has since been refreshed with new content while the player was away in a border area. This usually brought with it a meaningful change in the situation, such as the introduction of Seekers or an Orc invasion, after which the process repeats itself. Since the border areas are situated on the borders of the world, the player is less likely to pass through them again while backtracking or doing Mainland quests, which means that their lack of new content won’t be noticed. The fact that all the refreshed content is only placed in the central hub/crossroads of the world means that the player is more likely to “organically” (i.e. guided by the designer’s graceful hand) come across all the changes and new content as they’re backtracking. This way they are more likely to engage with it out of their own curiosity and initiative, rather than being told by an NPC that they should investigate something in position XY, which can feel like it is invalidating player agency. Now that the designer can reasonably predict how the player progresses through the world, new level-appropriate content can be placed in areas that the player is likely to visit and come across.

Now compare this to ELEX. Here, almost nothing is gated, and after the tutorial zone the player can go about anywhere anytime. The fact that there’s shit to explore in practically every direction makes it very likely for the player to get pulled into every which way, making predicting player progression through the world rather difficult.

Besides that, ELEX has only three story acts, where the bulk of all side-quests (save for some companion quests) can be completed in the first act. There is no pressing reason to progress the main story, and if you’ve played a few RPGs, you are most likely used to completing as much of the side content as possible before progressing the main story (out of a merited fear of the sidequests permanently disappearing otherwise, as is already the case in ELEX with the Domed City). If you do all the sidequests first and the main story second, then the world will appear barren and its settlements lifeless now that there's no reason to interact with the rest of the world. Only the Domed City changes noticeably after the main story progresses, and even then it doesn’t offer you any new content when it does.

For this reason it would have helped if there were more main story acts and if more sidequests were gated in later acts, but this presents another issue: how do you notify the player that there's new quests available across vastly different parts in the world? Now that the designer cannot predict how the player will backtrack and place new content along that path, either the player must manually check each settlement and/or NPC to see if anything's new, which is time-consuming, or the player must be notified through either phone calls or messenger NPCs spawning near you to notify you that's something new. But the latter has its limits; it feels a bit silly if after a story act change you are bombarded with a dozen NPCs at once telling you you can progress their questline (which is something that actually happens when you visit your companion hub after a story act change). Given the design challenges here, it's understandable why PB would skip all this hassle by just making all side-quests available from the start.

The above paragraphs mostly concern themselves with anticipating progress between major zones of the world, but what about gating progress within those zones? The most common approach by PB games is to have high-level enemies soft-gate your progress, and nudge you towards areas more suited for your level. Instances of this do exist in ELEX, but they seem to be rather applied for guarding small buildings or inlets containing phat loot, rather than guarding larger areas. Even if higher-level enemies were spread out across larger areas, they still wouldn't be effective gatekeepers since enemies in ELEX have trouble chasing you down at all. Not to mention that it makes slipping by them rather unrewarding because of how easy it then tends to be. One of the reasons for this is that enemies never sprint towards you at full speed. Bizarrely, enemies in ELEX can sprint at high speeds, but they only ever do this if you point a ranged weapon at them. The jetpack also makes it easier to simply fly over any would-be gatekeepers, especially once you know how to dodge leading projectiles. That is something that can only be solved by introducing new ranged attacks for enemies that are significantly harder to avoid, or by making the jetpack itself upgradeable so it starts weak, just like how the player character has very limited stamina at the start of the game.

Another victim of this total freedom approach is the difficulty curve. Assuming that the player doesn’t use one of the game’s many exploits or broken tactics, the ‘hobo phase’ (the start of the game when the player is still weak and must scrounge by using any means possible) lasts too long, whereas after that the game completely dissipates in terms of difficulty, offering no meaningful enemy barriers after that point. Admittedly, no PB game ever had a difficulty curve that didn’t fold halfway through the game, but at the very least they still had a functional hobo phase. Yet in ELEX, the player is so weak relative to the average enemy roaming around the starting settlements that they have no choice but to do non-combat quests in towns for several hours before having the stats and money to equip the gear necessary to survive the wilderness and get into actual combat for once. While that is part of the hobo phase too, making it last for so long as in ELEX’s case can make it feel like the game’s just about being an errand boy. At least other Gothic games were more generous with placing weaker versions of enemies in the world.

Once you do hit the magic threshold (which is usually getting the stats to equip a weapon that deals decent damage), the world folds. The grand majority of overworld enemies can be reliably solo’d, you have enough healing potions at that point to mitigate most damage, and the only higher-level enemies are present in isolated pockets that are easily avoidable. From what I can tell, ELEX attempted to balance the fact that the player can go anywhere by balancing most overworld enemies to be mid-level. If the goal is total freedom, then each route should be equally valid, which can mean that each route should be equally dangerous. This would then result in the aforementioned overlong hobo phase (since lower level enemies are hard to come by) and the world having little to offer after you do reach mid-level.

The issue of insane stat requirements on gear can also be traced to the fact that the player can go anywhere at any time. A game whose world had some zones that were hard-gated could simply place higher-level gear in higher-level zones that the player can’t access to begin with until they reach a higher level, while populating the parts that the player can access with weapons more appropriate to their expected level range. Same thing goes for enemies: by gating world progression in a way where the designer can predict how much progress the player has made, they can then have the player fight more level-appropriate enemies. For example, in Fallout: New Vegas the player can take a short route to New Vegas by passing through mountain ranges filled with deadly high-level Cazadors or Deathclaws, or they can take the long and scenic route populated with more level-appropriate NPCs and quests. When the designer cannot predict how the player might make their progress through the world, they're forced to take a one-size-fits-all solution (level scaling in Bethesda’s games, or in ELEX’s case, respawning the world with enemy types depending on the player’s level) to enemy balancing, with limited success.

ELEX did introduce a new (for PB games) way of soft-gating the world: through environmental hazards, or danger zones as I like to call them. Step into a danger zone, and you receive a debuff that saps your health until you leave the zone. You then only have a limited amount of time to go about your business if you don’t want to die, which automatically acts as a barrier for the ill-prepared. It also brings with it interesting trade-offs. So you need to decide if you want to equip gear with a worse armor value but a better ailment resistance if you want to survive the danger zone itself, while leaving you weaker against enemies within the danger zone. So having to spend one buff slot on ailment resistance stims is one slot you can’t use on something else (which matters if your playstyle is reliant on stims). Of course you can try to force your way through the danger zone, but here ELEX actually disables healing through healing potions if you’re inside. The HP that you came in with is all the HP you have to play with. Since each action in the danger zone affects what other actions you can take/how much time you have left down the line, you also can’t just savescum your way through, when it’s a bad decision from half a minute prior currently screwing you over. Unfortunately danger zones are not used as often in ELEX as I would have liked despite the engaging challenges they offer. The few danger zones that there are don’t feature combat or platforming that often (even though combat/platforming under debilitating conditions would have made for more interesting challenges). The only negative in the implementation of the danger zones is that each danger zone type (heat/frost/poison/radioactivity) functions the same (sapping your health over time). It's the same thing but in a different skin depending on the biome the danger zone is in. The danger zones could be more unique from each other if each damage type affected you differently as well.

To conclude, I hope this all illustrates the challenges and caveats that come when expanding the surface area of an open world game. While I would have preferred that ELEX’s world was smaller in size, I do not believe it impossible to create a game with a larger world whose progression and balance is still sensible. The only challenge is doing so is whether the developer has the budget and manpower to realize that, which a larger studio like From Software recently set out to prove with Elden Ring (to great success, I hear). If you’re wondering why I didn’t cover other aspects of the game in any detail, it’s because simply I didn’t find them interesting or worthwhile enough to dissect a lesson out of. Others have provided better insight on them than I can.

During the time while I was (procrastinating) writing this piece, ELEX II was released to muted fanfare. Rather than to polish the strengths of the first game, it seems like per nu-PB tradition it’s yet another “one step forwards, two steps backwards” affair. Oh well!

Black Mesa keeps shifting between different modes of gameplay–or so-called “pillars”. Black Mesa’s main pillars here would be: puzzling, platforming, shooting, and being a walking simulator, following Half-Life 1’s original tag-line of “Run. Think. Shoot. Live.”. In the narrative context of Black Mesa, this pillar approach does make sense. You are not playing as Mario or Master Chief; you’re a “highly trained professional” scientist caught in a FUBAR situation between aliens and the military. That would be a hard sell if the gameplay focused on either platforming or shooting or puzzling. But what nags me the most is that these pillars all tend to happen in completely separate realities; you’re not doing much platforming or puzzling while shooting, or much puzzling while platforming.

A knock-on effect of keeping these pillars all separate is that it limits what you can do with them individually, since a game can only be so long. A given pillar can never reach its full potential if the game has to distribute its total length between several pillars; time spent on one means there’s less time to spend on the others. We already see the unforeseen consequences of this in Black Mesa: many puzzle or platforming segments being rather toothless, potential enemy compositions never even being tried, and many puzzle types being one-and-done once you move to the next chapter. Sneaking past highly-lethal enemies is only a thing with the tentacles in Blast Pit. Active turrets, tripwire mines or Barnacles rarely appear in major Marine encounters. The more mobile Alien Grunt variants in Xen only appear for about three or four minor encounters. You never get to use the long-jump module in combat against the Marines. The shielded Controllers only appear around five or six times near the very end of the game. Gargantuas are only used for scripted sequences and never as an enemy in regular combat. Bullsquids and Houndeyes rarely appear with the rest of the Xenians. Marine Snipers never appear in regular combat as well. Portals are almost never used within combat encounters. Headcrab Zombies are only used in minor encounters but rarely ever in any major ones. Tanks, helicopters and APCs are rarely utilized as a serious enemy type. Long-jumping in combat is never really tested outside of one boss fight where you use it to circlestrafe faster. The Assassins only appear for a whopping TWO encounters in the whole game.

This gets worse when Black Mesa continues to introduce new elements within each of these pillars, up until the very end of the game. When introducing something new, you generally want to slow the game down a bit to show/tell what the new thing is and/or does. So a security guard tells you the Tentacles in Blast Pit locate you by sound, the Marines are shown in a scripted sequence to be hostile against scientists like you, and you get an antepiece to practice your Long Jump in . Else you risk the player having no clue what they’re supposed to do with the new thing and die several times in confusion, which is rather demotivating. To its credit, Black Mesa is incredibly thorough with making sure that the player knows what it is they’re supposed to do and how something new works. The only issue here is that Black Mesa keeps introducing too much new stuff. If you keep slowing down the game to teach the player something new, there won’t be much room left to test the player’s mastery over most pre-existing elements, which leaves the game feeling like wasted potential. Black Mesa already has the tools to craft interesting combat scenarios or platforming sections or puzzles or combination thereof, but it instead chooses to dazzle you with its quantity and variety rather than the quality of its individual challenges. (At the very least it’s not Half-Life 2 where its gameplay elements and modes of gameplay are so disparate that you couldn’t combine them even if you tried)

Had the core gameplay combined these pillars into one, it could get more mileage out of each one. If your platforming/movement skills would get implicitly tested during combat segments (f.e. because you got the Long Jump Module much earlier on and/or because the combat arenas already involve a lot of platforming), then the platforming-only sections can afford to be more complex and engaging because the player is more familiar with the game’s movement already. If your fourteen weapons also had uses for puzzling and platforming, then the game wouldn’t have to spend as much time slowing down to teach you something new. Then puzzles could be used to teach you new ways to use those weapons in combat, and vice versa. For example, the Gravity Gun in Half-Life 2 isn’t only a puzzle tool, but a useful combat tool as well. The TMD in Singularity and time powers in TimeShift both worked in a way that enabled both interesting combat and puzzle scenarios. Admittedly, Black Mesa’s arsenal doesn’t lend itself that well to puzzles or platforming (perhaps it’s more fair to blame HL1 for that), but the presence of alien weapons and experimental lab weapons in the setting should’ve been a free ticket to do something more interesting in that regard, like Half Life: Opposing Force's Barnacle grappling hook weapon. And hey, it’s not like people were using the Hivehand much for anything else.

But even if Black Mesa had a less scatterbrained design philosophy, it wouldn’t be of much help if it kept the same horrible pacing issues. There are many many parts in Black Mesa well into the mid/late-game that consist of banal filler encounters where you’ll be shooting only one to three Headcrabs/Headcrab Zombies/Houndeyes, even though your arsenal is only getting more imposing over time. Sometimes you’re doing rather rudimentary ‘connect the wire’ puzzles. Other times there’s straight up nothing happening, where you’re walking down empty corridors or slowly crawling down a pipe or vent that serves no compelling narrative or atmospheric purpose (hello, Office Complex). Residue Processing at least has the big industrial vibes of getting caught in the massive underbelly of Black Mesa, even if its swimming and platforming puzzles are milquetoast. The ‘walking simulator’ parts in Anomalous Materials and Questionable Ethics at least serve a narrative purpose (which you can simply sprint past if you’re not interested, unlike some other games or moments in this game that like to lock you in a room until they’re done dumping the story), or if they happen right after a major setpiece where some downtime is well-deserved. The problem here is that Black Mesa completely overdoes this downtime. Xen is by far the worst offender here, combining copious downtime with non-threatening combat and simplistic throwaway puzzles/platforming.

Now, Black Mesa does manage to improve on some of the original setpieces, the Marine fights in particular. The launch pad climax at the end of On A Rail is no longer a small flat square, but a thoughtful arena with islands of cover and health/battery items placed in such a way to encourage aggressive maneuvering instead of camping a corner. The dam battle and Forget About Freeman’s topside fight cleverly use points of no return and liberal item placement to encourage the player to act proactively rather than passively. The lobby battle is also a wonderful addition both gameplay-wise and narrative-wise (with the scientists responding in awe and fear to you killing a whole squad of Marines by yourself, something the original game didn’t acknowledge as well). It’s the usage of item placement in BM’s encounters that’s a definite improvement over the original. HL1 was rather stingy with its supplies (on top of them yielding less depending on the difficulty setting), which meant that in the long-term it usually paid off to play boring and safe. BM is much more liberal with supplies within and outside combat encounters, which means you can afford to play more aggressively as long as you move towards wherever the items are.

Unfortunately, most Marine encounters (particularly those in We’ve Got Hostiles) are rather poor at pulling you into the fight. One reason for that is that you often don't get a good glimpse of a combat space and its layout before the fighting starts. This means that you won’t know what lies ahead or what your options are, which in turn means you’re more likely to play it safe than charge into the unknown. The other reason is that a lot of arenas only have a single entrance, whereupon entering you’re immediately fired at from every angle. When there’s too much suppressive fire ahead and you don’t know what exactly lies ahead, you’re of course going to retreat and take cover unless you want to take tons of damage. But when you end up camping the sole entrance, the enemy has no routes to encircle you and thus invalidate your camping position, nor can they flush you out with grenades (because at an arena entrance you usually have more than enough space to backpedal from incoming grenades). You could solve this by making arenas more circular and adding more entrances, and having enemies only move into an arena when you’re already deep inside. One-way entrances or cul-de-sacs with enemies coming from behind also help with preventing the player from approaching each fight with the same choke point and corner camping strategy. Some arenas do make use of these, but it's not applied as consistently as it should’ve been.

The way that the Marine Grunts are balanced also discourages playing proactively. The Marine Grunts’ hitscan fire is incredibly accurate, which turns most encounters into a damage race or a game of peekaboo. Marines also do not understand the concept of pain or flinching or self-preservation in response to being shot. It’s not uncommon for you and a grunt to dump mags into each other, waiting to see which one’s the first to die. It also used to be in HL1 that if you threw a grenade at grunts, that they wouldn’t even bother firing at you. They would instead run for their lives, letting you pick them off or reposition safely. In Black Mesa this behavior is nowhere as pronounced. They might call out the grenade, but all the AI does is try and shuffle away a bit while continuing to shoot at you. Without ways to mitigate hitscan damage, you shouldn't be surprised when the player decides to play it safe and boring.

As for the alien encounters, they only resemble something decent in Lambda Core. There the game actually leverages alien enemies being able to teleport in (when you’re already deep inside an arena!) at several positions and different vantage points. Then you gotta simultaneously take care of Alien Grunts on the ground, Vortigaunts sniping you from vantage points, Headcrabs/Houndeyes bothering you from below, and Barnacles acting as static obstacles. It’s promising stuff! It helps that compared to HL1 the alien enemies have been rebalanced for the best: the Alien Grunts’ ranged attack no longer has obscene homing, Bullsquids fire a spread of harder-to-dodge arced projectiles rather than a single linear projectile, and Vortigaunts/Houndeyes generally seem to not run around aimlessly after getting shot as they did in HL1. Unfortunately, most prior chapters only use alien enemies in the most basic ways possible, and Lambda Complex ends before it can meaningfully build on these interactions. It also doesn’t help that you get the Gluon Gun in Lambda Core, which is stupidly powerful and lets you trivialize a good part of most enemy encounters there.

In conclusion, Black Mesa could have gotten much more out of itself if it intertwined its pillars rather than keeping them separate. With some tweaking it already has a good foundation, it just needs to stop trying to change the gameplay every half hour. Admittedly it’s more fair to blame HL1 for that considering BM’s limited scope as a remake, but since the BM developers bloated Xen for no good reason other than what I assume is making their art portfolio look more impressive, it shouldn’t have been that impossible.

I also want to take a quick detour to talk about the final boss. The revamped Nihilanth fight comes as a part of a new wave of FPS bosses that I like to call “movement bosses”. Whereas before most FPS bosses had you either circlestrafing them to death (much like the Gonarch in HL1 or BM) or doing some inane puzzle that didn’t rely on testing what you’ve used so far (like Nihilanth in HL1, the Icon of Sin in Doom 2, and most Ugh-Zan fights in the Serious Sam franchise), nowadays developers seem to have somewhat realized that abstract puzzles or circlestrafing don’t make much of an interesting boss fight in an FPS. Now we get bosses with elaborate attack patterns reminiscent of 90’s console action games that you can’t just circlestrafe through (like the Cyberdemon in Doom (2016), General Brand in Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem, and Nihilanth here). These fare much better because they're challenging you on something that you’ve been doing throughout the entire game (i.e. moving). But while this new wave of FPS bosses has made it more interesting to avoid damage from a boss, they all fail to do so for dealing damage to a boss.

As it is now, dealing damage to a boss is a simple matter of equipping the strongest gun (or the next-strongest gun if you run out of ammo), and then holding down LMB on the boss. In Siberian Mayhem that is your Rocket Launcher, in Doom 2016 it is weapon swapping between multiple guns (which amounts to the same thing since you’re swapping between them for the sake of DPS and not their other properties), and in BM it’s the Gluon Gun. Most of these bosses weakly try to address this by attacking you once in a blue moon with some form of homing projectiles that you can only avoid by shooting them down, but if you are already using a continuous hitscan beam weapon like the Gluon Gun, then these are only brief one-second diversions from lasering the big fetus. There isn’t much of a reason to use your grenades, your Snarks, your mines, your satchel charges, your revolver, your shotgun, your pistol, your crossbow, or your crowbar against Nihilanth, whereas in regular enemy encounters most of them can be of use depending on the situation. If your arsenal is designed around dealing with a large variety of ever-changing situations, then a boss fight should reflect that variety and unpredictability, such as by throwing multiple obstacles of different types at you at once. Designing an FPS boss fight that challenges both avoiding damage and dealing damage would need a shift in paradigm design, which I’ve written about in extensive detail elsewhere.

Unreal Gold poses an interesting question: "what if enemies in a singleplayer FPS behaved like multiplayer bots?". Instead of large groups of predictable and squishier enemies like in Doom or Duke Nukem, here you get to deal with smaller groups of unpredictable yet tankier foes. They dodge your attacks, move while shooting, lead their shots, and can even use the same weapons that you do. A fight against a single Skaarj Warrior is more dynamic and unpredictable than, say, a Hell Knight from Doom. Yet despite Unreal’s more complex enemy behavior and 10-weapon arsenal with alt. fire modes on everything, it fails to deliver combat with the same level of depth compared to games with more simplistic enemies and weapons such as Doom or Quake 1. Nonetheless, there are still lessons we can learn from this experiment of trying to give FPS enemies “good AI”. Whatever “good AI” means.

Perhaps the most important one is that having complex enemy behavior is not a substitute for good encounter design. Unreal’s levels are on the whole decent when it comes to non-combat elements like exploration and pacing, but the actual combat scenarios themselves tend to be very repetitive. The key reason for that is because for the game keeps throwing encounters with only minor enemies at you (i.e. the enemies that don’t exhibit much complex behavior, like the Tentacles, Slith, Krall, Gasbags, insects and Brutes) while refusing to throw more than one Skaarj (the “good AI” enemies) at you at once up until the last third of the game. This is part of the reason why the ISV-Kran levels being a constant string of 1v1s/1v2s against the Skaarj starts to feel exhausting after a while.

While there’s certainly more ways an encounter with a single Skaarj Warrior can play out compared to, say, a single Hell Knight in Doom, there is still a limit to that. The Skaarj are not that unpredictable; their primary behavior still boils down to “get in your face”, “dodge your attacks if possible” and “keep my distance when I’m on low health”. They’re not going to do any high-IQ flanking or strategic camping. Nor should they, as making individual enemies more unpredictable tends to involve making them more RNG-dependent or making it impossible to keep up with them (such as by having enemies move obscenely fast or giving them too many behaviors to keep track of)--making them frustratingly inconsistent to deal with no matter how good you get at the game. Instead, this inherent predictability of the Skaarj should have been compensated for by making you regularly fight groups of Skaarj or Skaarj paired with minor enemies, thus increasing uncertainty without resorting too hard to the inherent inconsistency of RNG. A little RNG is necessary to create uncertainty at higher levels of play when you have every facet of the game already down to a T, but too much RNG makes the game incredibly inconsistent to play on low/mid-levels of play, and reduces the relative depth of the game on all levels of play in favor of a few consistent and safe strategies that largely mitigate RNG, as we will see later.

Now, while the last third of the game does regularly throw groups of Skaarj at you, the spaces in which these fights take place fail to make good use of the Skaarj. It’s either because Unreal reuses the same “some Skaarj in a tight corridor” or “a group of Skaarj in a wide flat open field” setup for the umpteenth time, or it’s because of our old friend, The Door Problem. A lot of fights are going to turn into the same “backpedal behind a doorway and bottleneck a group of enemies to more safely pick them off” if the space allows for it, which becomes an especially enticing option if the enemies have explosive weapons. In these situations the complex behavior of the Skaarj ceases to be relevant: in tight spaces they (and you) do not have any space to dodge and it becomes more of a battle of who can out-damage the other first, in large open spaces there’s so much space to let you safely keep your distance from enemies and pick them off with your hitscan weapons that they don’t have an answer against, and neither do the Skaarj have a good answer against you camping a doorway. Once again we can see that “good AI” is not a silver bullet that will magically improve your game--levels must provide enemies with the opportunities to let their unique behaviors shine.

Such an ideal combat space with the Skaarj involves a relatively constricted area that prevents hitscan weapons from becoming too dominant, it involves plenty of cover to give both player and enemy room to outmaneuver each other and avoid explosive splash damage, and most importantly, these spaces should essentially lock you in so as to prevent you from backpedaling away from any threat. That’s right, I am talking about the a-word.

There are a handful of such arenas in Unreal which, while badly executed, show a glimpse of potential of what could have been. The first arena in Demon Crater highlights this neatly where you have a space with tons of cover and varying height levels for you and the Skaarj to juke it out. While held back by being able to run past everything into the corridor leading to the basement, it is still conceptually interesting because (ignoring the basement) there is no perfect position in this arena. As you and the Skaarj move about, some positions become more (dis)advantageous and susceptible to explosive splash damage or providing one no space to dodge projectiles. So the northern rim of the arena is raised and allows you to get a good vantage point on the center, but at the same time that rim is narrow and has your back close to the wall, which means that while you can easily dodge incoming projectiles, you can’t easily dodge the splash damage from incoming rockets. The warehouse areas in Dasa Mountain Pass and ISV-Kran Deck 4 also feature similar constricted cover-dense arenas against multiple Skaarj where macro-level positioning matters more, but the former is hamstrung by having too much free space for backtracking, and the latter doesn’t have enough enemies to apply proper pressure on you from multiple directions.

Now contrast all this with the final arena of Demon Crater, which is this big flat donut space with some cover here and there and Skaarj Officers sparsely placed around. Because there is so much free space, you don’t need to be worried about splash damage or being boxed in, and the element of map control is non-existent in favor of circlestrafing being the definite solution for avoiding damage. Were the enemies in Unreal designed in a way where they could prevent you from circlestrafing from long-range or in an open flat space, then this might have worked, but as it stands the enemy roster is best suited for close-quarters arena combat, while the arena design itself is incredibly lacklustre.

Having enemies dodge your attacks like a human opponent in a multiplayer match does make them come off as more intelligent, but in terms of gameplay, it also comes off as bullshit. Namely, the way enemies in Unreal dodge your shots is by RNG. The exact moment that you press the fire button, nearby enemies check if shots from your weapon is something they’re allowed to dodge, and then they roll a dice to see if they can do an instant dodgeroll away. In practice, this means that there’s a N% chance (all dodge chances listed here onwards are not accurate and just my best guess) that one shot is basically a waste of ammo. For rapid-fire weapons such as the Stinger or Minigun this isn’t a big deal, but considering most of your workhorse weapons are projectile-based with a low rate of fire, the RNG dodging makes the effectiveness of certain weapons inconsistent, or just makes them plain not worth using at all. For the Eightball this means that your primary fire will get instantly dodged half the time and is usually only any good for its splash damage when charged, whereas for the Flak Cannon primary fire it’s just plain wasted ammo 40% of the time. And when you consider that the time-to-kill on Skaarj is already fairly high (it takes like 3-4 rockets or two Flak shells to kill the lowest ranks), it makes this annoying inconsistency even more pronounced.

Instead of bothering with this game of roulette, what you’ll more likely do is use weapons that enemies aren’t hardcoded to dodge to begin with. So the Eightball alt. fire, on its own useless due to its low projectile speed, now becomes surprisingly useful for one-shotting Skaarj Warriors (after charging 3+ grenades) because they are hardcoded to never dodge grenades. The Flak Cannon alt. fire becomes one of your best options since it kills most Skaarj in 2-3 quick shots from mid-range that will never get dodged, and without needing to be charged like the Eightball alt. fire either. The Razorjack can also decapitate most Skaarj in 2 shots and almost never gets dodged. And instead of bothering with projectile-based weapons, you can simply use your hitscan weapons such as the Pistol, ASMD primary, and the Rifle. The Minigun, despite being hitscan like the Pistol and Rifle, will get dodged, but since it’s hitscan you can easily correct your aim when an enemy dodges. Dodgerolls are just a very ineffective method of dodging hitscan attacks because of how the recovery after a roll leaves enemies stationary--having enemies dodge hitscan through erratic strafing would have been more effective. Given how all weapons have their own ammo pools (except for the Pistol/Minigun) and how each ammo type is equally scarce (Flak Cannon ammo is a bit rarer, and bullets are more common), you will always have enough ammo to use a weapon that renders enemy dodging behaviour redundant, which begs the question what the point of using RNG for triggering enemy dodging is.

Before we continue, it’s worth considering whether dodgerolling is the only means an enemy could theoretically react to your shots being fired (not to be confused with enemy reactions after getting hit). I mainly talked about dodging here because that’s what most Skaarj in Unreal do, but that’s not the only possible enemy reaction to your shots in Unreal. Skaarj Officers can react to your shots by putting up a shield instead of dodging out of the way, which I’ll touch upon later. To avoid making it come off like dodgerolling is the only possible on-fire reaction an FPS enemy can have, I’ll henceforth refer to enemy dodging/blocking/etc. as simply “reacting” unless I’m specifically talking about dodging or blocking.

Another thing to consider is what the point of having enemies react to your attacks in any action game like this actually is. The immersion-level goal of enemy reactions seems to be to create the illusion of unpredictable opponents that fight like actual human opponents would. I suppose the intended gameplay-level goal of enemy reactions then is to keep combat fresh and exciting, which, more specifically, is achieved by making certain weapons more situational to use. Because enemy reactions usually involve nullifying/countering your attacks somehow, then naturally your weapons won’t be as effective depending on their nature and that of the enemy’s reaction. So projectile-based weapons are more likely to get reacted to from medium range, while hitscan weapons work at most ranges. In this regard, enemy reactions serve a similar purpose to damage resistances/weaknesses and locational weak points (think headshots or weak points on the back). The difference is that while resistance/weaknesses apply on hit and locational weak points apply depending on the angle you’re facing an enemy (you can’t really shoot their head if you’re right below them), having enemies react to your shots depends more on your relative distance, position, and their state. This gives designers another tool to balance out weapons when other tools wouldn’t be as adequate.

For example: the Shock Rifle alt. fire fires a ball which can be detonated with the primary fire to create a shockwave for massive damage. This Shock Combo is incredibly strong, which is why it’s balanced out with enemies having a ~90% dodge chance against it. This doesn’t make it useless--what you have to do is create a situation where the enemy cannot dodgeroll away from the ball. So if they’re next to a wall, then shooting an orb to their other side means that no matter where they dodge towards, they’re always going to be within range of the Shock Combo. This way a Shock Combo can be strong in certain situations instead of almost every situation. Giving enemies a damage resistance against the Shock Combo (so it can gib some enemies in a group, but not all) to prevent it from becoming a dominant strategy would work if enemy groups were more diverse, but considering most enemy encounters in Unreal are fairly homogeneous, this wouldn’t really work. Having enemies only be vulnerable to Shock Combos from a certain angle (such as from behind an enemy) is most certainly a valid way of balancing it, but because not every humanoid enemy in Unreal has a means to block frontal damage, the Shock Combo’s usefulness is better mitigated through dodging, which every humanoid enemy is already capable of. Technically you could give every humanoid enemy a means to block frontal damage and it would work just as fine, but I suppose that having enemies mitigate your shots through movement makes them appear more intelligent than the alternative.

Taking all this into account, it would have been preferable if enemy reactions were made semi-random at the very least. So the conditions for a reaction to happen are deterministic, whereas how the reaction executed is partly random. A dodge could be triggered deterministically, but the exact direction of the dodge is influenced by chance. This way the designer has tighter control over weapon balance, while there’s still a degree of uncertainty that prevents the game from becoming too predictable. So the player could also devise more strategies using more weapons instead of relying on chance or a smaller handful of weapons that avoid chance completely. Taking projectile-based weapons for example, having enemies only be able to react to your projectiles after they travel a certain distance would mean that you could consistently use those weapons up close, but whether you would want to depends on if said weapon can inflict self-blast damage, or if the enemy is very dangerous to stay close to. Alternatively you could create a situation using a combination of weapons so the enemy cannot dodge projectiles even at long-range (such as having other weapons bait a dodge or cripple enemy movement).

Unfortunately, the weapon switch speed in Unreal is too slow to allow for any weapon combinations that aren’t two fire modes on the same weapon. If you wanted to use the ASMD alt’s ~90% dodge chance to bait Skaarj into dodging to land a guaranteed Flak Cannon shot, or if you managed to launch a Skaarj into the air by shooting a rocket at its feet and want to finish it off with the Flak Cannon mid-air, then by the time you are done switching to the Flak Cannon, the Skaarj will already have recovered and is ready to dodge anything. On top of the slow weapon switch speed you also have long refire times (the delay between shots) on several weapons in Unreal. So if you’re trying to switch weapons right after firing your current weapon--a use case that comes up fairly often--you’re forced to wait for the firing animation of your current weapon to finish before the weapons actually start to switch. With high-RoF weapons such as the Pistol and Stinger this isn’t as noticeable, but with workhorse weapons such as the Eightball, ASMD and Flak Cannon, it certainly is.

The slow weapon switch speed is a problem for Unreal in particular, but first it’s worth explaining what kind of a weapon switch speed fits a given FPS, and why not every FPS needs instant weapon switching. Basically, it’s about whether a game emphasizes split-second decision making (ULTRAKILL, Doom Eternal), or thinking ahead into the future (Final Doom, Serious Sam). In the former a small mistake is highly damaging, but you have more means to mitigate and recover from such mistakes. In the latter it’s the exact opposite; mistakes aren’t as damaging, but they’re harder to recover from in the long-term as they slowly build up to a point where recovery is impossible. This is also reflected in the enemy design of these games: in the former they tend to be agile and harder to predict, whereas in the latter they tend to be slow and predictable. After all, predictable enemies are less likely to push you into making constant split-second decisions when you can see what they’re about to do from a mile away, whereas unpredictable enemies are more likely to do the opposite. Thus, the weapon switch speed (and whether you can cancel the firing animation of a weapon by switching weapons) serves to reinforce the player into either thinking ahead or thinking fast. With a slow weapon switch speed, the player needs to always keep in mind that switching to another weapon leaves them temporarily vulnerable because of the weapon switch delay, and that switching to the wrong weapon can potentially screw them over. With a fast weapon switch speed, it’s simply a matter of whether the player can react fast enough to switch to a more suitable weapon as the situation constantly changes.

Taking this into consideration, one can see why the weapon switch speed in Unreal is a bad fit: the enemies are designed to be agile and unpredictable, but you cannot switch weapons fast enough to keep up with them as the situation changes--which it does constantly. This is not to say that you won’t ever switch weapons during combat--ammo for your current weapon isn’t infinite after all, but the slow switch speed biases your selection away from more situational weapons towards all-rounder weapons that work in most situations, which especially stings in a 10-weapon arsenal as some weapons end up feeling underutilized. Really, the only reason that the weapon switch speed isn’t a more noticeable issue is because of how limited in scope most Skaarj encounters are. Had the encounter design been more daring and engaging w/r/t enemy composition and the amount of enemies, you’d have many more reasons to keep switching weapons--where the slow weapon switch speed would have most certainly been felt.

It’s not only the weapon switch speed that makes it hard to keep up with the Skaarj, but the movement as well. Skaarj are overall faster than you, and when they’re within melee range of you it’s very hard to shake them off. Your best chance of pushing them away is by forcing them to dodge away using a high-dodge chance weapon, which, again, would have been a more viable option had the weapon switch speed not been so low. Otherwise you just have to hope that the Skaarj don’t try to chase you, or that you can cheese them out using level geometry. Jumping as an evasive maneuver also doesn’t really work because of the lack of air control and the pitiful height it covers (which also puts a damper on how vertical combat spaces are allowed to be; there’s no point in verticality if you do not have the mobility options to reliably move vertically). Lastly you have a dodge move as well (basically a short dash), which is pretty much useless because it covers only an incredibly short distance. Dodging is also done with a double-tap input that you’re more likely to do on accident than on purpose, especially in a game like this where you’re constantly changing strafing directions. While there’s unfortunately no one-tap dodge option, you can disable dodging altogether to prevent such misinputs.

Unreal’s direction w/r/t escalation of encounter design isn’t feasible for the long term. Its encounters had to be limited in scope, otherwise the player would be overwhelmed because of the player character’s limited ability to keep up with the Skaarj (like a Souls player character being pitted against Bayonetta enemies). Yet this limited encounter scope also means that the encounters become too repetitive across Unreal’s 8-10hr runtime. Here there are two options for expanding the encounter scope without over/underwhelming the player: either the player character can be given more means to keep up with the Skaarj (greater mobility, faster weapon switching, etc.), or the Skaarj themselves can become scaled down in terms of HP/aggression/reactivity/mobility so that they can appear in greater numbers without proving too much for the vanilla player character’s abilities. Although either option could work, I’d still lean towards the former considering it preserves Unreal’s unique edge compared to other FPS games on the market, what with its deathmatch bot-like enemies.

To sum things up, having enemies behave like deathmatch bots does make for good marketing and an interesting surface-level experience, but it doesn’t necessarily make for engaging gameplay. Enemies, be they complex or simple in behavior, need to be designed around the player’s abilities, and the encounter design should use these enemies in varied and engaging ways. Complex behavior isn’t a substitute for level design, because no matter how complex that behavior is, there will always be a finite range of actions an enemy can potentially perform. While Unreal most certainly stands out with its complex enemy behaviors, they end up feeling inevitably repetitive when the same enemy set-ups keep getting repeated throughout the game.

There are a bunch of other of Unreal’s failings I haven’t talked about yet (the redundancies and imbalances in its weapon arsenal and the design/usage of the minor enemies), but quite frankly I find that is more going into specific implementation details that aren’t as interesting in the grander scope of things. There is also a lot of praise to be written about Unreal’s immersive worldbuilding and implicit storytelling, and the way it does so by respecting the player’s time and intelligence (especially without locking them in a room waiting for NPCs to finish talking), but this is a part of Unreal that has been already extensively covered by others#Further_reading).

TAG2 itself is an anti-climax that represents a concerning change in direction for the Doom reboot series, which hits harder given how on-track id Software already was with Eternal and TAG1. I am also fully aware of its troubled six-month development cycle where both TAG1 and 2 had to be out within a year of Eternal’s release to fulfill legal obligations, whose production schedule did not originally account for blizzards and power outages striking Texas (where id Software’s offices are located), and a whole freaking pandemic. I am not particularly upset that TAG2 feels rushed or that most of its new enemies are reskins (if anything, I think more games should be willing to reskin and reuse enemies), but what concerns me the most is its new gameplay direction, one which would have persisted even without the world breaking down. To properly understand why this is concerning, and considering parts of the base game and TAG1 have been changed with the release of TAG2, it is necessary to go back to the previous entries and establish some context.

With TAG1, the core players were pretty satisfied with its intensity and challenge, but the consensus amongst casual players (according to Doom Eternal director Hugo Martin) was that TAG1 was too intense pacing-wise, and thus exhausting to play even on lower difficulty settings. Here I disagree; TAG1 definitely does not run at 200% at all times. When breaking the structure of TAG1 down, there are still many downtime segments in the form of platforming segments, minor puzzles, minor combat encounters, story segments, or (quite frankly overlong) underwater swimming sections inbetween all the major arenas. The difficulty has definitely escalated, but the escalation is necessary to avoid running the risk of only repeating the ‘white belt’ encounters of the base game that the player has already proven their mastery over.

I believe the real culprit here is that most casual players were also returning players who had grown rusty in the six months between the base game’s and TAG1’s launch. Considering TAG1 starts off with several Cyber-Mancubi and Barons and no warm-up and it only escalates from there, it can make the entire DLC campaign feel overwhelming when you have yet to remember how everything worked; something that might not have been a problem if you had only just finished the base game. This is where in retrospect I believe that TAG1 would have been better off if it was balanced around a shotgun start and finding all your old weapons again, instead of balancing around your full loadout. This would allow returning casual players to get a quick crash course on all your old abilities and weapons over the course of a level or two instead of having to remember everything at once, and it would also allow for some interesting encounter design for returning core players as well where you’d have to face off against enemies without the weapons you would normally use against against them (like dealing with Shieldguys without a Plasma Rifle, or Whiplashes without Lock-on Rockets, or a Tyrant without any of your power weapons). The Super Gore Nest Master Level already features a Shotgun Start mode, so this shouldn’t have been technically impossible. And, while I personally don’t see any value in this type of argument but know that many others do, you can also cite historical precedent as a justification for taking your weapons away by pointing out that Doom 1 would also take away all your weapons at the start of each episode. Nevertheless, id Software declared the pacing guilty, and so decided to correct this in TAG2.

Rather than balancing the learning curve around one playthrough like with the base game and TAG1, for TAG2 id Software decided to take the Platinum approach to difficulty. In short, the first playthrough is an extended tutorial meant to keep casual players invested by introducing something new every 30 minutes while forgetting about the last thing, whereas the second playthrough in the form of the (yet to be released at the time of writing) Master Levels is the ‘real’ game where aforementioned new elements are combined with each other and pre-existing elements to actually test your mastery over them. In the context of a game like Doom Eternal that’s not designed around being replayed repeatedly to get a decent grasp of the gameplay (like with a roguelite or an arcade game), this approach is terrible because of the following reasons:

Firstly, it defeats the point of having difficulty settings that you can switch between on the fly. When you select Hurt Me Plenty difficulty, you expect a comfortable breeze, and not something as demanding as TAG1 was. When you select Nightmare difficulty, you expect to be pushed into using all of the game’s systems. TAG2 on Nightmare absolutely does not do that, because most TAG2 arenas are intensity-wise on par with Arc Complex in the base game, except in Arc Complex you did not have all weapons/upgrades yet, whereas in TAG2 you are fully upgraded and then some (see: Hammer). Even if the Master Levels were already out, you would still have to trudge through 3 hours of white belt encounters on Nightmare before you can actually get to the Good Stuff, because in DE you cannot access Master Levels unless you complete the regular levels first. Using cheats to skip the regular levels for the Master Levels wouldn’t be ideal either, because regardless of skill level you still need the time and space to learn TAG2’s new gameplay elements, and Master Levels are the worst place to learn them considering MLs are designed around you already having a full grasp of them.

Secondly, you basically have to run through the same content twice to get the ‘full’ experience, and even then it’s not a given that people will even bother playing the Master Levels. Amongst the majority of gamers, “beating” a singleplayer game usually involves playing once up to the credits roll, unless each playthrough promises new content (like in roguelikes and whatnot). Having to replay the same content but remixed once or twice until you get to the Fun Zone will feel to most like uninspired padding, who will just drop the game out of boredom before they get to the Fun Zone. The base game deftly avoided this and successfully appealed to both casual and core gamers by showing you the majority of its content and making you experience the depths of the gameplay--i.e. the Fun Zone, over the course of one playthrough no matter what difficulty setting you picked. Master Levels were for those who were already satisfied with the base game but wanted even more. Only after getting hooked to the gameplay will make people feel like playing remixed content; the actual hook was not in the Master Levels themselves. Meanwhile if you want to experience what it’s like doing Meathook platforming or fighting the new enemy types in a situation that actually makes you think about what you’re doing, then you’re going to have to slog through this 3-hour long pseudo-tutorial before you can even get to that point.

Thirdly, changing direction like this in what’s probably the final piece of official DE story content is the worst place to do it in. Most of the people who will play TAG2 are most likely those who already managed to get through the base game and TAG1 and liked it for what it was and wanted more, so suddenly hitting the metaphorical brakes with TAG2 feels incredibly out of place, what with its tendency for simple fodder-only enemy waves. Narratively this also creates a massive whiplash, where you finally arrive at the True Big Bad’s Lair, but it’s mostly populated by these Demonic Troopers that explode if you so much as hit them with the Meathook, so your archnemesis ends up feeling underwhelming and like a bit of a joke.

Fourthly, I hear TAG2 is supposed to be a ‘victory lap’ or a ‘power fantasy’, but that is, quite frankly, cope. A power fantasy only works when you have something worthy to exercise your awesome power against. Whenever you’d pick up a power-up like the Quad Damage in a game like Quake 1 (or just Doom Eternal itself), it would throw a greater amount of enemies at you that would normally be bullshit to deal with without the power-up. It feels good because now you’ve got the power to pull one over the foes that have been making your entire life miserable up until now. Being given a power-up and the game throwing even less enemies at you than before is not a power fantasy, but an anticlimax. Being given a full loadout and an overpowered hammer that can stun groups of enemies, and then have the only opposition you face be on par with what you faced in the middle part of the base game, is an anticlimax. And as far as I can tell, TAG2 isn’t trying to be anticlimactic for narrative reasons that could possibly justify this direction in gameplay.

There is also another issue that plagues TAG2’s pacing, one which would persist even without the aforementioned changed in direction--namely: You’re introducing five new enemy types (Riot Soldiers, Cursed Prowlers, Screechers, Armored Barons, Stone Imps, I’m not counting the Demonic Troopers LOL), a new equipment item in the form of the Hammer, and Meathook platforming in a DLC consisting of three levels (or looking at Immora, it’s more accurate to say two-and-a-half). Where are you going to find the time and space to let the player get acquainted with all these new gameplay elements, while also delivering a climax gameplay-wise that’s befitting of the last piece of official main story content?

Well, you don’t.

Save for the Hammer, every new element in TAG2 is tragically underutilized. New enemies like the Armored Barons and Stone Imps tend to largely appear by themselves and are rarely accompanied by other Heavy demons, whereas the new support demons like Screechers and Cursed Prowlers are only used in relatively low-intensity encounters, and almost never in something major. Having new enemies appear by themselves or with only minor support makes sense for when you encounter them for the first time and have yet to learn how they work, but that’s about the only capacity said demons appear in. Meanwhile the actual major encounters in TAG2 barely use the new demons at all. Meathook platforming is also mostly used to traverse large gaps, but almost never in combat. When it is used in combat, it’s usually as a single Meathook point above a largely flat and sparsely populated arena that already has tons of space to move around in. I can only imagine this all being a consequence of the “we’ll properly flesh this stuff out later in the Master Levels” philosophy.

You really shouldn’t be introducing too many new things at the very end of the game, as it gives you very little space to flesh out said elements. The base game stopped introducing new enemies and weapons after Taras Nabad (bosses and Makyr Drones excluded), and dedicated the remaining four levels to realizing its own potential by combining the existing enemies in different ways to create more demanding but also more unique encounters. TAG1 did introduce Spirits in its second level and Blood Makyrs in its third and final level, but TAG1 got more mileage out of both enemies individually than all new enemies in TAG2 combined, on account of not having to juggle a dozen new elements at once. It also helped that everyone knew that TAG2 was on the horizon, and that we might see even more interesting usage of the TAG1 enemies there (we didn’t). If we knew there was a TAG3 coming, then I wouldn’t be writing this paragraph.

What’s even weirder is that TAG2 already provides a solution for there not being enough time and space to play around with all the new elements, in the form Escalation Encounters. Casual players that prefer having an uninterruptible flow can simply ignore the optional and more intense second wave, whereas core players can get the challenge they crave and see aforementioned new elements being used to more interesting extents. This is also why it’s so unfortunate that Escalation Encounters aren’t used that much (only three times in TAG2), and that even then the second waves barely use any of the new TAG2 enemies.

As for the new enemies on their own; some are good, some are undercooked. The Screecher is a great addition, as it makes you be extra careful with where you shoot and how you use your AoE weapons if you don’t want to unintentionally buff all surrounding enemies and screw yourself over. The only qualm I have about this buff is that on top of buffing enemy attack and movement speed (á la Buff Totems), it also buffs enemy damage resistance. This isn’t a problem in TAG2 itself, since most Screecher encounters don’t have Superheavy demons as support, but for larger encounters in possible future (custom) Master Levels where several Superheavies are involved, accidentally getting a group of Superheavies Screecher-buffed would basically cause a massive death spiral, at which point you might as well reload your save. It’s for this reason that, just like with the Marauder, the Screecher doesn’t scale upwards well; the level designer needs to put a damper on the heavier demons when using the Screecher so things won’t spiral into absurdly difficult territory, which limits how the Screecher can be used. I believe that forgoing the damage resistance buff would make the Screecher more flexible in this regard.

The Cursed Prowler is another such enemy which introduces an interesting and unique dynamic that works well within TAG2’s levels, but wouldn’t scale upwards well in future Master Levels. Being cursed with limited mobility and having to seek out and Blood Punch a moving target that keeps running away from you is great, as it makes you improvise using a more limited toolset in the same way that the Screecher makes you reconsider how to use AoE weaponry. The problem is that this dynamic can only occur so long as the Cursed Prowler hits you. This means that an arena that holds back on enemy spawns to account for the possibility of being cursed runs the risk of being too boneless if you kill the Cursed Prowler without getting cursed, whereas an arena that doesn’t hold back at all is liable to turn into a death spiral if you do get cursed, and basically makes memorizing Cursed Prowler spawns a requirement. This is a similar problem that Buff Totems faced in the base game, where you were better off memorizing Buff Totem spawns and beelining towards them instead of dealing with the buffed enemies, which TAG1 got around by locking Buff Totems away from you and forcing you to deal with buffed enemies. Similarly, Cursed Prowlers would work better if being cursed was an inevitability (like being automatically cursed whenever a Cursed Prowler spawns, with this being telegraphed well in advance). This would make dealing with the status effect more predictable if you know when it’s coming, but this predictability should also allow designers to create encounters that are better tailored around being cursed, instead of having to design encounters around simultaneously being cursed and not being cursed. Even with that in mind, being unable to dash while cursed means you’re basically screwed against enemies like Tyrants, Doom Hunters, or Whiplashes where you absolutely must dash in order to avoid their attacks (the Meathook also works as a means to quickly GTFO, but it has its own cooldown), so to better allow for encounters where you end up being cursed against enemies like that without it becoming complete bullshit, it would be better to create some leeway by having dashes just recharge relatively slowly when you are cursed.

On another note, I also wish being cursed didn’t automatically give you a BP charge to always prepare you for killing the Cursed Prowler, and would actually deplete your BP gauge to begin with. Part of the dynamic of being cursed involves having to suddenly adapt to a limited moveset, and having to find other enemies to GK for BP’s while cursed (instead of immediately beelining towards the Crowler) could have played a great part in that.

The Armored Baron is a great albeit underutilized addition. It’s basically the Marauder Done Right; instead of only being able to wait for the Baron to give you an opening to disable its shields (like with the Marauder/Blood Makyr), you can also force an opening by shooting it with the Plasma Rifle and its mods, which also makes the Heat Blast somewhat useful for once because of its burst plasma damage. Instead of the Armored Baron being a non-factor that you only deal with after clearing out all other heavy demons (like with the Marauder), you do want to prioritize parrying/dodging its morning star attacks when they occur, because their range and accuracy is massive. The Armored Baron also occupies a different niche from the Blood Makyr where instead of being able to insta-kill it during its vulnerability window in one shot, you need to commit more time and ammo to kill it while it’s vulnerable. This is why the Armored Baron works best in pairs or together with other (super)heavy demons; other demons get in the way of you easily being able to burst down an Armored Baron while it’s vulnerable, while the Armored Baron still demands top priority when it does its morning star attack. This is also why it’s unfortunate that Armored Barons are rarely used in this capacity. On another note, I wish the vulnerability window for the morning star attacks was made a bit smaller, so you’d have a reason to actually go destroy the Armored Baron’s armor the hard way when things are getting too intense for you to easily focus on parrying the morning star.

The Riot Soldiers are supposed to be like the Doom 2 Chaingunners, but here they are just undercooked no matter how you want to try and use them. Their fast low-damage projectiles are too inaccurate to pose any threat whatsoever, and their indestructible shields are easily circumvented with only one Remote Detonation or Sticky Bomb. Riot Soldiers could work as a long-range harassment unit, where they bully you with nigh-unavoidable chip damage into breaking line of sight or prioritizing them first, but this could only work if they could actually reliably hit you and if they weren’t so simple to kill from long-range with explosive splash damage. The Challenge Restored mod has the right idea here where Riot Soldiers have increased projectile speeds, and take way less damage from explosive weapons, with the intent of using explosives to setup falters and finishing them off with another weapon. That way instead of quickly being able to delete Riot Soldiers from any range, you need to commit dealing with Riot Soldiers either by waiting for your explosives to detonate and falter them so you can finish them off at any range, or by simply moving around their shields.

The Stone Imps seem like a lazy way to get you to use the Full-Auto, but they do pose an interesting dynamic (if they’re not used only by themselves). So here you’ve got an ubiquitous fodder demon that cannot be killed using regular means. While Full-Auto does easily kill them, Full-Auto is also a mod that requires commitment in terms of deployment time and reduced movement speed when using it, so if you had to fight Stone Imps alongside heavier demons intruding on your personal space, then using only Full-Auto would be much less of a dominant solution. You also can’t easily choose to ignore Stone Imps until you take out all the bigger demons first, because Stone Imps have this homing spinball attack that’s tricky to avoid. Their damage vulnerability to the Hammer is also a neat idea in that you can expend a valuable Hammer charge to easily get rid of them in one shot. At least this would be a cool dynamic if getting Hammer charges wasn’t so easy, but more on that later. I do wish that the Stone Imp also had a damage vulnerability for other high-commitment options such as the Mobile Turret, Microwave Beam and Destroyer Blade, so you have a bit more freedom in deciding how exactly you are going to commit to dealing with Stone Imps.

Lastly, TAG2 introduces the Hammer. The Hammer is your replacement for the Crucible, and is a way more interesting tool that should’ve replaced both the Crucible and Chainsaw from the get go. The Chainsaw simply isn’t very interesting to use; with one press of a button you insta-kill an enemy for ammo, and the dynamic of being left vulnerable after a Chainsaw kill often doesn’t get capitalized on by the enemies (except for Mancubi and Possessed enemies), and even then can be mitigated by deploying the Chaingun Shield right after the kill animation ends. Meanwhile there is more depth to how you can use the Hammer as a tool to regain ammo, as a tool to stun enemies, or just to clear out fodder (kind of like DOOM (2016)’s Chainsaw dynamic of “do I save fuel to insta-kill a Baron, or do I want ammo now”, except the Hammer takes a less insane approach that doesn’t involve insta-killing any enemy with no effort). Enemies hit by the Hammer shockwave drop ammo, so the more enemies you hit at once, the more ammo you get. But you can also opt to forgo maximizing ammo gains to use it more offensively by stunning (super)heavy demons or using it to increase the vulnerability windows on enemies like the Armored Barons and Marauders, or enemies that are resistant to everything except the Hammer like the Stone Imp.

This is all great, but in practice the Hammer is way overpowered (especially once upgraded), and needs to be tuned down by a whole lot. The ammo gained per hit demon is large enough that grouping enemies together on purpose isn’t something you would really consider doing, which on top of already having the Chainsaw means that ammo will never be an issue ever. Hammering enemies that are already frozen with an Ice Bomb or set alight with the Flame Belch further multiplies the health/armor gains to absurd levels. The absurd upgraded stun duration on enemies hit by the Hammer, on top of the debuff that makes hammered enemies take bonus damage, means that you can kill most (super)heavies in one cycle (if you know how to quickswap), and is already obscenely OP on its own. Yes, it lets you very easily one-cycle Marauders which is based because they’re a trash enemy type, but that is honestly just a band-aid fix. Furthermore, the Hammer is also quite spammable because you only need to destroy two weak points or do two Glory Kills to recharge it (sidenote: having something fill up based on destroying weak points is great because it gives you a reason to bother shooting off the Revenant shoulder cannons), and even then TAG2 levels tend to litter arenas with Hammer charge pick-ups that make using the Hammer with its sheer power a brainless option. I want to use the Hammer, but its sheer power makes other parts of Eternal’s resource gathering and faltering dynamic too redundant. The Ice Bomb/Frag Grenades are about as or less powerful than the Hammer, but they’re also less spammable because of their lengthier cooldowns, and so end up being less useful on their own unless combined with the Hammer. In short, the Hammer needs nerfs nerfs nerfs--to the resources you gain from it, to the degree it stuns enemies, and to how frequently you can use it. As it is right now, it’s only suitably tuned for slaughter map-tier encounters, and way too strong for anything below that.

Finally, there’s the Dark Lord fight, which is bad. It’s basically a Super Marauder, except the Gladiator boss fight was already a Super Marauder, so the Dark Lord doesn’t get any points for originality. It’s also a much worse Super Marauder fight in every conceivable way. The biggest one is that it’s just terrible at pressuring you and testing your mobility. Most of his attacks can be avoided by simply circlestrafing or circledashing in the case of his shield bash, which you can do because the arena for the fight is ridiculously large and flat, and the Dark Lord has no fast ranged options that actually lead your movement. Compare this to the Gladiator who could snipe you with his morning stars, his shield projectile, his jumping rope attack, or by just rushing you and smacking you up close, or how the DOOM (2016) bosses would have more ranged attacks that indiscriminately covered the whole arena.

In terms of offense, the fight doesn’t fare much better. Whereas you could deal some chip damage to the Gladiator instead of having to only wait to parry its attacks, the Dark Lord gets straight up healed when you attack it when its eyes don’t flash green, even when it whiffs a melee attack (?!?!). This means there is absolutely no choice but to wait for that green flash to come, and whether the Dark Lord will do the one attack where he does flash green is very much up to RNG. Once you stagger him it’s a matter of optimizing how much damage you get out of the vulnerability time window by using the Hammer to extend the window and equipment to deal more damage, but in this context that’s not an interesting dynamic on its own. Since the fight is mostly a 1v1, applying a close-to-optimal quickswap combo becomes the dominant strategy, which is also one that isn’t that difficult to execute if you have set up some reasonable keybindings. Here the solution is obvious, is easy to execute, and must be repeated several times (for a minimum of two times for each of the five phases) with no reason to change it up, so it becomes boring. What wouldn’t have been boring if you had to find a way to deal the most damage possible while other demons kept trying to interrupt you--much like how fighting Armored Barons should ideally play out. Now depending on the situation you need to shift your priorities between doing sick combos and dealing with other demons. Charging the Hammer so you can deal extra damage is also a shallow dynamic in this fight, where instead of having to set up Glory Kills or target weak points on other demons, the enemies that the Dark Lord summons will straight-up drop Hammer charges on any kind of death, meaning there is no real choices to be had between prioritizing enemies for resources and prioritizing the Dark Lord to deal damage (and even then you can easily Meathook towards any of the static Zombies at the edge of the arena for a free Glory Kill/Chainsaw Kill).

In conclusion, as a result of trying to cram in too many new things in a small mission pack and trying to expedite properly utilizing said things to subsequent playthroughs, TAG2 ends up primarily feeling like wasted potential, and I would have genuinely preferred if it introduces less and polished what little it did introduce, than to wave all these cool concepts in our faces and do nothing with it. While introducing as many new elements as possible is great for future Master Levels both official and unofficial, vanilla TAG2 ends up suffering because of it, and vanilla TAG2 is what most people are going to be playing. I do hope that in the future id Software goes back to the base game’s approach to the learning curve, instead of TAG1’s approach of assuming the player is still completely familiar with all systems, or TAG2’s obsession with flow and increasing the intensity only very gradually over the course of its campaign.

Doom 64 can be best described as "inoffensively OK". I do prefer it over the rather basic level design in most of Doom 1 and the creative but quality-wise inconsistent Doom 2, although there was definitely a lot more Doom 64 could have done with its enemy roster, even if the Chaingunner/Archvile/Revenant were cut due time/technical constraints. This becomes clearer after playing the new The Lost Levels add-on (seven new levels that were included in the rerelease of Doom 64 on modern platforms), which is a noticeable step up compared to the original campaign in terms of visual detail and encounter design, for reasons I will get into a bit later.

The most standout thing about Doom 64 compared to other Dooms is its psychological horror atmosphere, one that's more in the vein of Quake 1 than Doom 3 with its jumpscares. So Doom 64's color palette is darker and more desaturated (while still being willing to use primary colors unlike Quake 1 and its endless Brown), but it's the oppressive dark ambient soundtrack that really hard-carries Doom 64's atmosphere. It's not even an understatement to say that the soundtrack is the atmosphere. It fits unsurprisingly well with continuously slaughtering demons by the hundreds in abstract industrial/hell-mazes without ever stopping to take a break. I find myself wishing that Doom would lean into the psychological horror more from a narrative and level design perspective as well (without turning the gameplay into a generic corridor shooter á la Doom 3), because as it stands the horror is exchangeable window dressing. But damn it's some good window dressing.

In terms of the new models and animations in Doom 64, it's kind of a mixed bag. I don't have an issue with the enemy sprites being pre-rendered early 90's 3D as opposed to the scanned clay models of the original, but a lot of expression has been lost on the new enemies. You can barely make out the angry grimaces on enemies like Zombiemen, Imps, and Mancubi, which did a lot to give them some extra personality. On the other hand, the redesign of the Arachnotron feels like a straight upgrade (its design was even used as the base for Doom Eternal's Arachnotron), making it looks more murderous and lethal that's better in line with its role in combat than the goofy "fatman on a chair" look it had in the originals. The biggest loss by far are the new shotgun reload "animations", which instead of the legendary original reload animations now just do the Quake 1 thing of moving the shotgun sprite back and forth. On the other hand, the Chainsaw now has twin chainsaw blades. It deals the same damage as the original, but it is twice as cool now.

Doom 64 plays near-identically to the first two Dooms, but there have been some tweaks. The SSG has a slightly higher RoF (1.77s -> 1.53s), and Cacodemons now consistently go down in two instead of three SSG blasts when the RNG felt like screwing you over. This helps speed things up in parts where there's not a major challenge going on (like fighting lone Hell Knights in tight corridors or the clean-up phase of a major fight where you're finishing off the last heavy demons) without making stronger weapons like the Plasma Rifle or Rocket Launcher useless, so I do welcome this change. You can no longer prevent Pain Elementals from spawning Lost Souls by hugging their face, now you will take a rocket's worth of damage if you try to do that. A new weapon has been introduced called the Unmaker, which on its own is like a hitscan Plasma Rifle and a redundant addition to your arsenal, but becomes an OP joke weapon once upgraded. You're better off pistol starting each level (yes, all Doom 64 levels are designed around pistol starts, and for maximum enjoyment you should play with pistol starts as well) so you don't have to pretend you can't just Unmaker your way out of a tight spot.

There are no new enemies in Doom 64 (not counting the Mother Demon), aside from the Nightmare Imp, which is an Imp reskin that moves twice as fast and throws out fireballs that move twice as fast, but I do dig its inclusion on paper. On paper this allows regular Imps to pose more of a macro-level threat with their slow fireballs cutting off your movement in the long-term, whereas the faster Nightmare Imp fireballs create micro-level threats that you need to immediately evade. In practice this distinction is kind of pointless since Imp fireballs are small and easily avoidable either way, and Arachnotrons, Mancubi, hitscanners and Revenants (if Doom 64 had 'em) are generally a better fit for that kind of setup anyways.

Lost Souls have been changed the most, they charge much faster and attack more frequently, but (thankfully) now take only one instead of two shotgun shots to take down. In a vacuum, I do prefer this change of Lost Souls being a high-threat enemy that screw you over harder but are easier to kill (outside of Lost Souls becoming unable to move around corners because of how frequently they try to charge at you in a straight line), as opposed to a tankier annoyance that always came in large numbers and took a noticeable amount of time to get rid of. The problem is how this change affects Pain Elementals. A weaker Lost Soul means Pain Elementals also pose less of a threat, which you could stunlock more effortlessly. This is probably why the Pain Elemental in Doom 64 now spawns two Lost Souls at once instead of one. However, this opens yet another can of worms, especially when the Pain Elemental is triggered into infighting (something more likely to happen in D64 since a Pain Elemental failing to spawn Lost Souls can now damage other nearby demons). At best, you get lucky and manage to kill the Pain Elemental with two rockets before it spawns two super-sonic Lost Souls that are in your face the next frame and cause your rocket to blow up in your face. At worst, the game grinds down to a halt as the sheer amount of coked-up Lost Souls create so much unpredictability that picking them off from a safe corner becomes the only viable survival tactic. Not that this never happened in the originals, but there Pain Elementals didn't tend to escalate things as fast. When looking at the Lost Soul changes in the grander scheme of things, I do prefer the original implementation, as it doesn't make fighting Pain Elementals as much of a chaotic fustercluck.

Doom 64's level design usually doesn't do stuff that's downright offensive (f.e. death pits, giving you almost no breathing room against an enemy horde, surrounding you with hitscanners, etc.), but at the same time its combat encounters aren't particularly outstanding. There's a general lack of time/space pressure in most encounters (i.e. being given too much space to move around in and/or there being not enough enemies to restrict that space), nor is there much of a Double Impact-style resource management pressure to justify the overall laidback intensity of the levels (doubly so if you are playing without pistol starts). Aside from that is the EXTREME overreliance on Hell Knights/Barons, especially in the "do the SSG dance against one or two Knights/Barons in a tight corridor" setup that gets reused for about a hundred times with little variation. I don't believe that the absence of the Revenant/Archvile is the cause here, because you can still get some good mileage off Arachnotrons and Mancubi (as The Lost Levels show). This brings me to my second point, which is that Arachnotrons and Mancubi are woefully underutilized in the main campaign. In the main campaign they primarily appear in some of the later levels and most of the climax setpiece levels (Dead Simpler, Cat and Mouse, Watch Your Step), but for most of the game it's Knights/Barons, (Nightmare) Imps, Pinkies, and Cacodemons. Even then Pinkies/Cacos are used similarly to the Knight/Barons where the winning strategy is doing the SSG dance while slowly moving backwards. Usually Pain Elementals, now an Archvile-level threat, and Lost Souls will be deployed to shake things up Although as I stated before, I have mixed feelings about them.

The Lost Levels fare a lot better level design-wise. So (Nightmare) Imps tend to be more effectively utilized for long-range harassment, the levels are more willing to make you fight demons from multiple directions, Arachnotrons tend to be used more often as turrets and just in general, and Knights/Barons aren't spammed as much. There are some tedious parts, like the blue key room in Thy Glory and the room design making you slowly take out major enemies one by one, but not every map can be a winner. Overall, definitely a good inclusion for Doom 64. For those who are interested, my favourite maps would be map 9, 15, 16, 22, 34, 35, and 37.

In terms of navigation, Doom 64's levels do have a tendency to fall in the "go backtrack and find out what this switch opened on the other side of the level" trap, where at best you find the newly opened gate or door by accident, and at worst you're running circles in an empty level trying to find out where to go next. The navigation in Doom serves to create small navigation puzzles between fights to keep players from tiring out (much like the platforming in Doom Eternal); it shouldn't be what you end up spending most of your playtime on. To prevent this, colored keycards should be used when the distance between a switch/key and the corresponding gate is large, as colored gates are easier to remember as a place you need to eventually go to, than if it were a locked generic door. But since Doom only supports three keycard colors (and because the more you add, the harder it gets to keep track of these colored gates), regular switches should be used when the distance between a switch and a corresponding locked gate is short. Alternatively, extra enemies can be spawned in to form a breadcrumb trail towards the now-opened gate, or the corresponding gate can be placed in your line of sight when hitting its switch. Not to say that Doom 64 never does this, but it's not always consistent in doing so. So there is even one level in Doom 64 which has an interactable Build Engine-style camera to show you what just opened in another part of the level.

Overall, a decent map pack. Try it out if you want to see what playing Doom with a Quake atmosphere feels like.

Uplink: Hacker Elite was an important game for the script kiddie phase of my childhood. Many hours were spent figuring out Uplink’s systems, finding the secret missions, and learning the game with each game over. Not only was Uplink the first (well-known) hacking simulator, but in my eyes it’s still the best. Even in my adulthood I replay Uplink at least once a year. To express my love for Uplink and its 20th year anniversary, I will now dissect its fetid corpse and show the world the innards that make up this unholy mess.

At its core, Uplink is a loading bar simulator. Hacking is done by opening a hacking tool, pointing it at a security measure of the system you're connected to, and waiting for the tool to finish its task. Until you can buy some better hardware or tools for your virtual gateway to speed things up, you’ll have no choice but to wait, doing nothing but watching bars on the screen fill up for about half a minute. It’d be nice if Uplink allowed you to fast-forward time to skip the wait--which it already does! But only by minutes and hours. Considering hacking into a system triggers an active trace that will catch you in one or two minutes, skipping ahead by several minutes or hours per second is a good way of getting an instant game over. Another solution for preventing the player from doing nothing but waiting is keeping them engaged with minigames to speed up the hacking, which several other hacksims already do. But then you better have a large amount of them like WarioWare, or create considerable depth for the handful of minigames that do exist.

How you go about applying hacking tools in Uplink is shallow. Each can only do one thing and be used in one way, and all security measures that you have to crack are similarly one-note. To get admin access, you point your Password Breaker program at the login screen and wait for it to finish. To break an elliptic-curve cypher, you point your Decypher program at it and wait for it to finish. To get around Proxies, you activate your Proxy Disabler and wait for it to finish. To get around Firewalls, you activate your Firewall Disabler and wait for it to finish. And if you’ve got the money, then you can buy a Firewall/Proxy Bypasser and just skip the wait altogether. The order in which these security measures are cracked usually doesn’t matter, nor do any of them have any kind of synergy where one affects the other. In short, most of the hacking in Uplink is just a shape puzzle in disguise.

In Uplink’s defense, the real puzzle is figuring out how to actually accomplish your objectives and avoid getting caught. This isn’t as simple as it sounds. Past the tutorial mission, Uplink doesn’t hold your hand at all (aside from a Help page which you aren’t told about and have to find on your own), and you’re overwhelmed with all kinds of options available to you from the get go, where you just gotta figure out what options you actually need. Although breaking voice locks is a matter of playing back a recording of the admin’s voice using a Voice Analyser, you’re not told how you can get your hands on such a recording. The missions for destroying a person’s life do not even give you a target system to hack, you need to figure out on your own what system can be used to accomplish the mission. How you can actually destroy and shutdown a system isn’t something you can do with any tool, and requires a more unique solution. All you can do is scour the internet (in Uplink) for clues on what to do next. Basically Uplink’s puzzles take more after those commonly seen in point ‘n click adventure games, where it’s less about discovering new applications for existing mechanics (i.e. Portal, Recursed), and more about figuring out and applying the internal logic of the game world.

There’s only one major problem: Uplink is structured like a roguelite (or to be more accurate since Uplink predates roguelites, it’s structured more like the Elite games). If you consider that getting caught results in a permanent game over (thankfully Uplink will let you get away with only a fine and criminal record if you fail the beginner missions), and that missions are randomly generated based on a set of 16~ mission types where the only random factors are the company name and the reward amount, then that involves redoing these same puzzles over and over. Even without permadeath, you would still be grinding out missions of the same type to get the money you need to buy the necessary tools for the higher-level missions, so repetition is inevitable. Here Uplink should have fully committed to either being a linear game with handcrafted and unique missions with and no permadeath, or to embrace being a roguelite and go hard on adding more randomness and variation to the missions.

The only mission types that seem to break this mold are the LAN missions, but even they are a failure in that regard. They involve having to break into a semi-randomly generated Local Area Network, which are made up of several computers and unique systems blocking your way to the main server. Except the fact that the layouts being semi-random doesn't really matter, because each security system type within a LAN also has effectively one solution that stays the same regardless of the layout. It is, again, just going through the motions. At that point in the game you will probably have a Monitor Bypass, which prevents you from being actively traced until you gain admin access to the main server in the LAN, so there's again next to no time limit pressuring you while you're slithering your way through a LAN.

The only true exceptions to this are the final main story missions for both of the two story branches, which are by far the high points of the game. Both missions are not about figuring out how to break into a system, but more about hacking into as many systems as possible before an invisible timer hits zero. And because you can only do this mission once per run, you don’t have the comfort of fully knowing what to expect, resulting in a very tense situation. Go improvise. At the same time, the final missions don’t ask something out of you that you can only learn through trial ‘n error; they mostly involve applying what you’ve done throughout the entire game, and you’ve already gotten a chance to get familiar with the non-standard mechanics in previous storyline missions. All that remains is whether you got the sleight of hand and nerves of steel to do it. A final mission like this in a permadeath game where you have to redo 1-3 hours of gameplay to get another shot if you fail could have easily become an exercise in frustration, but thankfully Uplink doesn’t throw a last-minute gimmick or a difficulty spike at you to make failure on your first try near-guaranteed.

Although the hacking itself in Uplink is shallow, there is one important element you do need to keep track of: time. When you initiate a hack, the system you’re connected to will start actively tracing you, giving you a limited amount of time to get in, do your business, and get out before your location is traced and your ass is sent to jail. Your Trace Tracker will beep with increasing frequency the active trace is about to complete, which adds a lot to make the hacking feel suspenseful. The game being permadeath also has to do with it. Being given a limited amount of time in turn makes you ask which one of your loading bars you want to prioritize to get in ASAP (although as said before, this usually doesn’t matter), as you can control how much CPU power each program gets to complete their task faster. In a sense you could say it's similar to solving a Rubik's Cube or playing Tetris: if the solution to the puzzle is obvious, then on repeat playthroughs the only fun lies in how quickly and accurately you can apply that solution.

Unfortunately, this whole element of time management is hamstrung by how the bounce paths work. Basically you don't want to directly connect to a target system, because that gets you immediately traced, so instead you want to route your connection through several other computers to make the trace last longer. The problem is that from the very start of the game you can find over 80 systems to bounce through, making traces against you last an enormous amount of time. There is also no downside to having such a long bounce path (other than the initial investment of having to manually click a gajillion indistinguishable boxes on an crowded world map to set up your bounce path, which you can thankfully save and load for future use), like suffering massive lag because you're routing your connection from France to Australia.

Having tons of time to perform a hack in turn also affects the usefulness of hardware upgrades. Buying a better CPU for faster hacking becomes more of a QoL upgrade than an essential upgrade, better modems with better download speeds become redundant, and storage space upgrades for the missions where you need to steal a massive database aren’t as necessary, because with the tons of time at hand you can safely make several trips carrying the loot from the target system to the depot server. And because hardware upgrades are less useful, gateway upgrades also become less useful, since now there’s not as much of a point to upgrade your gateway and get more hardware slots. Software upgrades almost always take priority over hardware upgrades because you simply cannot complete certain mission types without the right software, whereas hardware upgrades are more or less there for quality of life (with the exception of a few storage upgrades so you can fit all software tools on your gateway). If the time you had for hacking into a system was more limited, then there would be more of a reason to consider hardware upgrades, instead of the dominant strategy always being about prioritizing software upgrades.

A bit less FUBAR is the macro-level time management. Every mission you take also comes with an expiration date (usually about 4 days) after which the mission is automatically considered a failure. Failing or abandoning a mission will mean taking a hit to your Uplink Agent level (which prohibits you from taking higher-level missions), and doing so repeatedly will have the Uplink Corporation sack your incompetent ass for an instant game over. Time in Uplink progresses just like in real-life, so at first it seems like you have plenty of time. Then you find out that you accepted a mission for which you don’t have the right tools or the money to buy those tools (a common occurrence when you’re just starting out), so you need to do other missions first. Sometimes there are no available missions (that you can actually accept or have the tools to complete) on the mission board anymore, so you have to fast-forward time and hope the mission generator generates a mission that you can actually take on. Some missions involve having to skip ahead a few hours before news comes out of your hack as confirmation to your mission giver. The hardware and new gateways you buy also aren’t applied instantly, but take about a day to be delivered and applied. What you can also do is accept another mission, but negotiate with the mission giver to get paid fully or half up front in exchange for getting the mission done in one or two days respectively. This allows you to get the money you need to complete the mission you accepted earlier, but if done incorrectly you can sink into a greater time debt, and end up having to fail several missions which you cannot complete in time. As you can see, there are a lot of macro-level time issues that you need to keep in mind if you don’t want to run into a money or time debt.

The only problem here is that to have these deadlines imposed on you and to have macro-level time management be a relevant skill at all, is to accidentally accept missions whose tool requirements you don’t know. But once you know what tools you need to complete a given mission, you can avoid these deadlines altogether, and along with it the interesting decision making that comes with macro-level time management. The only other deadline of note is having to have at least 300 credits in your bank by the end of the month to pay your monthly Uplink subscription fee, but in Uplink 300c is total pocket change. Uplink could make macro-level time management more relevant by pushing you into situations where you want to borrow money, such as by having you rely more on tools you can only rent, or by having the main story push existing debts onto you which have to be cleared before the deadline. This kind of emergent time management layer of strategy comes more naturally in games like Pathologic (2) and Dead Rising 1 where these deadlines are imposed on you from the get go.

Aside from active traces, there are also passive traces. All the actions you perform on a system leave behind logs, and the feds will take an hour or two to follow your bounce path until they find your real IP, so it's essential to delete the logs that you leave behind if you don't want to get caught. The problem is that this is so trivial to do that it becomes nothing more than busywork, and has no interesting choices tied to it at all. How and where you go about deleting your logs doesn't matter--you can have your bounce path always end at the same server and the feds will be none the wiser. It is a chore that you must perform every now and then, where the only danger involved is accidentally forgetting about it. This is especially the case when you learn that the best server to wipe your logs at is the InterNIC server, for it is the only server in the game that doesn’t initiate an active or a passive trace when you try to hack it. This system could have worked better if you couldn’t repeatedly use the same server to cover your tracks with.

As for one thing in Uplink that does grip me, it’s the presentation. The user interface is very minimalistic, which for a 2001 game set in 2010 is surprisingly prescient, given how minimalism for UX design is all the rage at the time of writing. Uplink’s visuals manage to strike that right balance of Hollywood hacking where it’s just flashy enough to look cooler than your own desktop (primarily through the usage of sound effects and rad animations), but restrained and grounded in reality enough so it doesn’t look downright silly and hard to take seriously (like the depictions of hacking in any police procedural ever), while also not being too abstracted to the point where it doesn’t resemble actual hacking in the slightest (cyberspace, baby!).

That said, the usability of the user interface in Uplink is another matter. There is no ability to select or copy-paste text, which means that you need to manually input numbers and IP addresses by hand every time. There are no keyboard shortcuts for most functions, so you need to manually repeat manual tasks using GUI menus and the cursor. You cannot set macros for things like launching all your Bypasser programs either. Mission descriptions and e-mails are all grouped together in a messy horizontal stack at the bottom right of the screen, all of which are depicted by indistinguishable icons that don’t clue you in on what the contents represent, so you’ll be spending some time combing through several missions to find the one you actually need. This gets especially messy when you’ve ordered several hardware upgrades at the same time, and you’re gonna have to manually delete all the useless notification emails if you want things to not be a total mess. The lack of tabs and windows means there’s a lot more menu trawling than necessary for when you need to go back and forth between particular menus, instead of being able to place them side-by-side. Having solutions for UX issues like this doesn’t only make the user interface more pleasant to use, but it also creates a larger skill ceiling. Discovering certain tips and tricks to perform repeat tasks more easily and efficiently is a joy in its own right, and also actually useful when you have to hack a system under a time limit (even if in this case that time limit is borked).

Although I have been very harsh on Uplink, I still love it if only for its uniqueness and untapped potential. Most hacksims since Uplink took the linear puzzle-by-puzzle approach, but none have taken an immersive sim approach of trying to simulate the internet like Uplink tried to. While you mostly interact with the world in Uplink through missions, there are also additional servers like a simple stock market system that’s affected by which companies you benefit/ruin, a news server that reports on hacks performed by you and other NPC hackers, each NPC has its own bank account and academic/criminal record that you can mess with, and there are even a few secret missions that you can trigger on your own if you pay close attention to the world. These are all unfortunately minor which you don’t have much of a reason to bother with outside missions, but it shows that you could certainly expand on this reactive open world concept.

What’s particularly interesting is that Uplink is completely menu-driven, and therefore expanding the world or gameplay systems like this doesn’t require much in the way of audio/visual assets. The whole game being a simulation of an OS and the internet also provides a convenient narrative excuse to not require complex physics/animations/graphics/what-have-you like your standard open world game. That indie developers (which technically also includes the Uplink devs themselves, who are still trucking to this day!) haven’t really tried to dethrone Uplink yet in this regard is really one of life’s greatest mysteries given the amount of potential present, especially considering how nowadays the Internet is playing an even larger role in our life than 20 years ago (to be fair, I haven’t tried NITE Team 4 yet, I’m hearing interesting things about it).

A lot of stuff in Uplink is simply uncooked, which becomes especially apparent when you replay it. For an experimental game cooked up by bedroom programmers making their first ever commercial game, that’s to be expected. However, Uplink does show that it can serve as a blueprint for at least the presentation, world simulation, and time/money management aspects in a hacksim.

If during the seventh gen the market was flooded by indistinguishable boomer shooters instead of corridor shooters, then AMID EVIL would fit right in. Just like Bioshock Infinite or Resistance or Killzone, nobody will be talking about this in a few years. The only reasons AMID EVIL got any attention at all was because of its striking visuals and the novelty of being one of the first new retro shooters, since it sure as hell wasn't the quality of the gameplay.

The gameplay is irredeemably bland for three key reasons:
1) 90% of the enemy cast are either melee rushers or ranged projectile-based enemies which you all dodge in the exact same way, i.e. circlestrafing.
2) AMID EVIL rarely shakes up enemy placement in any meaningful way: enemies typically come at you from only the front instead of multiple directions, enemy groups often consist of only one or two enemy types, and enemy groups are usually too small to ever effectively pressure you on space or time.
3) The levels are often very spacious and open, giving you plenty of space to keep circlestrafing or backing away from enemies forever.

So even though the game keeps throwing new enemies at you, new level design styles, new level gimmicks, the combat ends up playing out the same each time.

The enemy cast has some interesting enemy types here and there, but then AMID EVIL bizarrely decides to keep them exclusive to their own 4-level episodes. This means that the actually interesting enemies that aren't merely reskins of Doom's Imp or Pinky, such as the ones that throw bouncing explosives, fire continuous laser beams, fire a burst of short-range hitscan nails, or pull you towards them, are never used in tandem. It makes absolutely no sense why you would kneecap your own game like this. Imagine if Doom never paired zombie grunts together with the hell enemies for lore reasons--there isn't much you can do with zombie grunts alone, but it's when they're combined with other demons that they really shine. Instead, each episode in AMID EVIL gets one interesting enemy type at most that's only mixed with that episode's reskin of the Imp and Pinky. If each episode is going to reskin the basic enemies from the last episode to fit this episode's visual theme, then they might as well reskin all the cool enemies from the prior episodes as well while they're at it.

Some enemies have elemental weaknesses/resistances to incentivize using other weapons, but elemental weaknesses/resistances are only any interesting if whether taking advantage of them being a good idea depends on the situation. For example, exploiting them could make them explode on death and deal damage to everything nearby, which is useful if you're far away, but dangerous to yourself if you're in blast range. The Golems in E3 have something like that going on where they're weak to your rocket launcher, except the rocket launcher deals negligible self-damage when used up close anyways, and levels rarely place them in a way where you can't easily create some safe distance between you and them. A bigger problem is that AMID EVIL will often pit you against homogeneous groups of enemies that have the same weakness, so it's really not a choice as to what weapon you should be using.

At the very least you can theoretically get some mileage out of basic straight projectile throwing enemies and melee rushers through clever enemy placement, but it is here that AMID EVIL just haphazardly throws them in front of you in a big open field, or throws one enemy at a time at you in a section where space is limited. There are some exceptions, such as the start of E6M1 where you're dropped in a space with enemies surrounding you, or E6M2's start on Warrior Mode where you need to run past high-tier enemies to get some better weapons first. But even so, AMID EVIL is primarily a circlestrafe-fest--which is not what Doom and Quake 1 were. Doom employed hitscanners to make you think about when and where you should break line of sight to avoid damage instead of holding A or D for the whole game, and Quake 1 used tanky enemies in claustrophobic levels make you use the most out of what little space you have. AMID EVIL ain't got nothing like that.

Even supposing the enemy cast were good, whether the weapon arsenal could make even better use out of it is another question. AMID EVIL's arsenal is functionally identical to your standard melee/pistol/shotgun/machine gun/rocket launcher (the game is just very good at covering up this fact by giving each weapon a cool visual design). So you've got the Whisper's Edge which functions like a slow and unsatisfying projectile-based shotgun, the Star of Torment that's an actually satisfying-to-use Super Shotgun, the Azure Staff that's like a machinegun with slight tracking, the Voltride that's a heavy machine gun, the Celestial Claw that's a rocket launcher, a melee weapon in the form of the Axe, and the Aeternum which is this game's BFG. Most of the time you're going to be using the Axe, Star of Torment and Celestial Claw anyways, because they're the only ones that can deal any decent damage anyways, and ammo restrictions aren't too big of a deal in AMID EVIL, even on Warrior Mode where you start each level with only the Axe. DPS is the only meaningful attribute you want to consider (on top of enemy weaknesses) when it comes to choosing the right weapon for the right situation. The Whisper's Edge/Azure Staff are weak compared to the SoT/Voltride, and because they share the same ammo pools respectively, there's generally no reason why you would choose to use the weaker weapons save for some edge cases. You can get away with a lot of shit with the Axe in the early episodes, because even on the highest difficulty the enemies there will just do fuck all damage (the difficulty in AMID EVIL is more balanced in a way where enemies in later episodes deal more damage, which the difficulty setting doesn't affect as strongly), and health pick-ups are everywhere.

There are some unique attributes to AMID EVIL's weapons. The Axe pulls in nearby enemies when you swing it for a guaranteed hit, which neatly gets around melee hit detection being a problem in most first-person games. But the rest isn't all that interesting. The Voltride has a mechanic where it can chain lightning to other nearby enemies when you overkill something with it, but you rarely ever face large groups of fodder in AMID EVIL that would make you consider using that. The Aeternum is just a boring BFG. Instead of looking at how Doom's BFG actually functioned like a shotgun with a very wide horizontal spread which could do insane damage at point-blank range or spread damage evenly across multiple enemies from medium range, AMID EVIL just made its BFG equivalent into a Skip Encounter Button. You point it at an open space, click fire, and it fires an orb that instantly deletes most enemies in line of sight. There is little skill involved in using it, and only serves to let you skip encounters outright.

The Big Gimmick of AMID EVIL is Soul Mode, which is like Heretic's Tome of Power, except instead of finding it as pick-ups you have a gauge that needs to be refilled by picking up the souls of fallen enemies, much like in Painkiller. When you activate it, all your weapons temporarily get supercharged and behave differently (the Star of Torment fires homing balls, the Whisper's Edge fires penetrative projectiles, the Axe becomes a blender, etc.) for an extra burst of power. There's several problems with this, however.

One, first-time players will have no idea when it's appropriate to activate Soul Mode. This leads to prematurely activating it in situations that turned to not be that intense after all. It's made worse by the fact that Soul Mode takes so much souls to charge up, so using it at the wrong moment stings pretty hard. The only way the player can know for sure that it's a good idea to use Soul Mode is when the level places a Mega Soul that refills your entire Soul Gauge in anticipation of a big fight (because why else would the game place something so powerful in the open), which begs the question if it's even a good idea to allow the player to use Soul Mode whenever they want, if it's not made clear when it's a good time to use it. This is why it might have been a better idea to make Soul Mode faster to charge but less powerful (much like DMC's Devil Trigger) in order to make the player more willing to use it without it feeling like they wasted it, and without trivializing certain fights in the game once activated.

Two, having to walk over enemy bodies to pick up their souls is incredibly tedious and does nothing except waste your time. This is even more problematic with flying enemies whose souls can be stuck several feet in the air that you can't reach, or when you kill an enemy with the Star of Torment only for their body and soul to be launched across the room and stuck on a faraway wall that you can't reach. The only reason the way this is the way it is is because in Early Access Soul Mode could only be activated whenever you picked up enough souls instead of manually activating it when the Gauge was full, which everyone rightfully considered to be a bad idea, because having no control over how and when you control such a core mechanic means you can't consistently activate it when you want to, and are more prone to accidentally activating it in spots you didn't want to because you accidentally bumped into a soul (which was the devs' intended way of balancing Soul Mode (?!)).

In terms of navigation/exploration, AMID EVIL's level design also makes several blunders. AMID EVIL has this tendency to sprinkle minor ammo and health items around the edges of a room (instead of placing one major pick-up at the center of the room), probably because it admittedly looks aesthetically pleasing. The problem is that having to move next to every edge to get all items is bad for the pacing of the level. Trails of minor pick-ups are fine when they're on the main path, decorating edges of the room with them just wastes your time. Another is that while AMID EVIL's levels make good use of verticality, there are no shortcuts. This means that if you accidentally trip and fall, you're gonna have to walk aaaaaaall the way back up, which is especially the case in later episodes where platforming becomes more of a thing. This could have been prevented with shortcuts, but it seems the devs designed the platforming around savescumming.

Speaking of platforming, there's Episode 5. What I like about Episode 5 is its willingness to use more environmental hazards and traps in combat arenas, but what I intensely dislike is its platforming. Not because there's platforming at all, but because it's platforming of the 'wait 10 seconds for the platform to move towards you' and 'run all the way back up the stairs again if you fucked up the platforming' kind that involves copious amounts of downtime and doing nothing at all. There is even a sign near one of the first major platforming sections E5M1, that reads 'Patience is a virtue'. All that message was missing was a :^) at the end.

The combat part of AMID EVIL's level design is a failure, but I want to stress that the aesthetic of the levels, especially in later episodes, really are the bee's knees. While the combat may not be memorable, the level architecture and aesthetic certainly is. The earlier episodes suffer from the incongruous UE4 look of low-poly assets being mixed with high-fidelity lighting and visual effects, but past Episode 3 things actually start looking more appealing. Episode 6 is a highlight with its Arcane Dimensions-like buildings and giant floating water bubbles, and Episode 7 with its completely abstract areas where every platform is skewed and platforms spontaneously pop in front of you. It is only unfortunate that, except Episode 5, these changes in theme hold little to no ramifications for the gameplay.

That's honestly the best way to sum up AMID EVIL: it's some basic bitch-ass shit, but boy, it sure is pretty.

The gist of Rolling Thunder is that you're playing as a Super Spy called Bames Jond, on a mission to rescue his partner from the LGBT-division of the KKK, led by Piccolo from Dragon Ball. Rolling Thunder isn't about bare-chested excess and covering the screen in spreadfire and brimstone like Contra is--instead you're a spy, and spies act with lethal precision. Most enemies take only one or two shots to die, and as for Mr. Jond, taking one bullet means instant death (despite the misleading size of his health bar), and colliding with enemies shaves off half. Yet, the ensuing mercy i-frames on a collision are so short that most enemies will simply collide with you again right after your recovery, so a collision usually means instant death anyways (unless you get very lucky).

As ammo is limited, enemies are everywhere, and you can't shoot while moving or jumping, so you need to be quick and precise to not get overwhelmed and Hitler-greeted to death. The premise and limited ammo is also what makes it satisfying to calculate how many shots you need to take out a group based on the amount of enemies and the enemy types present, and then execute them with no shots wasted (even though the game is pretty lenient with ammo refills and lets you carry your stockpile over between stages). Besides your semi-auto pistol you also have a full-auto SMG, which you want to apply some trigger discipline with and not waste more shots than necessary. Enemies that take more than one shot to kill subtly reinforce this with their slight on-hit i-frames; taking one bullet knocks them back into a crouching position, and á la Shinobi AC they're invulnerable until they land on the ground (but unlike Shinobi this only takes a fifth of a second and doesn't feel like it takes ages). This means that if you fire a stream of bullets from a standing position at an enemy, one will connect, but all other bullets will go right over his head. Therefore you want to follow up with a shot from a crouching position or be shooting from crouch to begin with, but you also want to slightly space out your shots to take the i-frames into account. Firing full-auto from crouch will have the enemy soak up three bullets instead of two because of the way the collision works in this game, so you’re better off manually double-tapping.

You also want to be quick about your Tactical Espionage. Not only is the time limit pretty strict and you get more score the faster you clear a stage, but the longer you take, the more chaos you subject yourself to. Enemies in Rolling Thunder primarily enter the field through the right side of the screen, but also through the many doors in the background, and they will keep coming out of those doors at regular intervals unless you move on. So a stage will behave more predictably when you’re blazing through, but less so if you're being a turtle as enemies that you didn’t originally account for in your route start making themselves known. It's a bit how Ninja Gaiden (NES) discourages backpedaling by giving you more respawning enemies to deal with if you do back up instead of facing towards danger. The enemy types that come out of the doors in RT also tend to be semi-random (usually one of two possible Masker types, where there's 8+ of them in total), so even if you're blazing through you still need to take this into account.

RT is also pretty interesting to play for speed, primarily because bunnyhopping forwards lets you move faster than your walking speed. Doing so also carries an inherent risk, because you cannot attack while jumping, and enemies come out of doors unannounced and quickly enough that a misplaced jump can make you fall right into a Masker's bosom and die. At the same time there are enough obstacles in your path that you can't just bunnyhop past everything like it's a Half-Life 1 speedrun, so you need to be smart about knowing when to go fast. The ability to bunnyhop also brings rise to a technique that I call 'queueing shots', which operates on a similar principle as the jumping attacks in Castlevania and Ninja Gaiden. It involves firing a bullet and then bunnyhopping alongside it to increase the distance it travels before it hits an enemy or exits the screen. This allows you to kill enemies right as they enter the screen while moving at max speed without having to stop and shoot right as they appear, adding more depth to optimizing a given stage for speed. This is also partially made possible because the speed of your bullets isn't blazingly fast--it's only slightly faster than you moving at bunnyhopping speed. If the bullet speed was practically instant like in Rolling Thunder 2, it would despawn before you could even begin bunnyhopping.

One thing Rolling Thunder introduced that other games would steal is the ability to high jump and vault onto the platform below/above you, effectively presenting two planes of combat. Not only are you worrying about enemies coming from the left and right and the background, but also from above and below, because all enemies will high jump up to where you are. High jumping also makes you invincible against bullets (except for the startup of the jump), so it makes for a good escape tool. All this is cool on paper, but the game rarely does anything interesting with it. Short of being physically blocked off by walls, there isn’t a lot that makes you want to move towards the other plane (like enemy groups that shoot bullets from both standing and crouching), or being forced to vault towards a plane that’s already contested by enemies. Most enemies will already move towards your plane, who you can catch by staying on yours and safely shooting them as they vault in (unless they’re vaulting exactly into your position for a collision kill). Enemies that can badger you from other planes, like grenadiers that will spam grenades on the plane below, are surprisingly rare. Moreover, multi-planar combat is only really a thing in Stage 1 and 5 for both loops, in all the other stages they only play a minor factor, usually because there’s no other plane to begin with.

Instead, too many stages in RT seek to impose a challenge through diagonals or height differences in terrain and enemy placement, even though your moveset isn’t always well-equipped to deal with them. For example, take the chest-high peekaboo shooting sections near the end of Stage 5, where you and the enemy are forced to wait for each other and take potshots like some kind of generic cover shooter. This is precisely where having another plane would give you more options to negotiate obstacles like these instead of being forced into playing peekaboo, but unfortunately they are absent here. Another example is the staircase section in Stage 2. Because the enemies come in diagonally from below and because you can only shoot to your hard left and right, your only option is to wait for them to ascend/descend into your line of fire. You can jump over them, but usually there’s another enemy group at the bottom, so the collision damage would kill you. Here I again wonder why the game doesn’t use multiple flat planes to let you vault down repeatedly (like Stage 2 in Rolling Thunder 2). The end of Stage 1 does employ staircase formations in the same way, but the enemies are placed in a way where you don’t have to wait more than a second for them to fall into your line of fire, so it’s much more tolerable in comparison.

Some sections of the game are even worse in this regard, which involve you having to drop down or ascend to proceed, except your path forward is blocked off by very inconvenient enemy placement which you can’t jump over without dying to contact damage, and said enemies simply won’t budge. The only way to negotiate these situations is to abuse the hidden ability of your jumps to induce spontaneous brain aneurysms in the enemy AI, and make them move the other way. I can only surmise the devs knew about this and designed parts of the second loop around it, because there’s simply no way you can pass through certain sections without this knowledge. But because this only works when an enemy is in a neutral state and some of these enemies will be attacking non-stop, you will have to jump repeatedly until their AI gets the message, and then you gotta wait for them to process their brain aneurysm and slowly turn the other way, which just puts a massive dent in the pacing of the game. This is honestly a band-aid solution for situations that the player character turns out not to be properly equipped to deal with, and would be better solved by designing situations around your existing toolset (i.e. add more planes), or giving you the proper tools necessary for these situations (jump while shooting/non-lethal contact damage).

The Maskers come in many different color schemes, all of which signify different behaviors and properties (in a clever bit of asset reuse). Strawberry Green Tea is your standard mook that wants to get all touchy feely, Banana Blueberry is the same but takes two shots, Orange fires bullets from standing positions, Lime Green Tea fires from crouching, Lime and Chocolate Lime throw grenades in an arc, and you also get the illusive Ninja Maskers that appear from thin air. It’s a bit of a basic line-up, but they’re often employed in great numbers and from several different directions on the screen that it still allows for a good deal of variety in the stage design. Signifying different enemy behaviors through color coding helps you formulate a plan to deal with a given situation instead of being forced to guess whether an enemy will shoot from crouching or standing, which is why it’s especially frustrating when the game decides to break this rule in the second loop. Suddenly Strawberry Green Tea can throw grenades, and Orange fires from crouching instead of standing. On its own enemies being able to do things like randomly decide between shooting from standing or crouching would push you to take the safest and most consistent option for dealing with it, but because the game actively misinforms you with no warning, dying as a result can’t help but feel cheap and disrespectful of your time and effort.

There are also other non-Masker enemies, most notably Mutants whose small stature means you can only hit them while crouching, but once they come close enough to you they will quickly leap into your face and jump right over your crouching shots. So at long-range you want to shoot from crouch, at close-range you want to catch them mid-air with a standing shot, which makes them pretty effective to force you to stand up every now and then, considering crouching shots will take out most other enemies. Aside from Mutants you also got Panthers, which behave the same except less aggressively, but they’re more of an annoyance because of their growl. Their growl actually lowers their hitbox and makes it impossible to hit them on a flat plane. This is not an attack, this is just a taunt that wastes your time. There are also Owlbats, which are horrible enemies that thankfully only appear rarely. Upon getting triggered they will fly around at the top of the screen for several seconds, then swoop in like a homing missile. Much like the Panther, them flying around just wastes your time. Owlbats could be a good fit if you were forced to deal with other enemies on top of the Owlbats (like in an autoscroller section), but as is, you can just back off instead of moving forwards and deal with more enemies, and then wait for the Owlbats to swoop down so you can safely take them out.

Although most of the enemy cast can be dealt with by shooting from a crouching position, the stage design does a good enough job of using the stage terrain in a way to force you out of it, particularly Stage 1, 3, and 5, on account of actually presenting different planes for you to vault around, and using doors to spawn enemies right next to you.

Stage 3 is mostly a retread of Stage 1’s ideas, but with the addition of Mutants to spice things up. Initially you will have to get used to their ability to leap over your shots when they get close, but over time you can mitigate the threat they pose by memorizing most of their positions. One interesting thing of note is that Mutants cannot enter the screen via doors (nor can any other non-Masker enemies, although all other non-Masker enemies beside the Mutant suck and are better off not appearing at all) and only appear from the sides of the screen, which all things considered makes sense, if they spawned within leaping range they’d come at you so fast that you can only survive by memorizing these spawns. However, this lack of response time could be mitigated if Mutants could only spawn through doors on the plane that you’re currently not on, so you would still have adequate time to react.

Stage 4 opens with another staircase where you have to wait for the enemies on it to drop down into your line of fire, and then giving you Owlbats to deal with. After that you have to drop down into a pit, but if you take the most straightforward path of simply dropping down, a Ninja Masker will suddenly spawn in your face, which will make you collide with another very inconveniently placed Ninja Masker. Instead, you have to descend platform by platform to get down safely. This isn’t particularly hard to execute or get around, it’s just some bullshit designed to get first-time players considering the Ninja Masker isn’t remotely telegraphed. And after that you get a platforming section, which again involves more trial ‘n error. The first part is the running men-on-fire that keep bouncing around the screen, and split into four ascending spirits when you shoot them. You have to memorize what platforms to shoot them from, else their erratic bouncing will make it infeasible to get them in your line of fire (especially if you’re on a higher platform and they’re on a lower one), and shooting them while they’re close means their released spirits can get you by surprise. Again, it’s easy and consistent once memorized, but their erratic nature is primarily designed to catch first-time players by surprise. But the second part involves the actual platforming itself, which takes some time getting used to, as you’ll probably often end up falling off platforms by accident while trying to jump. This is mainly because the player’s hitbox and neutral stance is pretty thin. Most platformers allow the player character to eke over the edge in order to make jumping off the edge off a platform more lenient; you can see how the character’s sprite is standing with one foot on the platform and the other on thin air. But as this isn’t the case in Rolling Thunder, you have to be very precise with your jumps, which IMO is a bad fit for a game that primarily isn’t even about precision platforming at all.

Stage 5 is where all enemies and bullets start moving faster. Even though the actual enemy compositions aren’t that hard by themselves when compared to previous stages, it’s certainly more engaging because of their numbers and all the different directions/doors they are coming in from, on top of the increased enemy/bullet movement speed. In this stage the foreground/background plane switching comes (somewhat) into greater play, although bizarrely going into the background is never required to progress, so you can just ignore this altogether. There is an interesting dynamic to combining background/foreground switching on top of the existing plane switching; being in the background protects you from enemies on the foreground and plane above you because enemies on the top plane cannot jump down into the background (but enemies can jump from the background towards the top plane), but you still have to contend with enemies spawning from the background doors, and you eventually have to exit into the foreground through a chokepoint doorway. Being in the foreground means you no longer have to deal with the background doors, but you’re still vulnerable to enemies on the top plane, and on the top plane you’re vulnerable to background doors AND the bottom planes on the foreground AND background. This kind of asymmetric set-up in terms of potential risk is something the terrain could have played into--where there’s trade-offs in taking one plane over the other, with hard counters forcing you away from one particular plane. Sadly the terrain in Stage 5 never plays with this, so the foreground/background switching ends up being an underutilized gimmick.

Stage 5 isn’t the end; you have the second loop as well. It’s not just the same thing as the first loop but slightly faster; you get new enemy types, revamped enemy placements, some stages feature redesigned terrains, and the Stage 4 in the second loop is a completely new stage that doesn’t resemble Stage 4 in the first loop at all? Given how short the first loop is, (10 minutes) this is basically the second half of the game, and if you intend on playing this game you shouldn’t skip out on it.

So Stage 6 (or ST2-1) features way more enemies, tougher enemy types appear more often, and previously flat hallways now feature enemies poised to drop down from the windows above. The second half features laser gates that you have to time your approach through (while being mindful of their wack hitboxes), but their inclusion feels kinda wasted. You can usually dispatch all enemies first and then safely pass through the gates while the lasers are down, although this way the laser gates always pose the exact same challenge regardless of how the enemies are placed. Laser gates would be more interesting if you were forced to pass them while having to deal with enemies that you can’t permanently remove. Doors to both of your sides that spawn Maskers at a higher rate would be a great fit). Laser gates aren’t used again until Stage 9 (and in the same lacklustre capacity to boot), so there’s some wasted potential.

The most bizarre change between loops is that the final stretch of Stage 6 features enemies that will jump up unannounced out of the sandbag mountain you are standing on. You cannot see this coming because the sandbags are obscuring their sprites (save for teeny bits sticking out), and whether they will jump up to begin with is mostly random. You can kind of route around this, but the only way possible against a threat that you literally can not see coming is through trial ‘n error. This part is a headscratcher and I cannot even guess what the rationale behind it is.

Stage 7 plays mostly the same as Stage 2 with slightly tougher enemy types, the only noticeable changes are the addition of Owlbats in the crate sections and Mutants in the staircase section. For Owlbats you want to memorize their positions so you can pre-fire them while they’re still on the ground, so you don’t have to wait for them to stop flying. The Mutants don’t really add anything to the staircase section, all you do is stand on top of the staircase and shoot while standing as all the Mutants leap into your line of fire. It’s a static threat that doesn’t overlap with anything else, and is repeated several times in a short timespan in the exact same way. Just a waste of time.

Stage 8 doesn’t look all that different from Stage 3, but then it keeps going, and it just keeps going, until you’ve realized that they slapped a remixed version of Stage 4 at the end of this stage. The No Miss clears on YouTube can only manage to finish this stage with less than 20 seconds left on the timer because of its sheer length, and only with an airtight route and a compliant AI at that. The role of time limits should be to discourage excessive dilly-dallying and encourage more aggressive and engaging playstyles. All making them this strict/making stages this long is make only the most optimized routes feasible, while making any elements of RNG a massive pain in the ass.

One such RNG element is the new Panther cage. Whereas you could just pass by it via the foreground in the first loop, now the foreground path is blocked off, and you have to get around it by going into the Panther cage. And the only way you can do so is via two narrow doorways, while there’s a massive group of Panthers on the other side unpredictably walking around and making it unsafe to enter it. All you can do here is wait until an opening presents itself--costing valuable time, or try to force one by jumping and making all Panthers jump along with you as well. But all of this is subject to a lot of RNG, because sometimes the Panthers will decide not to jump (because they randomly decided to growl), sometimes they will decide to leave their cage and get the jump on you, and how they move around is unpredictable.

Particularly cruel here is that if you move a slight bit to the left before entering the cage, a Panther can spawn on the left side of the screen and immediately maul you before you can react. There’s nothing inherently wrong with enemies spawning in from the left, but the player character’s position then ought to be locked to the center to give you enough time and space to react to this, as opposed to Rolling Thunder 1 where your position is locked a one-third screen width from the left. This makes RT1 more suitable for threats that come in from the right, but certainly not from the left edge of the screen.

The ensuing lava section has to be one of the worst cases of trial ‘n error in the game. First you get an Owlbat that for some reason decides to fly around the bottom of the screen instead of the top, and in order to hit it you must jump on a platform amidst lava. The only issue here is that this platform is placed just close enough that if you jump off the very edge of the prior platform (as the game taught you several times before), you will overshoot and land on hot lava instead. Air control is very limited in this game and your jump arc is mostly fixed, so you can’t adjust your trajectory mid-air by much. The only way to avoid this is to unintuitively jump a few steps before the edge of the platform. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t recall even Castlevania ever doing this. Again, there’s nothing inherently with this kind of setup, but Rolling Thunder isn’t primarily about platforming and never drilled fundamentals like these into you, so being expected to suddenly know about not having to jump from the edge of a platform (while the time limit is almost running out) is a bit obscene.

This is also why the last section of the stage where you have to platform across incredibly narrow pillars also feels rather out of place, but the most offensive thing about it is the men-of-fire that get spawned mid-jump--in a game where you can’t attack while jumping. Even if you land safely, they will inevitably collide with you and kill you. The only way to avoid this is to pre-fire a bullet before you jump, which is some mighty kuso. I did say before that I liked queueing shots for its speedrun potential, but only because it was optional. Forcing the player to pre-fire obstacles is always going to be a problem if you don’t telegraph what’s ahead.

Stage 9 is on the mild side, all things considered. Not a lot of doors or multi-directional spawns to worry about. Instead you get a lot of boring sections where you have to drop down something, but have to wait for a Masker at the bottom to move out of the way so you don’t collide with them. There are also more Stage 3-style Ninja Masker pits, where you gotta drop down several platforms, but standing on particular platforms causes Ninja Maskers to spawn in your face, so you just have to trial ‘n error your way through until you find a consistent route. Not particularly interesting on replays. The only interesting obstacle of note is the two laser gates stapled to each other that activate at asynchronous intervals, since you need to use your brain a little to find a gap between the laser gates, although their RNG nature makes it crappy when playing for speed. One thing I’d suggest for laser gates in general is to have them move back and forth horizontally, allowing for more interplay with enemy spawns by making laser gates more of an overlapping and persistent threat, as opposed to the current implementation where you can just chill near one and take out all enemies first, effectively isolating the element of enemy placement from the stage hazards, instead of combining them.

Stage 10 is more of the good ol' stuff. More enemy swarms, less gimmicks. However, the foreground/background switching is still mostly boring, and there is one crappy part that involves enemies pre-firing at a place you have to drop down towards, which again involves more jumping to get the AI to GTFO. At first I was convinced that the extension of the final stage in the second loop was some bullshit that you couldn’t reliably pass through, namely having to ascend a staircase populated by Maskers that refuse to budge unless you bait them into dropping, so I used an invincibility glitch to waltz past the whole shebang. Turns out my Google-fu just wasn’t up to snuff and I somehow missed the existence of a No Miss clear before the time of recording. Designing games around gaming the enemy AI like this is tricky, because behavior is not something that you can really telegraph until it’s too late, like the Red Arremers in the Makaimura games or Donovans in Streets of Rage hard countering your air attacks. It’s more tolerable in beat ‘em ups because you have a wider margin of error thanks to the beeg health bar the genre usually affords you, but less so in precision run ‘n guns like Rolling Thunder. At the very least you want to teach the peculiarities of the enemy AI in a controlled environment early on in the game, not the absolute last stretch.

Finally there’s the final boss fight against Piccolo himself, where you must face his most powerful technique of Running Into You. This is actually an interesting fight where you must constantly gauge how many shots you can afford to let loose before having to jump over him again, because the distance after which he decides to turn around after you jump over him is AFAIK random. And often that distance is so short that you have no choice but to immediately jump again. Cool fight, but the randomness makes it bad for speedrunning, which is also especially bad in a survival context, because if you no missed everything up until this part you will likely have about 20 seconds remaining on the timer, and RNGesus making you pay more of it really makes you want to scream. However, all this is assuming you let the fight play out as intended. Instead, if you have at least 25 bullets, you can simply spray him to death before he even gets close. You can do this by conserving SMG ammo throughout the stage, but if you enable autofire your pistol basically functions no different from the SMG anyways.

All in all, Rolling Thunder has a good core of ideas and mechanics, it’s just not utilized as well as it could be, and it often throws situations at you that are better suited for a different kind of game. The amount of trial ‘n error in the second loop kind of sours the whole thing, and although the game is fun to be played for speed, often it just doesn’t let you.

The new DLC is good. It shows some glimpses of Doom Eternal's true potential whereas the main campaign was tame in comparison, the same way that Plutonia started going all out with the (new) enemies in Doom 2. Here you start fully upgraded, so there are no RPG systems and trawling through pause menus to fuck with the pacing. You don't get the Crucible either (you left it in the Icon of Simp's head at the end of the base campaign), so now you have to actually engage with Archviles and Tyrants in earnest instead of using your delete button (although the BFG still exists and the Ice Bomb and Lock-on Burst deletes them about as easily, but oh well).

The first level in the DLC, the UAC Oil Rig, is the most straightforward of the bunch, and mostly exists to serve as a warm-up for those who haven't played DE in a while. The encounters here start to ask much more out of you: Cyber-Mancubi start appearing as often as regular Mancubi, Barons start appearing on the regular, Carcasses and Shieldguys feel like they are in every encounter. Superheavies just start appearing even in the small corridors inbetween the arenas. But more importantly, the arenas get a lot more cramped. You don't get as much room to run/dash circles around enemies, environmental hazards such as electrified floors appear more frequently, and heavy demons are able to more effectively pressure you now that you have less space to work with. Hell, the second Marauder fight in this level takes place in a janitor closet. A trend that will be more apparent in the later levels is that the outer rims of the arena now tend to provide less sightlines on the center of the arena (where most of the enemies and fodder are). So whereas in the base campaign you could often peck away at enemies from the outer rims of the arena, now you have to move towards the center if you want to find fodder to GK/Chainsaw and don't want to deal with a surprise Hell Knight around the corner.

There is only one new enemy type introduced in this level (not counting the shark) in the form of the Turret. It's an Ambient Enemy that serves to be a nuisance, but not necessarily in a good way. Much like the Tentacles you can only damage it when it pops up, and it pops down when you hit it/when you're too close to it/when you look at it too long. It takes at least two high-power shots to kill (like a Precision Bolt or a Ballista shot), so you'll inevitably be forced to wait for it to pop back up. The underlying idea behind this design is that because the Turret itself isn't a major threat and because you usually have ten other more threatening demons to worry about, you're better off focusing your attention on them instead of waiting for this lowly Turret to pop back up. But usually you can find a safe moment where you can focus on the Turret, and eventually can do nothing but wait to kill it, which isn't very engaging. It would be nice if there was a way to immediately bait them into popping up, or if they could be instantly destroyed with a Blood Punch regardless of their state.

One rather annoying thing about this level is the underwater swimming sections, which are just a waste of time and involve even less player interaction than the platforming sections. Doomguy's oxygen is suddenly limited now (lol) and you have to get a wetsuit to breathe underwater, which is just a repurposed radsuit. At least the radsuit offered interesting possibilities by creating a limit to how long you could stay on acid floors without taking damage (even though the base campaign never really tried to play more with this idea in big encounters), but the wetsuit has no such flexibility unless underwater combat ever becomes a thing.

The second level, the Blood Swamps, is where shit gets real. First you get these plants everywhere that detonate after a second or two if you get near them, and leave behind some acid on the floor that damages and slows you down; making you stay airborne and move around more. The second is that there's now cloaked Whiplashes and GIANT Tentacles. Whiplashes aren't as threatening as they were at first if you know how to quickswap a little, so cloaking them so they can sneak into your face does help make them more threatening. Giant Tentacles are just scaled-up Tentacles, but it does fill an extra role in the bestiary by being able to prevent you from safely approaching a much larger area. The third is gimmicks, lots of gimmicks. And That's A Good Thing! I've always argued that nuDoom and Eternal should have employed way more gimmicks for their arenas, because it allows arenas to be more distinct. The new Doom games cannot create variety through different monster placement and level layout to the same extent that the old Doom games could, because the enemy AI in the new Dooms is simply too chaotic and unpredictable to create handcrafted levels around without the enemies doing something you never intended. In old Doom the levels had to compensate for the simple AI, and in the new Dooms it's sort of the other way around. Obviously the arenas in the new Doom games aren't literally copypasted. Elements like heavy demon placement, how much fodder demons there are to farm resources off, and the layout of the arena do affect how you play, but not necessarily in a noticeable way. If you can get by in an arena fight using roughly the same strategy of the last arena, it can't help but feel repetitive.

But here you've got gimmicks that affect how you have to strategize on a macro-level. So you get fog that doesn't let you see more than five feet ahead of you, making long-range weapons unreliable and having you try and get the high ground (by Meathook-jumping) so you can see clearly above the fog, all while the high ground is littered with the aforementioned plants. So you get a section that passively damages you unless you stay in the protective bubble of a wolf familiar, all while enemies come from every direction to invade your tiny safe space, especially demons like Shieldguys, Pinkies and Barons that are a massive pain to deal with in close quarters. There is also a section with a Buff Totem that is locked until you kill a buffed Marauder. I honestly wish arenas would more regularly use Buff Totems in this fashion where you are forced to fight buffed enemies, instead of how they're normally used, where on your first try you ignore all the enemies and are looking around the arena to find the damn thing, and on subsequent attempts you just beeline towards wherever the Buff Totem is.

The biggest gamechanger so far is the Spirit. It's the Summoner from nuDoom, except now it possesses enemies, which: gives them massive damage resistances, makes them immune to any kind of faltering or Ice Bombs, buffs their movement and attack speed, and removes their weak points. What's great about Spirits is how they allow the entire enemy roster to be recontextualized into essentially new enemies. Possessed Arachnotrons force you to deal with their turret and make you rely more on the arena layout to break line of sight and avoid having to play Touhou with it. Possessed Hell Knights and Barons of Hell will simply deal unavoidable damage if you do not keep your distance at all times. Possessed Tyrants and Pain Elementals are the closest thing DE has to a Chaingunner. Fighting these makes you realize just how easy you had it up until now by being able to control enemies with falters and destroying their weak points, so enemies that can ignore all of your bullshit really pushes you to improve your fundamentals, and allows other nuisance enemies like Carcasses and Shieldguys to be even more relevant threats.

The only way to kill a Spirit is to kill its host and then lock it down with the Microwave Beam. If you don't kill it in time, it will possess another nearby enemy and make you go through the same dance all over again. Having an enemy only be killable with one weapon is particular is certainly controversial, especially if it's the weapon that most considered to be the worst in the game, but I think in this case it is a net positive and not just a matter of color-coding to force variety. While you use the Microwave Beam you are slowed down, which makes you extra vulnerable to enemies around you--especially melee-focused enemies. This forces you to ask whether finishing off the possessed demon in this time and position is a good idea, and whether you shouldn't first create a situation where you can take care of the Spirit without getting interrupted. The other aspect is that it makes you be more mindful of your cell ammo in particular, because by the time the Spirit pops up you want to have enough juice in the can to take care of it in one cycle before it possesses something else and makes you go through the whole dance again. So now you have to be more careful about using the Ballista in your quickswap combos. These dynamics wouldn't be as present if you could just shoot down the Spirit with any weapon while being able to move freely and not having to worry as much about ammo. Paradoxically, limiting you to one weapon in this case results in more interesting gameplay than if you could use anything.

However, I do have one issue with this implementation of Spirits, which is that it puts a ceiling on how many possessed enemies you could reasonably deal with at once. Enemies being able to spawn pre-possessed allows for way more variation in level design, but because you have to make yourself vulnerable with the Microwave Beam to kill the Spirits, you can only have so many possessed enemies at once before things become bullshit overwhelming, whereas without the need to microwave Spirits the level designers could be a lot more flexible in this regard. And because you can only have so many Spirits at once, you probably don't want to waste them on fodder demons, even though there is some potential in having to fight larger groups of possessed fodder demons.

The third level, The Holt, is less overtly gimmicky, but it still has enough in terms of unorthodox surprises and set-ups to keep things fresh, such as an arena interspersed with pylons that damage you if you touch them, an arena where the floor is lava and you're surrounded by flying enemies, and a fight against a possessed Tyrant which is a MAJOR pain since you only get 1 (one) respawning fodder enemy to work with. That's a common theme with The Holt, where a large part of the difficulty stems that there's way less fodder spawns for you to farm resources off, as opposed to the UAC Oil Rig where fodder would often clump together for you to easily ignite and detonate into a flaming ball of +100 armor. It means you can't rely on your generic fallback strategies as much and have to be more mindful of doing unnecessarily risky shit. The lack of fodder to Chainsaw for ammo is compensated for with the presence of Makyr Drones. Speaking of, on launch shooting their head wouldn't drop any health, but only ammo. But id later "fixed" this to drop both. I find this unfortunate, because it does away with the dynamics of 'do I headshot them for ammo or do I set up a Glory Kill for health' and keeping them alive as floating ammo packs for when you really need it, whereas in a level with a draught of fodder and health items, going for a Makyr Drone's head is not even a question.

This level also introduces the Blood Makyr, which is basically a Turret that can fly around, except it fires damaging AoE zones that also slow you down, so it's more of a relevant threat. It's invulnerable to everything until it attacks, so damaging it again involves more waiting. At least it dies in one shot to the head instead of two. Like I said before, I could tolerate them more if there was a way to sidestep their immunity by playing proactively, such as being able to bait them into dropping their guard (f.e. by deploying a mod that slows you down like Mobile Turret or Auto-Fire and then quickswapping to a weapon that can oneshot them) or by hitting them with a fully charged Destroyer Blade or something. That said, I do like having a supporting enemy that you simply cannot swat away in the middle of a fight while there's more threatening enemies around. I just wish dealing with it wasn't largely outside the player's control.

The boss fight against Samur is the best in the game, the best in the franchise, and honestly one of the best of the genre (an admittedly low bar), for it is one of the few FPS bosses I can describe with full confidence as being truly... average. What makes it so average is that it actually tests you on your mastery over the core gameplay instead of forcing a different and more limited playstyle on you at the eleventh hour. So the boss fight heavily relies on spawning in regular demons to pressure you from multiple directions and lock you in, and the boss actually challenges your aim by constantly zipping around every which way. The constant teleporting also has the added benefit on making the Lock-on Burst unreliable, so you can't rely on that crutch for this fight. This is in stark contrast to the Khan Makyr fight where you could just spam Lock-on Burst or your other favourite weapon at a static target, the waiting game that is the Gladiator fight, or the clusterfuck that is the Icon of Sin. That said, the first three phases of the fight are a total doozy.

The first phase doesn't have many heavy adds (or many adds at all) to keep you on your toes, and Samur isn't that big of a threat himself with his easily avoidable projectile spread, so you can get away with just focusing down Samur for most of the fight. Samur does spawn Eyes that move in a fixed path and deal damage if you're nearby, which are neat and make focusing down Samur a bit more complicated, but unfortunately he only spawns these when you get him down to about 50% health, so you won't notice their presence that much for this phase. The second phase has Samur become invincible and make you fight a Possessed Mancubus and Hell Knight at once, but this phase is hamstrung by the fact that there's a pillar in the middle of the arena which you can use to break line of sight between you and the Possessed Mancubus while you go deal with the Possessed Hell Knight first, so you're not even really fighting both at once. The third phase certainly has the setup to be good, the problem is that the Cacodemons don't spawn in at a fast enough rate/high enough amount to really put pressure on the limited amount of space you now have.

The fourth phase is when things actually start getting good. It's a repeat of the first phase, except now you have lasers slowly combing over the arena to give you a macro-level threat to keep in mind, there's a constantly respawning Blood Makyr to complicate things further, and the new layout of the arena is more vertical in a way that no longer gives you a clear oversight over the whole arena, which makes getting a line of sight on a speedy Samur way more difficult. Because of the raised platforms you also have less space to deal with Samur's attacks without falling to the bottom where the Blood Makyr and the rest of the adds are. The fifth phase now has you deal with a Possessed Pain Elemental and Possessed Dread Knight on top of a Blood Makyr, which is something that cost me a good half hour to beat. You really have to try this without crutches like superweapons or the Lock-on Burst to appreciate how intense this phase can get. A Possessed Pain Elemental is ridiculously accurate while the Dread Knight is being ridiculously aggressive, and all the while you're trying to find an opportunity where you can take care of the Spirit without the other Possessed enemy interfering. It really shows the potential of having to deal with multiple Possessed enemies, but I suppose we'll see more of that in TAG2.

I suppose having to predominantly fight minions in a boss fight instead of the boss itself may not be thematically satisfying, but for a game that's all about fighting multiple enemies at once it is only logical to incorporate this into your boss design. That said, I would have preferred there to be one last phase where you fight against Samur himself instead of more minions.

Overall, the DLC was great and highlights that there's still plenty of potential to be had in Doom Eternal's formula. I'm looking forward to TAG 2.