Not one of the best retro-style shooters I’ve ever played but certainly a fun ride I didn’t mind sticking through to the end. The weapon toolbox is really sick and it gives you a bunch of options for entering the action sections with fervor. The game on Hardcore provided a pretty sufficient challenge that never forced me into blatant savescumming but still kept me closely monitoring my vitals and ammo. All of the levels are pretty big, reflected in their pretty beefy par times. The 10 maps end up feeling quite lengthy, and my first playthrough on Hardcore took me about 13 hours. It doesn’t string together as much gunplay as a lot of its contemporaries and inspirations, because there’s definitely more of a focus on exploration here, but the combat sections usually work pretty well, even when the game kinda blatantly locks you in a room with 60 enemies with a battle soundtrack. There’s even a pretty passable stealth mechanic that works well, even though I didn’t find myself using it pretty much at all.
The “puzzles” are usually fine; If you find yourself unsure what to do with a quest item you have, the best thing to do is just take it to a place you can’t get through. If you get in a routine of this, you barely have to think about what you’re doing in the first place. There’s only one time in the game I had to find myself looking up a walkthrough to find a what-seems-like invisible book sticking out on a wall revealing a switch for a door, and I’m glad the game never got that stupid about a solution ever again.
I feel like the artstyle and graphics really miss the mark here, it feels like a chaotic mess of the usual GZdoom big-polygon 3D environments which are still nice, and even beautiful at times, mixed with raw and unpixelated art that seems like it’s retrieved from the most mediocre annals of D&D portrait DeviantArt, and I think that dissonance really fucks things up the most for me here. It’s not an ugly game per se, but one that just has me routinely remembering “oh yeah, I’m just looking at stringed-together smoke and mirrors right now, and not having an immersive experience”. The art misses a lot of what makes its influences so timeless, because I can look at the models for enemies from Doom and see the beautiful miniatures that were made for the enemies, but as for this, the art style seems to have some confusion between low effort and low game engine capabilities. A great modern example of the retro look with amazing visuals is Ion Fury, which has some absolutely incredible art direction. The way-too-horny official art I’ve seen for the game’s protagonist Zan (who is an okay protagonist, also) hardly has any connection with her borderline lazy artwork in game when you can see yourself in mirrors.
This is unnaturally lore-heavy for this type of game, and while I thought the story at hand was pretty interesting with its lite-D&D inspiration, the amount of reading the game asks me to do between action sections really gets rough, and when the game actually wants to stop and show me the “story”, the pacing just plummets. I am just really sick and tired of these “trip” sections that Far Cry started to popularize, where the protagonist enters some trippy sequences after coming into contact with drugs, or hitting their head, or whatever, you know what I’m talking about…while this isn’t the 100% entirety of the Errant Signal level, it’s still a majority of it and it just becomes a slog with the kinda unfitting (while still good) music and the megaton of unpaced exposition, even though it’s chased with a pretty fun boss battle.
The music is…interesting. It’s a mix of one part original music created by Akhzul that goes for either a dark ambient route for the quieter-exploration parts of the game or a nu-metal battle triumph, and then one part licensed OST from, among other things, Unreal. Even though I wasn’t initially complaining, it was quite weird to hear those iconic Alexander Brandon/Michiel van den Bos synths here. I’m not fully against this kind of usage, but it is a good bit weird when the context of the music hasn’t really been changed that much at all. It’s like skipping the whole step of wearing your influences on your sleeve, and just being fully clothed in them instead. Besides this, I really don’t think the licensed electronic stuff fits at all, and I think Zan’s revenge story is much better suited to the dark distorted tones that Akhzul brings to the table.
The “puzzles” are usually fine; If you find yourself unsure what to do with a quest item you have, the best thing to do is just take it to a place you can’t get through. If you get in a routine of this, you barely have to think about what you’re doing in the first place. There’s only one time in the game I had to find myself looking up a walkthrough to find a what-seems-like invisible book sticking out on a wall revealing a switch for a door, and I’m glad the game never got that stupid about a solution ever again.
I feel like the artstyle and graphics really miss the mark here, it feels like a chaotic mess of the usual GZdoom big-polygon 3D environments which are still nice, and even beautiful at times, mixed with raw and unpixelated art that seems like it’s retrieved from the most mediocre annals of D&D portrait DeviantArt, and I think that dissonance really fucks things up the most for me here. It’s not an ugly game per se, but one that just has me routinely remembering “oh yeah, I’m just looking at stringed-together smoke and mirrors right now, and not having an immersive experience”. The art misses a lot of what makes its influences so timeless, because I can look at the models for enemies from Doom and see the beautiful miniatures that were made for the enemies, but as for this, the art style seems to have some confusion between low effort and low game engine capabilities. A great modern example of the retro look with amazing visuals is Ion Fury, which has some absolutely incredible art direction. The way-too-horny official art I’ve seen for the game’s protagonist Zan (who is an okay protagonist, also) hardly has any connection with her borderline lazy artwork in game when you can see yourself in mirrors.
This is unnaturally lore-heavy for this type of game, and while I thought the story at hand was pretty interesting with its lite-D&D inspiration, the amount of reading the game asks me to do between action sections really gets rough, and when the game actually wants to stop and show me the “story”, the pacing just plummets. I am just really sick and tired of these “trip” sections that Far Cry started to popularize, where the protagonist enters some trippy sequences after coming into contact with drugs, or hitting their head, or whatever, you know what I’m talking about…while this isn’t the 100% entirety of the Errant Signal level, it’s still a majority of it and it just becomes a slog with the kinda unfitting (while still good) music and the megaton of unpaced exposition, even though it’s chased with a pretty fun boss battle.
The music is…interesting. It’s a mix of one part original music created by Akhzul that goes for either a dark ambient route for the quieter-exploration parts of the game or a nu-metal battle triumph, and then one part licensed OST from, among other things, Unreal. Even though I wasn’t initially complaining, it was quite weird to hear those iconic Alexander Brandon/Michiel van den Bos synths here. I’m not fully against this kind of usage, but it is a good bit weird when the context of the music hasn’t really been changed that much at all. It’s like skipping the whole step of wearing your influences on your sleeve, and just being fully clothed in them instead. Besides this, I really don’t think the licensed electronic stuff fits at all, and I think Zan’s revenge story is much better suited to the dark distorted tones that Akhzul brings to the table.