Out of all the retro/throwback/boomer shooters I’ve played, Viscerafest is easily the most mediocre title. It combines all the most frustrating elements from other first person shooters and crams them into one early access mess.
For a game labelled a “shooter” it does a great job giving you barely any ammo to shoot things. There’s nothing “difficult” or “hardcore” about limiting the player’s ability to use their weapons. What the game expects you to do is damage enemies with your guns and then finish them off with your punch. If you don’t strictly play this way then you will be scraping by for ammo during most of the levels. Not to mention that these enemies hit hard and getting close to them for more than a second is suicide since they attack frequently.
The saving system in this game also sucks. Just like in Wrath: Aeon of Ruin, you need to collect a specific item to be able to save, and it sucked in that game too. It is one of the worst ways to implement quicksaving and I have no idea why it is used at all, nobody has said “I wish my ability to quicksave was limited by an item”.
Now we get onto the presentation. Other retro shooters released in the last few years that use sprites put a lot of effort into their sprite-work, with Ion Fury having fantastic enemy and weapon sprites. Meanwhile the sprite-work in Viscerafest looks ugly with so many flat colours and the weapon sprites look average all around.
Finally, we have easily the most annoying FPS protagonist I have ever had the misfortune of playing as. You play as Caroline who sounds like a 16 year old girl that’s arguing back to her parents. Her one liners range from cringe (and not the funny kind either) to edgy as hell to straight up taken from other characters but made worse with her annoying voice. Her voice is just so obnoxious I legitimately played the rest of the game muted while listening to music. It goes to show that making an FPS protagonist that cracks a lot of one liners are a difficult art to master and Viscerafest is a prime example of how to not make one. It boggles my mind how the Viscerafest dev has the audacity to say that the Shadow Warrior reboot Lo Wang has crappy jokes when they created this awful creature known as Caroline who spits out school playground insults.
The only positives this game has going for it is its soundtrack, frequently good levels, the funny premise of the whole plot and satisfying gore effects which is the only aspect of your weapons which stop them from feeling like water pistols.
Overall, Viscerafest is an early access retro shooter that fails to be fun and feels more like an FPS Hotline Miami but 100x more frustrating with a protagonist that you’ll wish would die in the game’s ending just so you don’t have to listen to her again. It sucks because the core gameplay is there and if it could be tweaked a bit more balance-wise, it would be actually fun. Because at the moment if you start a level with little health or ammo, you're basically screwed. Go play Dusk, Amid Evil and Quake 2 if you want some good shooters, not only because they are significantly better games, but because the Viscerafest dev either thinks these three games are average or terrible.
For a game labelled a “shooter” it does a great job giving you barely any ammo to shoot things. There’s nothing “difficult” or “hardcore” about limiting the player’s ability to use their weapons. What the game expects you to do is damage enemies with your guns and then finish them off with your punch. If you don’t strictly play this way then you will be scraping by for ammo during most of the levels. Not to mention that these enemies hit hard and getting close to them for more than a second is suicide since they attack frequently.
The saving system in this game also sucks. Just like in Wrath: Aeon of Ruin, you need to collect a specific item to be able to save, and it sucked in that game too. It is one of the worst ways to implement quicksaving and I have no idea why it is used at all, nobody has said “I wish my ability to quicksave was limited by an item”.
Now we get onto the presentation. Other retro shooters released in the last few years that use sprites put a lot of effort into their sprite-work, with Ion Fury having fantastic enemy and weapon sprites. Meanwhile the sprite-work in Viscerafest looks ugly with so many flat colours and the weapon sprites look average all around.
Finally, we have easily the most annoying FPS protagonist I have ever had the misfortune of playing as. You play as Caroline who sounds like a 16 year old girl that’s arguing back to her parents. Her one liners range from cringe (and not the funny kind either) to edgy as hell to straight up taken from other characters but made worse with her annoying voice. Her voice is just so obnoxious I legitimately played the rest of the game muted while listening to music. It goes to show that making an FPS protagonist that cracks a lot of one liners are a difficult art to master and Viscerafest is a prime example of how to not make one. It boggles my mind how the Viscerafest dev has the audacity to say that the Shadow Warrior reboot Lo Wang has crappy jokes when they created this awful creature known as Caroline who spits out school playground insults.
The only positives this game has going for it is its soundtrack, frequently good levels, the funny premise of the whole plot and satisfying gore effects which is the only aspect of your weapons which stop them from feeling like water pistols.
Overall, Viscerafest is an early access retro shooter that fails to be fun and feels more like an FPS Hotline Miami but 100x more frustrating with a protagonist that you’ll wish would die in the game’s ending just so you don’t have to listen to her again. It sucks because the core gameplay is there and if it could be tweaked a bit more balance-wise, it would be actually fun. Because at the moment if you start a level with little health or ammo, you're basically screwed. Go play Dusk, Amid Evil and Quake 2 if you want some good shooters, not only because they are significantly better games, but because the Viscerafest dev either thinks these three games are average or terrible.