I can't help but feeling that the "doom clone" tag (Which is pretty much present in most of the comments here and every entry on this game) seems to be a bit unfair here. I think it's pretty accurate to say that almost every game in history is based upon an already existing engine which they licensed. Heretic does many things to differentiate itself from Doom. It really tries to reach authenticity while being loyal to the then rising FPS genre. So the doom-clone tag may be proper just for historical purposes (basically a time where almost every FPS was built on the Doom engine) but in other senses it can be misleading.
In a time where the medieval fantasy tropes in video-games where mostly asociated to the RPG genre (Games like Catacombs might have been designed in first person but they were still RPG games), Heretic was probably the first to transport all that background to a fast-paced first person shooter. That alone makes Heretic a very relevant game. But not just that, because i think it's actually succesful in what it tries to do.
Of course, the resemblance to Doom in level design, weapons and enemies is hard to be ignored. Still, they are all well done. The level design is in my opinion very well handled, the difficulty progression is pretty stable and logic all the time. Is only in some levels from the third episode that you might find like the game has already shown you everything it could.
Enemys are really fun to deal with, and i actually haven't found a really annoying or bad designed enemy like you could find in Doom (Pain elementals and Lost Souls comes to mind, since they were not really challenging, just simply annoying). The weapons are pretty much ok, i recognise it's not among the best of the genre, but they are still fine.
This game also introduced the possibility of looking up and down, and also the new inventory system that would later be used in many FPS: This time you can stock every item you find without neccesarily activating them. So you can save them and use them strategically in the moments you need. Some of them are classics: Invulnerability, invisibility, health potions, berserk. And there are some innovative ones, like the one that allows you to fly over the map, and the ones that upgrades your weapons. This one is probably the best since it really improves the weapons that are not so good.
Also, visuals are very nice and colourful, and the soundtrack definitely kicks ass.
This review stands for the original version of Heretic containing only three episodes. I have the feeling that the two episodes added in the "Shadow of the serpent Riders" version might probably stretch the game too much, and for bad. The three original episodes are just fine, and you know what they say: good things, when short, are twice as good.
In a time where the medieval fantasy tropes in video-games where mostly asociated to the RPG genre (Games like Catacombs might have been designed in first person but they were still RPG games), Heretic was probably the first to transport all that background to a fast-paced first person shooter. That alone makes Heretic a very relevant game. But not just that, because i think it's actually succesful in what it tries to do.
Of course, the resemblance to Doom in level design, weapons and enemies is hard to be ignored. Still, they are all well done. The level design is in my opinion very well handled, the difficulty progression is pretty stable and logic all the time. Is only in some levels from the third episode that you might find like the game has already shown you everything it could.
Enemys are really fun to deal with, and i actually haven't found a really annoying or bad designed enemy like you could find in Doom (Pain elementals and Lost Souls comes to mind, since they were not really challenging, just simply annoying). The weapons are pretty much ok, i recognise it's not among the best of the genre, but they are still fine.
This game also introduced the possibility of looking up and down, and also the new inventory system that would later be used in many FPS: This time you can stock every item you find without neccesarily activating them. So you can save them and use them strategically in the moments you need. Some of them are classics: Invulnerability, invisibility, health potions, berserk. And there are some innovative ones, like the one that allows you to fly over the map, and the ones that upgrades your weapons. This one is probably the best since it really improves the weapons that are not so good.
Also, visuals are very nice and colourful, and the soundtrack definitely kicks ass.
This review stands for the original version of Heretic containing only three episodes. I have the feeling that the two episodes added in the "Shadow of the serpent Riders" version might probably stretch the game too much, and for bad. The three original episodes are just fine, and you know what they say: good things, when short, are twice as good.