i was pretty blown away right off the bat by this game's speed, scope and scale. i mean fuck - skydiving past anti air lasers in the second mission? destroying a fleet of battleships shortly after?? being able to destroy a gen 1 AC by flicking it??? shit's crazy!!!

it was kinda surprising how fast-moving the narrative was in general. the foreshadowing towards a grand scale war over a clearly dangerous resource, the rising value of the player as a mercenary - leveling a corporation's entire base of operations halfway through the game? imagine my shock!

...when the following mission ended with credits

that's it? that's armored core 4?! this game is like 30 seconds long and hardly anything actually happens in it!! what the fuck?? this is effectively a prologue and a tech demo. i mean, don't get me wrong - it's a cool tech demo and it's really fun while it lasts - but holy shit is it brief and anticlimactic

anyway. nice appetizer. some of the hard missions were cool too i guess. fuck that 4v1. i'll be getting to for answer now

Hexen II understands 3d exploration like no other game. you zoom through enemies relatively quickly compared to the amount of time you spend exploring the areas that then become completely empty for the rest of the pretty long chapters, especially when compared to its contemporaries. it's uncanny and reflects the state of the game's reality at that point. impressive how even though every chapter reflects that feeling, Blackmarsh is still the most unnerving. empty churches, stores, and houses, all of which you can (and often need to) enter to search for a piece of the convoluted puzzles. you rid the area of enemies, but the people who lived there won't come back until you get rid of Eidolon.

having finished it alone and in coop, i noticed that both approaches still work in the atmosphere's favor. looking through areas with friends makes exploring Hexen II feel almost archaeological. your group starts piecing together structures and their meanings to the people who used to live there, and every time someone finds an item, a discussion as to what it means follows it. you need to understand what it does/why you need it in order to know where to place it somewhere.

the different classes also contribute to that feeling. the Necromancer is there to regain his status as the most fearful ruler and the Assassin is there for glory, while the Crusader had to abandon his monastery to fight and the Paladin has nowhere else to look after the slaughter of his village. even though half of these characters are there for selfish reasons, all four still work together to restore the world. the game doesn't make an effort to connect them as allies explicitly but the emergent cooperation between players achieves the same effect.

i don't think i'll ever find another game with such strong and understated direction choices. it's harsh, cold, and forlorn - but also leaves space for the warmth of perseverance.

this seems like it's made specifically for the weirdos who liked the more sparse and offputting aspects of the original Quake. you get way more rockets than rifle rounds, and even though there are more than 50 enemy types, most of what you face are the main enemy archetypes from Quake. its main strength is mixing this very american design philosophy with a particularly culturally specific representation of 80s czechoslovakia (mainly in the architecture), which makes for a strange mix.

those old "slavjank" titles are usually focused on verisimilitude - even if it's oddly represented by the mechanics or structure - while the Quake formula begs for maximum abstraction. Hrot tries playing both sides, but ends up being its own perplexing middle ground. at least it's an interesting conflict to see being wrestled with throughout the 3 episodes, which become gradually more lost until the last few levels from the 3rd episode transform into small, sepia dollhouse arenas.