the basic problem with Dusk is that it does little to improve upon the games it is a homage to. this wouldn't be a problem if classic first-person shooters were ever anything more than mediocre, but they aren't: Doom, Quake, Half-Life, etc. are all ultimately boring; bland repetition of geometry intended primarily as arenas for combat which actually is as simple as "shooting it until it dies" with a requirement for spatial awareness etc. rarely relevant -- but mostly you'll just be circle-strafing. it's "mindless fun", the worst kind of "fun". it's only with more experimental action-adventure games like System Shock and Deus Ex -- "immersive sims" -- and more demanding character action-inspired shooters like ULTRAKILL and Doom Eternal that the genre becomes more than a slightly more sophisticated version of Cookie Clicker.

there seems to be little thought to game-mechanical design in every aspect of the game; there are in most scenarios too many weapons which overlap too much in niche -- a classic of this genre, there are several redundant and trivial enemy types, level design is often bewilderingly poor -- often literally just being huge open spaces with spammed enemies -- and borders on the quality of something like Doom II's more infamous maps, bosses are universally too easy and uninteresting, the porn-narrative cheese of Doom et al. is mimicked with little thought, etc. the guiding principle for the game's development seems to of been "wouldn't this be cool" more than anything else.

there is one truly good level in this game, the penultimate one, and it's the best level in the game precisely because it's by far the most difficult, which makes me think that the game's real issue is that it's just far too easy (and yes, I played on Cero Miedo), never demanding too much of you or pushing you to form evermore synaptic connections; it's far too comfortable, and because of that it's largely boring.

Reviewed on Feb 02, 2024


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2 months ago

filtered