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by blackwater 02/21/2023, 12:45am PST |
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Final thoughts
The design sensibility is more Doom than Quake, I think. There are the infamous "monster closets" that open up to surprise you with monsters when you go to a new area or pick up a certain item. And just like in Doom, the player moves extremely fast compared to the enemies. This makes circle strafing a great strategy. Levels usually involve picking up three keycards -- red, yellow, and blue -- to open up the corresponding doors.
It's not all Doom, though. Like I said before, you have mouselook and a graphical engine that handles elevations much better than Doom's. (I played with auto-aim off, of course, as all PC users should.) Like in Quake, you have jumping pads that bounce you high up into the air. Like in Half-Life, you can lift objects and stand on them. Including, yes, crates. Oh, and there's a rare powerup that turns the game into superhot for a while.
Above all, the game is fun. It's like they just cut out all the things that weren't fun, like fall damage or reloading. Friendly fire is always on for enemies and they attack each other all the time if you get them in the right situation. Love it.
The level design is great. A few levels stand out to me: the weird floating city thing, "New Babylon." The sewer level that's a giant machine full of meat. The weird level where you're fighting waves of enemies and everything is transparent. The level where you only get melee weapons for a while.
There are a lot of "secrets," and how many of them you find is tracked, just like in Doom. I didn't really try hard to find anything but occassionally something would come up. One secret I found was just a bathroom. I don't know what was up with that.
The plot is about an evil cult. None of the plot beats are really surprising, but they nailed the atmosphere. In particular, the disembodied voice periodically taunting you was a nice touch. Now that I think about it, the voice acting and sound design was pretty good in general.
Jonesy would like this one because it allows save-anywhere. And I'll be honest, I did save scum a bit, mostly avoid replaying hard parts too often. However, playing on the middle difficult, it wasn't TOO hard. Just keep in mind that you are a very fast-moving glass cannon.
Annoyances: the game really likes to "break your flashlight," supposedly because you fell down a hole. And then you don't get a new one until much later in the level. The very, very dark level. Seriously, this happens like 4 times in the game.
Anyway, if you like boomer shooters, you should play this! |
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