Just heard about this, looks pretty damn good, love the pixely level of detail.
It has quiet moments. Levels are not large, but often there’s some back tracking. Sometimes enemies are spawned in cleared areas in response to e.g. switch pushing. But that hasn’t been the norm so far in the 10 levels I have played (I am at the first world boss, which is mission 11). Sometimes rooms only contain a few monsters. I feel like I find myself in unoccupied hallways as often as not.
I am playing on whatever the lowest un-limited lives difficulty is. I have died a few times (not counting twice on the world 1 boss). The last block of levels is 4 straight which was mildly annoying. It took me 30+ minutes to clear them (maybe closer to 40) as I was diligently looking for secrets and treasure in every nook and cranny.
Do I like the mechanic? No, it’s dumb. But it hasn’t caused any frustration thus far.
This is true. All the best games have extraordinary amounts of Polish.
This pleased me quite a lot.
World 3 and it’s getting a bit tedious to have to run the 4-map gauntlet at the end of each world. I don’t find that low health situations (I was pretty desperate over the final two maps, not sure where it all went wrong) - I had my first real trouble since the very beginning in the world 3 final stages - combined with the lack of save points makes for a good gameplay tension. Yes, I am on easy so I could have just restarted the level but I don’t want to do that. Especially given that I find the levels are increasingly harder to navigate. The last few on world 3 have been extremely samey (losing some of the more interesting variation from previous levels on this world and other worlds).
The automap is garbage. It doesn’t show you anything but room outline and even that isn’t always a good guide (or it’s a bug, but several times I have looked up to see myself in the dark spots - and this wasn’t when finding a secret mind). So occasionally I have to wander looking for that [color] door, which doesn’t show up on the map. Worse, there’s no larger map and the map is stuck in the top left of the screen and can’t be changed. I am just going to brazenly assume the devs are left-eye dominant or something but this is actually causing me physical discomfort.
Also, the game is really fucking dark (in many levels, not all). There’s a light spell that doesn’t use mana but you cannot use it and shoot at the same time. I’ve played with available graphics settings and all I’ve managed to do is make it “just shy of hurting my eyes” at typical brightness but then secrets and the light spell get too bright.
It’s still fun, but I feel eye strain (which is unusual for me) having to run through 3 and 4 level gauntlets.
That is very strange. I’m trying to think of a game that I have played that didn’t have the map in the upper right. All that comes to mind is X Wing which had the forward radar on the right and the rear radar on the left.
It’s a flawed game. From what I’ve played:
-It doesn’t support standard Windows resolutions. They are hardcoded, and the biggest one is 1080p.
-The performance isn’t perfect, which what I would expect from a game of this type. It’s 60 fps, but there are some less smooth moments.
-The minimap is horrible. Doom already did it better in 1993. Exactly, it isn’t an ‘automap’ like in Doom which draws the visited areas, its’ already all there, so you can’t know to where you should advance, nor it shows the doors. And I’m in the early levels and the maps are already labyrinthine.
-The game is strangely retro. Too much, imo. What am I talking about? Well, the game seems to take inspiration from Wolf3d, almost more than from Doom or Heretic. Maps are totally orthogonal, and mostly dull. Again, when a 1993 had more advancing mapping than your game… that’s retro for retro’s sake, it doesn’t enhance the gameplay. Well, I can imagine it made his map design much easier for the dev.
-The game can be somewhat ugly. The mix of retro maps with repetitive textures and pixel art, and on top of that having ‘modern’ effects like bloom, reflections some f/x like fire that look from a game 15 years newer, it all makes it look incoherent and a bit a mess.
-Map design, apart from being dull given the excess of square rooms and square corridors, abuse of narrow corridors that hurt the gameplay. It also has some dark levels that are put there I guess so the light spell isn’t worthless. The problem is that it hurts the pace of the game, he should have removed the damn spell and make the game play better.
-Of course the save system can die in a fire.
-Somehow people try to do thing differently from the classic, and it always bite them in the back. They don’t have a sprint key, they have a ‘always run’ button toggle. Doom solution was better.
-Sound mixing could be improved, ghouls growl for example is too low, it can be hard to notice they are at your back.
-Weapon priority could improve. When you spent all the ammo of a weapon, you automatically switch to the dagger, the weakest weapon, despite having several weapons with ammunition. It’s pretty funny as a minimum it could switch to the other melee weapon, the axes, which packs a punch.
-The game isn’t very hard, I finished the first world and the first level of the second world without dying once, at medium difficulty. Maybe I should have picked the Hard difficulty.
What it does well?
-Weapons: It has a nice variety thanks to the mix of magic and firearms, they have good gunplay. Upgrades are cool for replayability…
-Enemies are well animated, better than many games from the 90s.
-Another annoyances I found is a strange effect where things are darker when you get closer to them, as unintuitive as it sounds. And speaking of darkness, I had to increase the brightness to maximum to play the damn game in some of the Egypt levels, whyyy he thought that was a good choice, ffs.
-The game is on the easy side, until the fourth world I hadn’t any problems. Which is also strange, you would think this type of game is designed for old school shooter fans, veterans at this point.
-And of course, the game doesn’t allow to change difficulty in any way whatsoever. Yay.
-Although even if I could change it, I’m not sure if I would do it, the hardcore difficulty sounds horrible: single life permadeath, double damage received, faster monsters. That’s going to the other extreme of difficulty.
-And you can’t have several profiles/games in progress, ‘new game’ options overwrites the current one.
Man, it’s a pity the game isn’t better in other areas, as it makes a good job with the weapons. Some of them are pretty sick.
Also, it has a good variety with five different worlds (Antartica, Ancient Egypt, hightech city, etc), and each one has unique enemies. .
Big thanks to @vinraith for the gift of this game.
1st Impressions:
Woah, all objects face towards you no matter which way you look at them? This is a kind of 2D retro I’m not used to. This is going retro farther than I needed it to go! :)
You can’t control anything in the main menu with the controller, so you have to put the controller down and use the mouse until you get to the actual game.
When you’re in the game, by default there’s no cross-hairs, so when i picked up a projectile weapon, I wasted all my ammo by missing all my shots because I always aim above where I should aim for some reason.
This will take some getting used to.
I agree, I didn’t feel the pull with this one. It’s funny that the idea of these retro shooters is so appealing, and yet, when I get my hands on them, most of them just don’t feel all that satisfying. Dusk, Amid Evil, and Project Warlock were all duds for me. But on the other hand, DOOM 2016, Overload and the new Quake Episode from MachineGames were all excellent and really captured the magic again.