- The Catacomb
- Catacomb 3D: The Descent
- The Catacomb Abyss
- The Catacomb Armageddon
- The Catacomb Apocalypse
- The Catacomb (1989)
- Bonus: Dangerous Dave in "Trophy Trouble"
Story: There isn't really a lot of plot to work with in this game. I mean it did come out in the day when story generally was just enough to explain why you are there, but even for that there is very little here. In fact the only story that comes with thsi game is a 2 sentence section of the readme file:
You are a mighty wizard who has been sent on a mission to free the Palace of Kierlon from the powers of darkness. Armed with the power to hurl powerful magic missiles you strike out on a grand adventure.
The game will never offer you much more then this, making it incredibly limited even by it's day's standard. Nor will it offer anything along the way or more then a single screen with a statement of congratulations at the end. If there was any less plot to this game, it would not be rateable. Perhaps that would have been better.
4/10
Graphics: This is not a pretty game in the least. It is very old, having come out back when the common graphical options for PC gamers were either 4 color (CGA) or 16 color (EGA). It does not even support the standard one expects of DOS titles with 256 colors (VGA). Nor would I say it uses the 16 color option to it's best.
You will play this game from a top-down perspective with yourself always in the center of the play area. This portion of the sreen is dominated by two colors: hot pink and green. No matter what level you are on, hte walls will be hot-pink with a green tiled floor to wander around. There really isn't a lot more to say about the look of the place beyond that.
You do not fair much better as a ghostly white guy with a neon pink shirt and deep blue pants, who frankly resembled a Lemming from that game if you were able to get close enough to them to need more then 6 pixels for their display. It is not flattering.
Sadly, the enemies don't fair much better either. Their is a descent variety from skeletons and red goblin/demon things to giant grey Baphomet looking dragon creatures, but you may need some creativity to identify exactly what they are. And again a lot of them are either low detail or that same hot-pink the rest of the game is. This seems like such an off choice considering this is EGA mode, and not CGA where that would be pretty close to one of the four colors they could use on the palette.
But that only explains the leftmost 60% or so of the screen, the rest, much like the games it's taking the style of (Gauntlet and Gauntlet II which would have been a standard in the arcades at the time), is for your stats. This area is a white box showing your score, the high score, as well as your inventory, a power meter, and a light meter. The name of the game is in the bottom right of the screen. It is very clean and functional although I kinda wish it was more compact since the action left-to-right does seem a bit more boxed in then suits the game.
5/10
Sound: Once again this is a game that wears it's age on it's sleeve here, as there is no support for sound hardware at all. All you are going to hear are the blips and bloops that make up the sound effects that would have come out of your internal PC speaker. There is no music at all, and if you thought there were going to be any lines of speech I may just have to laugh at you.
And what is here is pretty standard fair of the day. You will hear a blip when you pick up an item, aa fairly meaty boomish sound when you or an enemy shoots and explosions, but not much else. And to be honest there really isn't room for much else. This alone will fill the sound with a chaos that rivals the amount of chaos you will hear in many modern shooter, if not in quality.
Overall I can not say the game sounds good. However I can give it recognition for a retro quality that some will love if they grew up in this era... much like people look back fondly at the noises an Atari 2600 makes.
5/10
Gameplay: As noted in the Graphical section of the game, The Catacomb is a top down game which will have you exploring various maps with monsters roaming around. In arcade fashion, you will blast your way through the hoards with the singular goal of surviving to reach the next level... at least for the most part. There is a very specific point where the game will drop a single multi-level based puzzles that will require you to stop and use your head even more then your trigger finger lest the same handful of maps keep you looping around them forever. It is not a particularly hard puzzle, but the answer is hidden in clues across multiple of them in a way that is frankly impressive to have been considered.
And this will also mark another point of change in the game as well... while the levels before this moment do have some challenge, you better use this time to prepare, because this is when the game gets balls-to-the-wall hard, introducing the toughest enemies it will offer you and then relying squarely on them for the rest of your adventure... including one of the most infuriating I have ever seen in any game: The werewolf.
This guy is the defenition of strike hard and burn out. He's fast and hits like a mac truck, but doesn't take a ton of damage to go down. Now basically every enemy besides maybe the ogre is fast in this game, but this guy is insanely so... and he will be your worst enemy, if only because of how stiff the game can be.
Yeah, this is one of those games where your biggest threat isn't the enemies, but the game being stiff in how you and the enemies move around the map. This is pre iD's breakthrough to allow smooth screen scrolling on a PC, and as such to allow the maps to be so big, sacrifices had to be made. In this case, it was locking all movement to a grid system. If you look at the floor, you will see it is made of green tiles that are obvious to see for anyone at a glance. The problem is that all movement is locked to to them as well, making it easy to get stuck easily, be on walls you are trying to get around or even enemies who have taken a position right next to you, resulting in a very stiff feel to the game as real difficulties dealing with some heavy damage enemies without some real planning ahead... in an arcade style shooter.
But it's clear when Mr. John Carmack (yes THAT John Carmack) designed the game, he was aware of these restraints as he built in a few ways to deal with it. The most sly of these is to give the game a strafe button. Like in most games, traveling in one of the four basic directions aims your character in that direction, however, you can hold this button down to hold yourself in a specific direction instead, letting you do things like fire back at enemies you are keeping your distance from, or set yourself up so when you basically kick down a door you jump through already facing the direction the corridor behind turns so you can start blasting at the enemies immediately, and use it for several other moments when getting into a position is the most important issue with surviving.
But if that fails you, there is a lot more obvious option of the Nuke spell, which lets out a "circle" of powerful spells around you. The game itself describes this as a panic button option, and you will likely use it at times... just be aware this is a scroll based spell and using it will cost you one of it's scrolls.
In addition to this spell, you will also have Blast spells which do about as you expect. Using this will launch a stream of powerful magic missiles in the direction you are facing and will kill all but the absolute strongest enemy outright. This too will cost a scroll to use. Add to this a health potion that behaves the same and you have the basic three items in your inventory.
Now this inventory itself is a lot more expansive then you might think. There is room across the screen to show 10 icons for each item, but that is a limit to what you can see not what you can carry. I went through most of the game with these bars filled in completely, which I recommend doing. If you need one once in a while, that's what they are there for, but you will want to save as many as you can for the last 3rd of the game... and as late as you can hold out.
As for your attacks, it will let you charge it by holding down the basic shoot button, letting you fire off either one mass magic missile or as many as you can rapidly press the button to do, keeping the action fast and furious.
The whole thing comes together as a competent game, but stiff to play and a shadow of what this developer would create even in the very near future.
6/10
Story: Much like The Catacomb, there isn't really a story here to speak of. The game itself will offer you absolutely nothing within itself to explain any story at all. Rather once again, all you will get for story is from the readme.txt file included with the game:
In CATACOMB 3-D you are a high wizard who must rescue your friend from the clutches of the evil lich Nemesis. Using your magical powers, you venture forth into the bizzare dimensions of the Catacombs.
So outside of this being a rescue mission there is nothing else to start with, and even less in the game. Even the ending is almost a joke for the final line before you get to place your name in the high score. If this is why you played, you are in for a SEVERE disappointment.
3/10
Graphics: Your milage may vary from me on this one, as I used an open-source engine to play the game which adds a few extra touches to the graphics you will see. However in general you will view the game from a first person perspective, but an exceptionally primative version of it. The world is made up of blocks, and always a single floor in hieght with no floor or ceiling graphics at all. Furthermore, the interface does not center your view. True, most of the screen is dedicated to this, but its in the upper left, leaving the right side to be taken by a picture of your wizard's face, a blue block, and a compass, while window below is reserved for more numerical data and where you are. The whole thing is done in EGA graphics (so it never uses more then 16 colors at once) and give off a vibe like I might expect an Apple IIgs game to look like... right down to the style of the time.
However, the end result is very clean and there is a certain nostalgia to this that just feels right to an old school gamer.
5/10
Sound: Unfortunately this is not a game that is going to impress in the audio territory in any way possible. Unlike the above title, there is music this time around, but it will not start until the game does, and it's only a single 8-10 second long track that repeats through the entire game. Thankfully this track is also very low key and easy to even forget is going on: it never really pushes for the center stage so much as is effective white noise for the game.
Nor are sound effects going to be a lot better. This game came out at a time when soundcards were a luxury and the beeps and boops of the internal PC speaker were the standard, so even though it supports using them for sound effects, the results are still pretty much the same. Enemies really don't make any noise at all, leaving it all for skkshh type sounds around your fireballs, a more staticky one when you hit an enemy (followed by a twittering as your score goes up for a kill), or even maybe a few celebratory high pitched beeps when you get an item or treasure. There really isn't a lot here at all: basically the bare minimum I would expect for a game developer first stretching into using the new sound hardware that their audience may or may not yet have.
4/10
Gameplay: While not iD's first foray into the FPS genre, this one is still very early in their career. For this entry, they team took their previous work of Catacomb (the original which is reviewed below) and directly translated it into a 1st person title. You will play the roll of your wizard as he runs around throwing fireballs at the monsters you encounter while you travel through the roughly 20 levels offered to save your friend from Nemesis. But unlike most FPSs, these levels are not completely linear.
You will eventually reach a point where they intersect in a hub-structure and ask you to figure out how to progress and offer a little bit of puzzle to the equation. It is not a difficult puzzle and in fact you can stumble across the solution easily since it's based on the exact same puzzle from the 2D games, but much more forgiving, so do not expect this hub to hold you back for long.
Although the individual levels do offer more to figure out then most FPS games, some relying heavily on secrets to progress, which also shows the age of the game quite directly: both in this having fallen out of favor and there being no use button here to press the walls and find them. Rather, you find secrets like you did in the 2D games: you shoot the wall and if it blows up, you found one.
Still the basics are all here, including color-coded keys to unlock various doors you will find along the way, which will be tracked in the bottom part of the screen along side your score, health potions, zaps scrolls, and nuke spells, all taken directly from the 2D game it's a translation of. But for those that do not wish to read that review, these are the three items you can collect as you play. Health potions are pretty self explanatory (using them fills your health entirely), but zaps and nukes are super attacks you will have available. A zap will cause your wizard to unload a stream of super-fireballs in rapid succession that few monsters will be able to withstand while a nuke fires off shots around you in a circle to buy you space.
And speaking of health this is part of what the right side of the screen will show you. Rather then a normal health meter, you will have a profile of your character and your health is presented by how complete it is. As you take damage lines of the profile will be replaced with a skeleton's profile pic, and when your wizard is gone it's game over.
Below him is what initially looks like a blank blue rectangle, but this is your power meter. Much like the 2D game, you do not unleash a fireball at the press of the button, but at the release. Holding it down will charge the shot, letting you fire a super-fireball if you wait long enough, noted by this rectangle being filled with a picture of a nuclear explosion. And finally the compass in the right corner does exactly what you would expect it to, but I will be honest, I never used it.
Unfortunately this is about all the variety you can expect in this title however, as excluding the final boss, there are only 4 monster types to share the battle with, and three of them play exactly the same, only really representing different strength when they hit you or how much damage they can take. The last is a wizard who can actually dual you with fireballs, but they are oddly the rarest outside the final boss himself and really only show up in I believe a single map. And that last boss can actually push you, being a summoner enemy who will fill the map with some tough monsters that will overrun you if you let them.
Overall, this is a fun if short, and not particularly special FPS. However it is notable as the first time iD made a completable first person adventure and their second step towards the game that would put them on the map.
6/10
Story: The events of Catacomb 3D lead to you successfully defeating Nemesis and saving your friend from him, but this would sadly not be the end of the story. Nemesis' minions would build the villain a mausoleum nearby the Towne Cemetery, which has now become a focus point of evil in it's own right: both to as a horrific vision of terror for the townspeople as well as in a more direct sense: those minions have begun using it as a base of operations for their dark deeds. As such the need of the people has surfaced again, and now you are hired to go take them down. After all with your history, you can handle anything these beings might be doing... right?
This basic story will take you on your journey, starting in the cemetery and making your way to the dread mausoleum as you fight back the hordes of evil that even now gather around it. There isn't much more to the story and even less of it will develop in the game, but if you wish to gain a little more insight, you will find it in the help section of the game where additional flavor text to go with the game is in place. It isn't much, but there is some genuine effort here to write something that flows along side your adventure... more then I expected and something I appreciate.
6/10
Graphics: Once again your milage here will vary compared to mine, as the engine I used for Catacomb 3D also supports Catacomb Abyss, allowing for some modern life updates to the look of the game including distance shading, modern resolutions, and wide-screen support. These are not features the original release could do.
But that said the core game is a fantasy FPS using the Wolf3D engine and EGA (16 color) graphics, and the very simple look of the world reflects that. Still, it is a very colorful game that pushes what could be done in these limitations as far as they will go, showing you varied lands and locations as you make your way through the various landmarks from the Cemetery to the Mausoleum, facing off with a fairly large variety of enemies along the way. The world, while primitive, looks pretty damn good if you ask me, and it kept things fresh right up through the entire journey. And those enemies you face off with also looked very good for the color palette available, from the first zombie that shambles your way right up to the final boss of the game. I have absolutely no complaints here.
If anything the only complaint I could muster is with the heads up display this time around. Where as Catacomb 3D balanced your view to the side of the screen, this time you have a view with all your information below, and it has some very useful stuff as we will discuss in the gameplay, but it is very.. large. In fact this display is so big it is just shy of being half the screen. With the aftermarket engine I was using, this isn't a huge deal as I was running the whole thing at 1080 resolutions, so the detail would shine through even if that display was bigger. However the original game did not have that luxury so it would likely make things a bit harder to see over information about yourself.
7/10
Sound: Here this installation faulters, and faulters bad. While yes, it does support a sound card, the way it does might as well not. Catacomb Abyss has no music at all and basically uses an adlib sound play very basic sound effects. You will hear things like your footsteps clearly enough, but enemies don't make noise at all leaving the game to let you hear bleeps and bloops and fuzzy explosion sounds as you find treasure, items, shoot fireballs, and blow things up. It's not quite as basic as one might hear from an Atari 2600, but I find myself wondering if these sounds could come out of a PC speaker from the days before sound was ever considered a thing to worry about in the IBM compatible world. It just sounds awful, when it sounds at all.
4/10
Gameplay: You are here for a good time, not a long one when you play this game. Having finished it in under 2 hours, I can attest to this. However what is here is actually very well made and plays very well. Again, like with the graphics, your milage may vary here, as the engine I used included modern quality of life updates like modern keyboard and mouse control schemes so as to make the game flow better.
But that said, this is at it's core a fantasy FPS and wears that on it's sleeve. You will travel through several levels in linear fashion as you march your way to Nemesis' Mausoleum, facing many enemy types on the way. Everything from zombies to skeletons to demons, to wraiths and many more things of the night, you can expect to see them before the game is over. Most of the time you will face off with enemies who can not shoot back, but vary only in size and toughness as you play, but they are placed well to make the adventure fun.
There is no ammo count of any sort, so you will be spamming fireballs to your heart's content as you search for secrets and keys while blowing away baddies on each map, so there is nothing holding you back from going wild this time. Still, there is also no charged shot this time either, so rapid fire is your main choice. However, the game does temper this with some caution. Firing with abandon will lose you potential items very easily as goodies you can collect can be blown up if you are not careful. Thankfully supplies are common enough this really shouldn't get in the way of your good trigger-happy time.
Those objects still include the same basic items you could collect the first time and they still each have a single button to be used: a stream fireball attack, a spread shot that shoots in a ring around you and simple health potions you can use as you will. However, there are some new tricks here, starting with treasure chests. There is no score anymore. Rather these now contain an unknown combination of the three basic items, so they can gear you up rather quickly in a pinch and with a little luck. But there are also completely new items available as well to keep an eye out for in the form of gems and and hour glasses. Both of these are exceedingly rare, but incredibly useful.
The hour glasses once taken will freeze time for a brief moment, letting you place fireballs as you will that will go flying when time resumes at whoever you aimed them at, but the real fun one here are the gems.. and to explain them, we need to get to your UI for a moment.
All the normal information you can expect is here: your health (now a % value under your picture, which will have varying degrees of confidence and fear based on how much health you have), a count of the different objects you have (including single use keys and scrolls you collected), but to the right-hand side is a radar with slots for those gems. Every time you collect one, that radar can pick up a new kind of enemy, making them easier to predict and deal with. It is a new touch that is probably worth your time to notice, especially when things seem just a little too quiet.
Overall, while the game is simple and more straight forward then what it's following up, I would call this a marked improvement and frankly a fun little FPS game.
7/10
Story: During the events of Catacomb Abyss, you found out Nemesis was back and hiding in his supposed crypt. In fact, he was the reason the town who hired you to investigate the monsters gathering had all their problems. But they are troubled no more as you returned from this dank den of evil victorious... but your victory was not complete. Instead, the warlock retreated beyond the town and setup a new base of operations where he, again is beginning to grow his power and influence, re-establishing his control over the forces of Evil. And once again, you have been called on to venture forth to vanquish this foe.
This time, your goal is the Lost City of the Damned where he is now believed to be holed up. Go forth, hero! Go forth and prevail!
This basic plot is, again, all you are really getting, and in fact most of it isn't even from the game, but an included readme file. The game, much like the previous, couldn't be bothered to explain the little plot it actually has... and you will literally get nothing else while playing. Even the ending really doesn't offer much beyond "yep, you won! Here's a picture of winning..." With so little, I don't think I can say much more here.
4/10
Graphics: As far as the technology side of this analysis goes, there really isn't much I can say that wasn't said for Catacombs Abyss above: this is a game written in the Wolf 3D engine, if one running on EGA graphics so it can only work with 16 colors at once, resulting in much the same basic limitations of blocky maps populated by flat sprites and colored with a very limited palette. Still it is bright and colorful much like it's predecessor, and looks very good overall for the tech. However, this time around there are a few additional tricks used to make the game look better such as sprite-work on corridors themselves to either make it look more like you're crawling through a hole in the wall or to emulate shadows, or even use the walls themselves to create an extra touch of illusion such as wandering a raging inferno or, of course, a sewer level where you are waist deep in water. (Seriously, they even thought of the walls exploding reflecting in said water! Well done!). Frankly a lot of these tricks still look good and are very clever for the time of release.
Still some of these tricks aged better then others but for reasons when writing the game there was no way the developers could have foreseen. You see since the game's release the code has been released to the public, and as the PC community does, open source ports have risen, giving the series some more modern touches (controls and resolution mainly), keeping them more playable then they would be otherwise, but at least the new engine I used also includes a new shading system which allows for the game to display areas further away from you with a darker lighting and while it looks great and even the said sewer level benefits, the inferno level does not. Fire, as a source of light, should not dim, taking a little something away from what otherwise would have been an absolutely great effect for the player to see.
Fortunately this is not an issue for any of the sprites that share this world with you. Treasure chests and other items will look about the same as they did in the last game, but you are about to meet a mix of new and refreshed cast members to share this world with. Yeah the classic zombies, demons, skeletons, and hell even bats, remain, just about everything got updated with new details to just make the design a little bit fresher and fit the style of newer enemies you will run into this time.
But really aside from these details there isn't much I can add that I didn't say for the last game.
7/10
Sound: Literally nothing has changed in the sound department between Catacomb Abyss and Catacomb Armageddon. Like before, there is no music here at all, and the sounds played might as well not have had soundcard support for how well it uses the one option it had (AdLib). You will be playing to video-game blips and bloops you might have expected from old 8-bit computers or even early consoles like the Atari 7800 and little else. This is one place that not even a new engine to run the game can fix. If you must have music, bring your own.
4/10
Gameplay: Much like the graphics, you will find the gameplay between Catacomb Abyss and Catacomb Armageddon largely the same. You are still playing a early FPS game. You are still traveling from map to map on your linear journey to take down Nemesis and his new plot to gain power and take over the world in linear fashion, even if the maps themselves can sometimes be anything but. Hell you will still have the same UI and even the same items that were available before will be here again. Same health potions, same stream fireball attack, same "fire all around you attack," same keys, hell even the same gems for your radar doing the same thing and same hour glasses to freeze time. It's all here and waiting for you, familiar, and comforting... or destroyable if you are not careful casting fireballs as you kill everything on the map.
But despite the familiarity, there is some expansion to what was before that for the most part adds to the game itself. For starters, where the items don't change at all, you are about to be introduce to a whole host of new enemies. Everything from worker ants who have to hatch before you can do anything about them to nagas that will remain statues until the opportune time to ambush you, to even rampaging evil trees that even after you kill them, they remain there burning and if you get to close, you will get hurt still, requiring you to either plan where they die, or be ready to dash past them and on the hunt for health potions as you need. This game gets a bit more creative in what you fight.
As for where you fight it, variety is also the name of the game. You will trek through abandoned cities, forgotten woods, sewers, temples, and even I'm pretty sure a mad scientist lab or two. Every map has it's own flavor, so you shouldn't get board before you finish up, which will take longer than the last one, especially if you are playing the base game with no modern enhancements. The original game had no map functionality, but still had the old-school mentality of hiding vital items (such as keys you need) in secrets you will have to blow open. I imagine without a map to "guestimate" where these secrets were, this would have added some unnecessary frustration to the mix. Even with this advantage it still took me around 2 and a half hours to complete this game... short by today's standards, but longer then the previous title.
Overall while this is not the level of improvement we saw between Catacomb 3D and Catacomb Abyss, it doesn't have to be this time. Abyss was a fun little FPS and a nice game overall. To see even a few steps forward is VERY welcome.
7/10
Story: At this point, I don't think Softdisk was even trying with the plot. Now do not get me wrong, this was never a series that was strong on story, but it can't keep the few details it had for the series consistent here, completely erasing the original Catacomb 3D game to contain everything in a single trilogy. Now it is possible they actually did this in the previous episode (Armageddon) and I missed it, but it's not uncommon for a sequel to directly reference only the last game, so I can not be sure of it. This game's story actually opens up with "You faced the challenge of your arch rival known as "Nemesis" in THE CATACOMB ABYSS 3-D and THE CATACOMB ARMAGEDDON 3-D." There is no reference to the game that game before this trilogy at all.
As for the rest of the plot, it is somehow even thinner then the previous entries which at least offered you a reason for why you arrived or what brought you back to deal with this menace a second time after you "killed" him. This time you don't even get that. All you get is that Nemesis is using time travel to get a whole new army of creatures together. To do what? Take over the lands? For some grand ambition of power? No... he's apparently so pissed off at his latest defeat he's coming for you. To hell with his desire to rule the lands under his evil shadow, YOU need to die and he will bring hell from the past and the future down on your head to make it so. It's such a jarring change in motivation, that it left me scratching my head rather then setting the mood of the game like the last two at least managed to.
Nor are you going to get any of this from the game. Like the previous title, the story is basically told in a readme file you have to open on it's own. The game itself will open with two sentences on an intro screen in the game to get you started when you actually play, but they basically say nothing. And do not expect the ending to be any better.
Thankfully as noted, this is not a game that relies on plot in any sense of the word when you are playing so it being absolute trash, even by the standards of this series, is not going to bother you once you start slinging spells.
3/10
Graphics: I really can't say anything about how this game looks that I haven't said twice over now, either. This is yet another game written with the Wolf 3D engine, but done with 16-color EGA graphics instead of the full VGA support that would have been available at the time. As suc you are about to run around a map that generally looks bright and colorful, but is made of blocks with a single solid color for the floor and the ceiling and anything that populates them is displayed as a 2D sprite in 3D space.
While dated, this doesn't mean it looks bad. In fact with the engine update I am using (CatacombGL, see the requirements section of this review) it looks really good at modern resolutions and even a gradient effect to make things dimmer in the distant.
Bu even as the world itself stands up to the rest of the series, I can not say the same for the enemies this time around. Yes you have a few cool ones like the ghost shadow thing you basically see in the beginning of the game, but it honestly feels like the idea well rand dry this time around and the "creatures from the future" are generally either floating eyeballs, very generic mechs, or just yet another form of the demons you've seen through the entire series, only now they are wearing some generic metal plating that is clearly wishing it had the design chops of the xenomorph from the Alien series. It's serviceable, but it's clear the designs peaked in the last episode.
5/10
Sound: Once again, we have a game that comes from an era where you were not expected to have hardware capable of much in the sound department, so there is no music at all and sound effects that would feel at home on systems like the Atari 2600. Expect thumps, crackly zaps, and crunchy booms to dominate the soundscape as the game does its best to play audio like it was designed to play whether you had only a PC speaker or could be adapted to play through a midi based adlib sound card of old. It does not sound good, and it offers no music to at least supplement this.
4/10
Gameplay: As with the past few games, Catacomb Apocalypse is a 1st person game where you are running around through various mazes, blowing up monsters and generally wrecking everything in your path with magical blasts on your quest to take down Nemesis one final time. Your arsenal to do so boils down to the same three basic attacks you have in the past two games: a basic fireball, a stream of them, and a spread shot that fires off around you in a circle. While the basic fireball can be fired at will (and rapid fire) you will need to collect ammo for the other two if you wish to use them, but don't worry too much about it. From what I can tell the game will offer you plenty of ammo, although potentially in the most annoying level design way I have seen in the game... but we will get to that. In addition to these special attacks, you will also find health potions aplenty as well, each of which will fill your health completely as a single use regardless of how much health you currently have. All three of these items will also show up in random quantities if you pick up one of the many treasure chests littering the various maps. In addition you also have on VERY few occasions access to hour glasses, which upon collecting will freeze time for about 60 seconds, letting you wander around and setup attacks that will all go off as soon as time starts again, which can be fun, but do not count on this to be a regular technique. And finally you have the unique item introduced at the beginning of this trilogy called gems. There are 5 of them which collecting one will add a monster type that will now appear on the radar in your hud.
This hud is still going to take about 1/3rd of your screen, offering you much more information then the radar. Included here is your health in the form of a percentage displayed under your face which will take damage as you do. Next to it you will have how many of each special ammo and health potion you have as well as how many of each color of key you have. Any given one of these can carry up to 99, but unlike the previous games, this time you will want to pay attention to that key count at about the halfway point of the game. At this time you will reach an axis level with access to one level for each of the different dimensions the time gates can send you to, and each will grant you more keys then you need. The idea is to collect all the extra keys before hunting for the secret exit on this level so you can open all the doors on the way to it. This means potentially repeating the four connected levels multiple times if you did not realize what was going on.... and even if you do it might be worth repeating all the same. After all, this is your chance to stock up on all the items you can use as for the rest of the game... including those keys if you feel like cheesing the game and not bothering to find them in the following levels. It's frankly a weakness in my honest opinion as it won't take you a lot of rounds to do and once you've done it, any effectiveness the mazes that make up the later half of the game might have had go right out the window. Add that to a rather weak lineup of villains once you start playing with "the future" and everything past this point just kinda runs out of gas.
6/10
Story: Petton Everhail is a very powerful wizard. In fact the most powerful in the world. But he has a problem: he is bored out of his mind. He is so bored in fact that he is basically casting fireball at his tea-pot to make tea.
But for he would not stay bored this day as an unlikely guest knocked at his door. A man claiming to be Terexin, High Wizard of the Keirlalon empire arrived to ask for his help to collect the treasure he left in the crumbling empire. Initially he tried to come across as an all powerful entity, but it didn't take long for him to drop the act and basically say "you look bored, let's say you go there, blast the hell out of everything, get the loot, and we split it 50-50."
Suffice it to say Petton agreed with a grin.
This is the total story you will get out of this game, and while it doesn't tell you this when you actually start, you will see this as a text before you begin playing. It is more then enough to get going and probably more then most games of this era would bother with, giving you a small insight into the personality of your hero and why he is really there. Frankly it's more then you get in most games around the time this one came out, especially for a game made to be released for free.
6/10
Graphics: Honestly I could point strongly to the first game in this review if I wanted to talk about the graphics as they are remarkably familiar: and with good reason. Where THAT Catacombs game was a full release that would ship from Softdisk in their subscription fee, you could think of this as the beta (despite having a lot more story).
You will see everything from a top-down view as you navigate around a neon-violet maze with neon green floors, populated by a host of fast moving monsters. Everything is grid-based, so while your violet shirted hero has a shuffle animation for where he walks, no one, including him, has smooth animations as they wander. But there is definitely some variance between the monsters, as you will face demons, skeletons, ogers, and even a dragon or two. They look alright considering the EGA limits this game had, but if you played the main 2D Catacombs game, you've already seen everything this game offers and then some.
As for the UI, it too is pretty close to what the subscription game would offer. Dividing the screen vertically, the right 3rd of the is reserved to this, showing the level you are on, your score, the current top score, your inventory, and two bars at the bottom: Shot Power to show how charged up a fireball you are packing and Body to represent your health. However the game name is missing from the bottom of the screen this time.
Overall it's functional, but as with the final game, it just doesn't look like anything special.
5/10
Sound: I literally could point you to the Catacomb game up top for the sound in this one: they are identical. There is no music at all and the game, coming from a time when most people didn't have any kind of special sound hardware and instead had to rely on the PC speaker for it's limited beeps, boops and buzzing sounds, did it's best with just these notes. And it sounds just as privative as you would expect.
To put it bluntly, this has aged even more poorly then the graphics, but there are people who grew up with this, and just like the classic noises of the Atari 2600, it will hit their nostalgia perfectly. For everyone else, though it's not gonna sound good.
5/10
Gameplay: If you played the first Catacomb game in this pack, you've basically played the better more advanced version of this one. Where that game was advanced enough to inclue a sprawling maze with looping levels you had to figure out in order to find the true way to proceed and other actually clever tricks, this is a 10 level basic top-scrolling shooter, if a very fast paced one. You will wander the maze blasting everything in site while trying to find your way through each level to the next before the game wraps up.
In order to get there you will have a few tricks up your sleeve though. First involves the Shot Power meter mentioned in the graphics. Pressing fire does not shoot your fireball spell: releasing the fire button does. Holding it will charge this meter and if you let it go at full power, you will unleash a fireball as big as you are that will rip through everything in it's path (at least until it's off the screen and hits a wall). It will be up to you to decide if a situation requires you to fire a ton of little fireballs or to save it for something much bigger.
In addition, you can keep a collection of four different item types you will find as you play, each having a line in your inventoring showing up to 10 of them if you have them (not that you are limited to this... that's just how many you can see). Keys are the most obvious of these items as you will need them to open doors, but this is where Carmack thought he was clever. There are a few levels where you have to be careful which doors you unlock as it would be easy to run out of keys and put yourself into a dead-man-walking scenario. (I mean he is clever, but clever about tech more then he is level design.) Add to this some really unfortunate secrets you have to blast and these are the biggest issues the game has.
As for actual combat, the remaining three items will prove useful: using a potion will refill your health, but the scrolls can be either a Zap (rapid fire super fireballs) or a Nuke (fire massive fireballs around you). Personally I almost didnt use any of these, however, so your milage will vary.
The end result is solid if expected combad in some rather infuriating level designs.... and all in a game you can finish easily within an hour or two. Think of it as a small bonus.
5/10
Story: Dave has a problem. His rival, Clyde, recently won all the skateboarding trophies, which Dave wanted. So he came up with a solution: challenge Clyde to a footrace. Ever the arrogant one, Clyde not only accepted, but made the fatal mistake of letting Dave pick the track and giving him a 4 foot head start. With the trap set, Dave picked a ladder. Starting near the top, he obviously won and Clyde was furious.
Still Clyde would be a man of his word... to the letter. Dave can have the trophies... if he can find them in the abandoned pirate hideout Clyde stashed them in. And here's where you come in. You will guide Dave through the obstacles and dangers of the hideout while trying to find all 10 trophies to finish the game.
It's a simple story, but considering when this game came out, this makes sense: in the 80s, the story for a game really was there to give the player the reason the hero was even in their situation and little else. But much like the main Catacomb game above, there really isn't enough here to do anything with, so you can't ignore it without any issue.
5/10
Graphics: For all the faults I will have to put on this game, graphics is not one of them. For the time, this game actually looks pretty good. The world is colorful, if blocky and the sprites match it for the animations. Still, the game is held back some as it is actually a port from the Apple II, so expect everything to be against a black background and very VERY abstract looking enemies. Also you can expect the limitation of screen scrolling the original game had to make it's way here too, flipping between screens as you progress through each map.
There really isn't much else to talk about though, as when you back up and look at this game, it's a pretty standard side scrolling game, if one with some extra polish.
6/10
Sound: Port or not, this game was a free title that came out at a time when IBM compatible systems were not expected to have any kind of sound support. As such there is absolutely no music or voice-work available. What you get are PC speaker blips and bloops for when you jump, use a jetpack, collect treasure, go through the exist of the level, shoot, or whenever you or an enemy die. It's nothing special in any way shape or form, and compared to what we would have in even a few years, sounds terrible. If you are expecting any kind of enjoyment for your ears instead of simple signals to match you are seeing, you are in the wrong place... at least unless you just want that nostalgia itch from a simpler day to be scratched.
5/10
Gameplay: This is sadly where this game falls apart. You will control dangerous Dave as you navigate through 10 levels to find the trophy and leave through the exit door. When you start any given level, you will only be able to move left and right or jump... with the up key. Yes, it's one of those games where the developer does not actually use a jump button, making the control that much more awkward then it has to be and setting the stage early on for what you can expect.
As you play you will find the game adds more complication on the way, giving it a good difficulty scale, but it never really gets past that point. By level 3 you start getting a gun, letting you shoot at enemies, just in time for enemies to shoot back, but even then due to the lack of screen scrolling these become less about a good firefight and more about timing your shot for when the enemy (who has a set pattern of movement) is on the screen to get hit. It just all feels wrong if you ask me, and add to it a random firing pattern and later places where you are forced to deal with enemies you can't shoot back at and the whole thing just finishes falling apart like that carboard box left in the rain.
4/10
Bugs: For as old as these games are, ironically the only bug I could find (and has since been fixed) was in the updated engine I used for the 3D Catacomb games. At the time I downloaded the engine, there as a bug where if you remapped any of the buttons (and you will want to likely to make running work better), it didn't save, meaning you had to set it each time you played. But other then that everything worked perfectly.
Digital Rights Management: There is no DRM for anything in this gamepack.
Overall: This whole collection is to be honest more for the enthusiast who wants to see where one of the most influential development teams in gaming ever got their start. Most of the games simply won't hold up to much higher standards we have today, but they show those first steps to how we got there. That isn't to say you won't have fun playing them. In fact I absolutely enjoyed my time with just about every title in the collection. However if you have no interest in that historical value you probably won't get the most out of it. Even the retro gamers among us will can probably find better examples of what to play from the days of DOS if they don't have that interest.
Score:
System Requirements:
- ANYTHING running at 1.8 Ghz
- Geforce 600 series or AMD Radeon 5400 (must have 128 MB VRAM)
- 512 MB RAM
- Windows XP
- 2 GB hard drive space
System Specs:
SPECIAL NOTE: With the age of the games in this collection, I did use some extra software to enhance the experience and will note it below:
- Ryzen 5 5600G running at 3.9 Ghz
- 16 GB RAM
- Windows 11
- PDP DX Wired Controller (Crimson)
- AntiMicro (to emulate KB&M on a controller)
- Ryzen 7 (5700X) 3.4 Ghz
- 32 GB RAM
- AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT (8 GB VRAM)
- Windows 11 (64 Bit)
- CatacombGL (open source engine to run on modern hardware)
Source: Gog.com
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