"Mah? MAH! Can we order some Doom?" "No, Dearie, we have Doom at home." When I played my last session of this game on twitch, I basically called the stream this.. and with good reason. If you have anything of quality, I would choose that over what is effectively a knockoff of the genre... and every bit as generic as that sounds.
Story: Meet Hellgore... once long ago, his people were destroyed by demons. Now those same demons are trying to do the same to the human race. And so they brought him back as their ultimate weapon. That is literally all the story is in this game: A name, a reason to be here, and demons to kill. Want more then that? Boy did you come to the wrong place.
5/10
Graphics: Before you even get to the title screen, you will be warned:
"This game was created like it was the '90s. Some people may find it too difficult"
This is the attitude you will find in the graphics as well. The title screen will literally just show you a 3D rendered image of Hellgore, shotgun over his shoulder and deamon head gripped firmly in his other hand while he looks about the world around him from a skull-encrusted cliff. The game WANTS so bad to be a 1990s shooter you can just about see the Quake-icon shirt around it's non-existent box.
Starting the game will show you a picture of the level you are on with a small burb about the level while it loads, and then yo off to the races, charging through a hell-scape of demon infested lands from a first person point of view. And this landscape is arguably one of the stronger points of the game. Taking hard-core inspiration from the Doom franchise, this game absolutely floors the look of a world demons took over, dominated, and made like their home below. In a word, this game's world is absolutely gorgeous!
Your weapons themselves hold up fairly well, too. You will not have many before the game is over, but what you have meshes alien, familiar and jut a little bit of organic looks well enough to both belong to this game and stand on their own as something creative.
Unfortunately I can not say the same for the enemies... these are a lot less creative then the things you will beat the life out of them with... be it humanoids who will shoot at you, other humanoids that will fling fireballs, and yet others who will just charge at you full force. Most of these creatures look very similar to each other and sometimes blend into the world too well to see them before it's too late. One look at the game and it becomes apparent where the art budget went... as well as where it did not.
7/10
Sound: The first thing that is going to hit you with this game is the soundtrack: in a good way. Simply put, unless you are loading a level, the heavy metal never stops. And true, it's not the most high-end you will ever hear (and you may even forget the details shortly wafter), but it fits the gme and the speed/action it is always trying to throw at you. There is NO tones in the game this music will even try to respond to... as long as there is music, the guitar thrashes and the drums are going full force.
And to go with this music, is some very welcomingly meaty weapons. Your hand gun doesn't sound particularly tough, butfrom the shot-gun on, everything hums, chirbs, whirs or explodes satisfyingly. But don't expect much in the way of vocal work. Your human-looking enemies don't speak, letting whatever weapon they are equipped with do all the talking for them. Not so much as a grunt. And as for the demons, their squeals and hisses basically sound the same and do little to warn you what type is coming in. A little work here could have gone a long way.
6/10
Gameplay: Fast... really that is the best way I can describe this game. In fact, maybe a little too fast. Much like the warning I mentioned in the above graphic section applies to the aesthetic they were aiming for, it also points to the gameplay they were, too. But unlike those games of old, the game has your run button held down to walk, resulting in you moving so fast it's actually detrimental fighting as you are just as likely to run off a cliff as you are to dodge whavever monster is charging or shooting at you. And yes, you can easily fix this in the settings menu (and I did) this kinda sets the tone for how this game comes off... far more a knock-off imitation then a tribute to the good-old-days.
You will play through about 8 levels of first person mayhem making for a pretty short experience. Seriously, my Steam account has my total time running the game to be shy of 6 hours, and restarted from the beginning about halfway through the game, so I can estimate under 4 hours to finish it. In essence, you can expect this game to be about as long as a single episode of an FPS game from the 90s that inspired this... effectively a slice at best rather then reliving the whole experience.
And this same tone goes for the volume of content you will play with while in the game. There are a total of three non-human enemies in this game and the human ones are all the same besides maybe a little bit difference in armor and what weapons they have... out of the five you can find, all acting exactly the same, resulting in a game where battle never really changes. It's fast and it's fun at first, but it also never changes and is about as deep as that teaspoon you used to mix your morning coffee.
And those weapons are also basically there to cover the grounds one expects from this game. You start the game with a pistol and your fists (which you should NEVER need to use), but you will will finish collecting a shotgun, an chain gun, a rocket launcher, and a bat (for a tougher melee weapon) long before you finish the game. The developer tries to claim alternate fire modes for all the weapons, but our of the four guns (yes, there are only 4) in the entire game, your hand gun and chain gun give you an iron sites mode as the alternate to increase your accutacey, while the shotgun unloads all three (yeah, three) barrels as one shot, taking longer to reload. I never felt the need to try the rocket launcher to see what the alternate could be. It all works and feels right, but it feels like a bare minimum.
And the levels themselves do not help this situation either. Don't get me wrong, they actually look really good, but it's pure style and not much in the way of design. You will find yourself with every map made of large rooms made for ambushes, corridors connecting them, and you will generally know where to go because the enemies are either there, or teleport in the way if you have to backtrack. There are also several rooms where you will face off with the hoard poured down on top of you which actually highlight the hectic fun the game offers quite well... enough so they are featured as their own "endless hoard" mode levels you can access once you beat them in the campaign, and even have their own scoreboards. Its a small way to get more out of the game for those inclined, but it doesn't offer much to extend the game in my humble opinion.
And finally there one big bad monster boss at the end of the game which just enforces how much this game wants to immitate Doom in particular. It's huge, it throws massive fireballs at you, and it does so basically wearing the face of the Cyberdemon from the newest Doom titles. And really I think that summarizes this game very well.
5/10
Bugs: This was not a flawless game. In the brief time I spent playing it (just under 6 hours) it managed to crash to the desktop... twice. However to the game's credit, it did make the process pretty painless. The crash report even had the option restart the game from there.
In addition, I would like to point out an issue the game has which can ruin your game.. it lies. At various times during the game, you will hit checkpoints where the game will tell you it's saving, and it is... kinda. It's not saving to a normal save point like one would expect, but to one reserved specifically for "the current game" when you click "continue" in the main menu. If you load your save the traditional way, it will not be listed. And if you load any of those previous saves, it will override this one with the one you loaded up, destroying any progress you made. Add to this how rare those saves are (not even happening at the beginning of levels) and you can literally undo HOURS of game-time... inexcusable especially for a game this short.
Also worth noting the game does not have limited saves or the ability to override files. EVERY save is a new file so you might want to get to know this game's entry in the PC Gaming Wiki so you can find and delete your saves to get a little space back when you are done.
Score: Bare minimum and imitation is the best way to describe this game. It's basically trying it's best to look like Doom 2016 and play like a simple FPS game from the 90s, resulting in something that seems to emulate far more then be a tribute of a simpler time. And to that end it succeeds, but it doesn't do any of it particularly well, instead coming off as a cheap knockoff. You can definitely be better served by other "boomer shooters" but if you are looking for something quick between games, it is solid enough to fill that roll.
5/10
System Requirements:
- AMD Phenom II X4-945 or Intel Core 2 Quad 6600
- 4 GB RAM
- AMD R7 240, NVidia GT 730, or Intel HD 530 (2 GB VRAM required)
- 20 GB hard drive space
- Windows 7
System Specs:
- Ryzen 7 (2700) 3.2 Ghz
- 16 GB RAM
- Nvidia Geforce 1660 (6GB VRAM)
- Windows 10 (64 Bit)
Source: Steam
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