The chaingun sucks, so much so that it can be a direct cause of death (low accuracy, low dmg, noticeable movement speed penalty), there is a grenade launcher probably only to trigger switches in special alcoves. There is a gun for some reason (for what, for what?). Maybe even weapons? Well, equipment is, to use an Anglo-Saxon idiom, a mixed bag. The game still pretends that there is some interplay and the blue ones don’t like the red ones, but the only effect it has on the game is that in some (only some) arenas in the final 1/3 of the game, not everyone immediately jumps straight at the player. If they live longer, unfortunately, the threat will still be practically zero… In fact, the only enemies that pose any threat are the chaingunner (no surprise lmao), pain elemental (far too much HP) and almost-archvile (the type that hits densely with very wide waves of fire ), and that’s mostly because the game has thrown them back into a hard-to-reach spot where they can safely drain HP before they’re within range of powerful weapons. Well… On the Hard difficulty I’ve played, almost all enemies with the bare minimum of skill on the player’s part will be zero threat, existing only to explode into a cloud of blood 0.2-2 seconds after being spotted. Such an imp but even more HP? Well, maybe at least fighting types is fun? The Doom Bestiary is iconic for a reason. There’s a blood spider that explodes with death, there’s a guy using a railgun and… hm. This does not mean that the original creatures totally lack. No, seriously – the peak of creativity of the creators is the palette swap of what id came up with. And the other half? Same as the first half, only painted blue and with more HP. Zombie, shotgun zombie, chaingunner, imp, pinky, caco, lost soul, pain elemental, even something related archvile and almost-cyberdemon. Speaking of enemies, let’s take a look at the bestiary and… very quickly, half of the creatures start to feel familiar. And distant enemies often merge with the bloodstains on the walls and floors. The lighting effects are actually cool, but for balance, the gore effects are so grossly exaggerated that in any fight with more than 2 enemies at once, they will genuinely obscure the situation in the arena and prevent you from spotting and avoiding threats. Enemies are pixelated human blobs, grey-red or angry blue depending on the variant, with no detail. Perhaps the best descriptor of Prodeus’s art style (or lack of style, to be precise) is to take the first 10 minutes of Doom 2016 and stretch it out to a whole 10 fucking hours. Apart from a short trip into the frozen lands just before the end, each level is similar to every other level everything merges into a uniform, monotonous, gray techbase mush, where the only variety is that sometimes the lava is green. Starting with the most visible element, the graphics – this one is actually pretty, but also incredibly undifferentiated.
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