Daikatana

John Romero it should go without saying is a legend in the FPS world. A Romero solo project (outside id anyway) in the amazing Quake II engine sounds like an instant winner. This game is ambitious, and it thinks outside the box. While Carmack was the technical genius, Romero (also a programming wizard) may have been the more creative one in level design. He wanted to make Quake 1 actually far more ambitious than it ultimately landed up being, just a next-gen Doom, but still in the familiar formula. With Daikatana, he realizes his vision. As it is an experimental game, I find that while it does come from the same FPS tree as the id lineage, it is definitely of a different branch. Most notorious of this is the save system, which I get why they tried it. Levels are not too long; saves when changing levels; and find save gems which can be stored for manual saves, up to 3 in inventory. This system sounds good on paper, with more strategic choice of when to save, but in practice, you won't know if you should save just now or just around that corner. Maybe you meet an enemy and die. Maybe you wait a long lift ride and wish you didn't save. You won't know till you go around and die first probably (or make it whole way without saving.) I just land up having to re-do the level more often because of this, but it's a pointless gripe since these days mods give you normal infinite saves. The game interestingly has a light RPG-style leveling system and points for various abilities (str, agro, pwr, etc.) which is cool and unique, without deviating too far from what makes an FPS an FPS, and becoming like Deus Ex or something. The game's story is also really cool. You're a time-travelling samurai with jedi force ghosts. Cool soundtrack too. Ultimately, in story, setting, aesthetic, and gameplay, I find Daikatana to be a really fun and good classic FPS of the late 90s era; a spiritual Quake III if it had been singleplayer rather than multiplayer only.

I remember the ads. I remember "John Romero's about to make you his bitch." I remember the feeling I got when I first read that. Whoa, this is gonna be awesome. This game is gonna blow me away. Fast-forward to when it was actually released, and my mindset was different. I knew that I was going to play a game that was barely finished and had problems. But I still had fun. Especially the multiplayer. I liked a lot of the levels and weapons. Duke Nukem Forever is going to go down in history as a sort of Daikatana, but it'd be a ridiculous comparison. DNF was a much better game at the time of release, even considering it came out many years later. But Daikatana was still enjoyable, and if you could approach it neutrally and spend some time with it, chances are you had fun too. And if you never got that chance, maybe you owe it to yourself now to give it to yourself. Just realize that you missed the boat and you're not going to get the same experience because we expect a lot more from games now than we did then.

Gave game ago years ago and it really is bad, no idea why anyone would like. Very little ammo and very hard and absurd enemies to kill, terrible weapons to choose from and the story is embarrassing bad. Saying that though, it really had an very good atmosphere but that's it.

Yupp if your a true gamer, you know about this game. Its horrible level design is only second to the horrible choice to make you wait ALL THE FREAKING TIME for your slow dumb friendly AI. Not to mention the fact that you have to keep telling them to stop, go, stop, go, stop, go, Just to get them to make their way through a damn Air Duct. Oh yeah The Froginators, yupp just a precursor to the horrible enemies in this game. So after all that why the F would you wan play it? Because its actually not that bad, at least the GOG version isnt bad. I've tried in the past to play it but it always crashes, the GOG version has never crashed on me, which deserves two stars alone. Playing though the game if you can look past all the dumb bugs, you can actually get into it a bit, Yeah the Level design is a freaking mess, but damn is this game too famous for being horrible, yet playable to pass up. Thats why I game it a 4/5 The GOG version is so worth the $5.99 pricetag

I had played this on a home port *Nintendo 64* and liked it, however upon playing the first few levels I remembered the things I didn't like about this game. The first few levels are byfar the worst, and I would argue most boring *Come on, who really wants to shoot frogs, alligators, and mosquitoes in a swamp* The thing that irks me so much about this game is the savegems. I like games like Deus Ex where I can save whenever I please. This game, you'd be lucky if you can save conveniently. The graphics aren't awful but obviously look dated. I also get annoyed by the quit menu, this game reminds me of an arrogant person who claims to be the greatest thing in the world. When you manage to get past the crappy first part the game gets a little better. It is worth a play or two but it just feels subpar after playing certain games *Blood, Deus Ex, Serious Sam*