Prodeus

Retro Doom feeling (I lost my way)

Just a great, hyper fast and well made FPS from start to finish. Great level design, good art, cool weapons, tight movement and a campaign that is just right in terms of length. Awesome music too. Well worth it, especially for Brutal Doom fans.

Hoooly cow!!! The name of this movie is called "LESSON LEARNED" PRODEUS has succeded extremely well to adapt modern DooM to an all timer FPS game. Basically it adapts all the mechanics that present DooM has to embed it into an old school FPS, just the way you'd love it. It is so good, it can even trick you to think this is a DooM sequel without having any plagiarism feeling : even Andrew Hulshult scored this one! Riffs, riffs and blood and more riffs! I could write tons of things to convince you, but you know what? If you have grown up like me, listening to Meshuggah and Fear Factory, you miss the first Quake (yeah the one with Reznor's soundtrack) after having played dozens of souless FPS, but you loved Doom (2016) and Eternal....THEN...this is the pixel butcher you was praying for! ALREADY A MASTERPIECE

I originally backed the game even though I disliked the visuals, because it was said I can turn off the retro look. This is currently true only partially, as you can for example change monsters to 3D models, but any pickups or pre-placed gibs will still be 2D sprites. And this mix will make the game look weird. Also I initially played the Alpha on gamepad and it wasn't a great experience, mainly due to cumbersome weapon switching system. But for EA, I switched to slower computer with m+k and the experience changed drastically. Due to slower hardware, I was forced to pick up the retro visuals and reduce the resolution to 270p. From this point on, I had so much fun with the game! The "downgraded" visuals play into game strengths, obscuring the fact it uses only three colors most of the time (grey, red and white - I cannot describe how much I miss colorful monsters from Doom Eternal). Mouse is really a must have for this game since nailing headshots is essential, so you won't run out of ammo all of the time on medium difficulty. This is even more pronounced by the fact that pistol is essentially powerful as a sniper rifle, while shotgun works as expected only if you showe it directly in the demon's mouth. Weapon switching still cumbersome, but you have the number keys to your help. Apart from normal levels, you can also try particulary clever and addictive time trials and of course community maps that add a lot of extra hours to the gameplay. As for the level editor itself - it is far more complex than SnapMap or classic DoomBuilder, but given the ambices, that isn't a bad thing, it just requires way more dedication to get into it over the two mentioned. Overall, this is a great buy, even in EA, even with 5-6 hour campaign so far. If you can play on m+k, love classic Dooms and disliked Doom Eternal and SnapMap, buy this. But be prepared for sort of boring color pallete, weird level and weapon switching, weak-feeling shotgun and complex editor.

Prodeus has a lot of good things going for it, it plays well, looks good, is responsive and has a reasonable amount of options - with more to come, hopefully. The Early Access-release is missing a few things, the campaign is incomplete and there is no multiplayer still, which the developers have stated is in the works. The most immediate "issue" is how similar it is to the Doom-series in terms of enemies, levels and many weapons. If you're fine with that it's very good, but it doesn't have much of its own flavor, and some of the weapons and alternate fire modes are a bit similar or weak, particularly the Shredders vs the Chaingun and the Shotgun alt-fire. There's nothing new here, and while it does an adequate job across the board it lacks the attitude that was a big part of real retro shooters from the 90s. There's no outspoken player character like in Duke Nukem, or even much expression in the portrait like Doom and Quake. That said, I feel it does a better job at being cohesive than many other "boomer shooter" throwback games. It takes something that works, and iterates on it a little bit without straying too far. I feel it takes a lot of queues from Doom 2016 as well in terms of atmosphere, particularly the first few levels and the accompanying music, with later levels being much more distinct to Prodeus. A couple things that retro gamers might be apprehensive about is the reloading of some weapons and the checkpoint system. The former is a bit weird if you come straight from Doom and Quake, but makes sense in the context of Prodeus when you start getting more weapons to cycle between during encounters and reload during breaks in the action. The checkpoint system meanwhile does not reset enemies, meaning you won't be bashing your head against the wall if an encounter is particularly difficult or cheap - but most levels aren't that long, and you want to aim for zero deaths on the score screen. It's adequate. Overall, it's pretty fun.