Project Warlock

While Project Warlock is clearly a labor of love, and attempts to leverage the appeal of retro FPS quite well, it ends up being less than the sum of its parts. In it's favor, spritework is excellent, and weapons are mostly satisfying to use, and some of the enemies are interesting, The game is let down in a number of key areas -Overdone high contrast filter: I can't tell if some areas are dark, or if it's the high contrast style. -Jank: The game feels unpolished, with some wierd bugs, such as mouse sensitivity varying depending on which direction you are looking in, or some perks, such as the movement speed upgrade not appearing to do anything. The hitboxes for the environment are way off, causing crossbow bolts to get stuck on nothing, or grenades to blow up in your face by hitting a lightbulb above you. -Boring environments and encounters: Despite having a large variety of enemies to encounter across its many themed worlds, most of them react in the same way, not requiring any change in strategy in dealing with them. This meant combat felt more like quicktime events than fps combat; see monster, click. This gets better in the later episodes, and relying on melee combat can make things more interesting, but isn't really viable due to the awful, corridor/maze focused level design that has you backtracking and searching for that button you've missed until some more monsters spawn out of nowhere. By focusing on a Wolf3d style grid, it restricts many levels to a labyrinth design, which meshes poorly with so many enemies having projectile attacks; you don't have room to manoeuvre. -Crap spells: The spells are crap. -Crap RPG system: you can level up and upgrade your gear, but putting points into anything other than HP or Ammo seems pointless, and some upgrades make weapons unusable, like the shrapnel grenade which will do more damage to you than the enemy. Ultimately, it became a chore to play, which is a great shame, as it shows so much promise.

It's like a fps like wolf3D but more than that, let's say it's like the good old dungeons fps but it adds a ton of good stuff! I started to play it but i like it a lot yet. Fun rpg elements with mana, level up, ammo, upgrades for weapon ect... Dungeonn style but you can have some elevator and vertical traps! The enemies can be killed slowly and lost some parts of their body for some of them. The animation system is amazing for a game supposed to be just like a dungeon fps! If you like Dungeon game with FPS view/action, you can like it and if you like fps and don't care so much about verticality, you can like it too!

I had a lot of fun playing the first levels. Shooting and movement feels good, the weapons have a good sound and feel "physical". Weapon behaviour is a bit same-y, the only difference between the weapons seems to be power and reload time, except for the wand (which lets you kill several enemies in a row) or the dynamite (which has an area-of-effect and can easily kill hard enemies). I like the kind of secrets that I have encountered so far, where you have to keep an eye out for irregularities. You are rewarded for being perceptive instead of being forced to try to press the use key on every damn wall, like in other games. Then came the first boss... At first I thought, that I was doing something wrong, but it seems that there is no special trick. You just have to shoot its HP down, while dodging and killing random spawning mooks. The boss's attacks seem irregular and random, with no apparent pattern which attack is fired when. The last phase of the boss is just a floating torso, which hunts you down with melee attacks, with no possibility to dodge or avoid them. If you don't have enough HP or damage to quickly rid of the boss, you are toast. And then your lives are used up. No continues. No save game. You have to start from the beginning. The game was fun, but not that much fun, that I would play the same thing over and over again, just to be stuck with the boss once more. I am also questioning the decision to include lives as a mechanic at all. I didn't lose a life until the boss. The game was fun, not awfully challenging. Then I played the boss for the first time and was instantly killed by its first attack. All the games that were the inspiration for Project Warlock don't have lives, but Save/Load mechanics instead. Lives would maybe make sense in a kind of Rogue-Lite gameplay, but this is not this kind of game. You lose all your weapons and progress, so there is no point. I'd like to love this game, but it doesn't let me.

The developers unfortunatly commited one of the worst crimes in my opinion when it comes to PC Shooters. Not having true free look. By that I mean that the crosshair moves at the speed and precision of your regular mouse movements. This game does not. This game has that awful "dragging the crosshair through mud" feeling, which, in my book, makes a fastpaced shooter unplayable.

This game simply has too many technical issues going on, it doesn't look authentic to the games it's trying to ape most of the time and injects costly post processing that barely makes a difference visually but very much bogs down performance. Technical issues like the resolution resetting on zone change have been left unfixed for half a year with no end in sight. The gameplay itself isn't so bad, you fight enemies and find keys to find your way to the final door of the level, collecting experience along the way that makes you level up. The point gained here allow you to unlock magic abilities that barely matter and upgrade weapons that do matter. The sound design for most enemies and weapons is decent. The music comes off as distinctly amateurish. Overall it just can compare to the myriad of other retro revival shooters out right now. You're probably way better off playing brutal doom.