Project Warlock

I can't remember when this happened the last time around, getting really bored and indifferent with something right before the end of it. The more I think back on my playthrough, I can't help but feel, dissappointed.. I'll try to explain. The game, is not terrible. Far from it, it is functional little FPS. It does begin to suffer from issues after a while. The game, enginewise. Felt like it was Wolf3D with mouselook. I know that is not an accurate description of it, all I'm saying it FELT like that. This mitigates after getting your hands on some of the more powerfull weapons. But the world is still just a grid, enemies have very similar behaviours, they mostly just close the gap and come into shotgun range. The enemies did have some nice references woven in, but they still felt bland. The bosses, also, felt dissappointing, only the final boss gave me a feeling of impending doom. Majority was just circle-strafe bunny-hopped to victory. I don't know whether or not Warlock had any voice-lines (the trailer did have several Caleb-like quips), whatever sounds I heard that may have been character speaking were so quiet and repeatedly buried under all the other noises. The joy I got from this game was with the weapons, which ranged from basic to utter lunacy. They were the only golden halo like light in the tunnel of this whole marathon. Everything began to blur together, visually, audially and mechanically. The game turned into porridge in my mind, even during writing, I'm having issues trying to remember specific parts of it. The only feeling that rises from thinking of it, is indefference. So I really cannot personally recommend this game, if you want something to do, you can play Project Warlock for a few hours, if you are mentally conditioned to not feel repetition. Only to notice that there are no save slots and need to start the level you stopped at from the beginning. 3/5 "Needed more time in the oven."

This game is... good. I guess. When I first got my hands on it, I was not very experienced with classic shooters. So from this game I got the feeling that playing classic shooters was about fun shooting and navigating on poorly designed maps. Well after playing through first two Dooms on both vanilla and modern sourceports, Doom64, Wolf3D the first Quake, Blood and Shadow Warrior I gotta say - boy was I wrong. And maps in this game sucks so much. Someone didn´t pay much attention to textures and level design so most of the maps just look like the same narrow coridors, crawling with enemies. Fine by me. But if you kill them all, you still have to find a way to the next corridor. And repeat. And repeat. And again. Almost no fun twists, good traps, creative design choices... God, the map design is just awful and unfun. I mean... the game is kinda fun, but if you want to get that retro feeling of an old, sprite based shooter in a modern coat, just buy Doom 2 and run it on a modern source port like GZDoom with BrutalDoom mod. It´s much better. Also cheaper.

The core gameplay and visual design are pretty good. Your mileage may vary when it comes to retro pixel art but the homage to Wolfensten 3-D/DOOM era design did land fairly well for me. This limits the shooting mechanics a great deal as you're not dealing with real 3D space and there is zero verticality but the developers layered in some nice RPG leveling mechanics to spice things up. I played for a number of hours before realizing that there are a limited number of lives. Progres resets to the first level once those lives are gone. I don't think this is the right choice for this style of game and there simply is not enough communication about this when you're first learning how to play. Finally there are minor performance issues as other have mentioned. I simply bumped down the overal quality to Medium and saw a dramatic boost in performance without really much in the way of visual degradation. The developers lavished much attention on various retro display filters and it's debatable if that was a good use of resources for them.

It's a good little retro-shooter. I spent a day eating up, and haven't touched it since. Honestly it's a flash in the pan kinda game; because there a few quibbles. They nailed a good aesthetic, and the fully customized graphics options are cute, but clearly a novelty. The unlocks are well paced out and satisfying, but if you are like me and want to 100% unlocks, you'll be secret hunting for a bit. Later levels have no-return points that prevent getting them. I cheated and Youtube'd the few I missed on the second playthrough. I was hoping for wise-cracks like the trailer, but other than the Doom-esque text dumps at the end of episodes, the protagonist is mute. Poor showing. No Duke or Caleb here, except as easter eggs. The weapon upgrades are great though, they all feel like they can be useful, but some are way better than others, like the crossbow upgrades into a three-shot, or a balistae that pins enemies to walls painkiller-style. I'll let you guess which one is better and more fun to use. Shrapnel grenades are hella deadly, but I usually ate a decent chunk of the splash damage. Some mechanics feel last minute? I played with most of my points in guns. Spells are less useful for non-melee builds, and even on hard, I always swimming in extra lives. The hardest difficulty is ironman, so they are moot. I don't get it. Not to snub the game, it was fun, grungy boomer shooter with a lot of modern bells and whistles, it wasn't too long and didn't outlive it's welcome. With two play-throughs under my belt, i got 15hrs outta this, which isn't too shabby.

Project Warlock comes pretty close to the likes of Doom and Heretic, it sure as hell does a better job at being a classic FPS than Wrack or any other classic FPS clone. Unfortunately I could not rate it any higher as the level design is a little lacking and the game can start to feel repetitive after a short while.