Viscerafest

Viscerafest wears its Doom inspiration on its sleeve, from the weapon UI to the sprite-based enemies and environmental objects, while pursuing its own balls-hard slant on the combat -- and this is where it stumbles right off a cliff for me. The character, setting, music? They're fine. The manual limited checkpointing system is pretty clever. The level design, taken in a vacuum, is... alright. But the only way to survive in this game is by bunnyhopping around fast enough to avoid enemy projectiles, in extremely boxy and rather closed-in levels that don't really allow you the room to do this properly, while affording you an utter pittance of ammo and thereby expecting you to maintain pinpoint accuracy and punch the smaller enemies whenever possible. While trying to bunnyhop through claustrophobic levels and your targets are single-facing 2D sprites in a 3D environment. I don't think I should need to explain further why this comes together as a horrible clashing of elements. There is method to the madness, but it doesn't feel like I'm learning anything, adapting, or getting better. I'm just throwing myself into the meat grinder however many consecutive times it takes until just enough of the enemy shots happen to go wide that I don't die. Go look up some free Doom mods! There are probably plenty you haven't played yet that are a better time than this.

Bunny Hopping Nirvana. This game is so fast and smooth, and I dig the campy story. Ammo is limited and that is inherent to game balance. If you want to be able to spray and pray like you're playing Serious Sam then this might not be the game for you.

Imagine if you took the pulp sci-fi look of the Blake Stone series of games (with a heaping of Synthwave aesthetics thrown in for good measure), put ION Fury's main character in it (but more eldritch and unhinged; you can tell Caroline's voice actress is having a lot of fun voicing the character) and covered it all with some tasty Doom Eternal gameplay sauce, i.e.: - Lighting fast combat. - Extremely powerful and accurate enemies. - Slick air control - Dashing maneuvers - Having to kill to replenish resources, specially health. and you've got yourself Viscerafest. Even if it's still in early access, what is already here (the complete first chapter of a planned 3) puts a lot of other FPS games to shame. And the music! It's a sort of synthwave-metal hybrid that sounds as if Quake 2 had been developed by Amiga demosceners. IMHO, it's Markie Music's best work to date. Also, the king of video s**tposting himself Gianni Matragrano voices several characters in the game. What's not to like?. Word of warning, though, this game is very, very difficult. It expects you to be very quick on your feet and pulls no punches at all. One of the best retro-throwback FPS of recent years by far, imho. Way up there with the new greats of the genre like DUSK and ION Fury.

It's fast, hard and quite fun. I like the premise for the story, I love when John Carmack is prooven wrong, specially on his own genere. The voice acting for Caroline is just on point, that crazy laughter really gets me. I found no bugs, only dead end is getting trapped in a locker. Keep in mind the game is in very early acces, and even though it works well, it's quite short and a lot of stuff hasn't been implemented yet. I'm letting it brew on my library for a few more months, it's a very promising game so far.