WRATH: Aeon of Ruin

Very good and polished game, having a lot of fun... this looks like a spiritual sucessor to Quake 1

The game isn't quite where it should be, all things told. For the record, I have never played any of the Arcane Dimensions mod content, but I'm lead to believe the levels in are are just as long as those found here, which I'm not a fan of. They just seem to overstay their welcome a bit, if I'm honest. Most of them take about 40 min to complete, so you'll be chomping on them in short bursts unless you've got a lot of time on your hands to complete them. But they are beautiful to see in such an old engine, with excellent art direction and colour palettes that work WITH the game, and a part of me wishes this game were designed as an RPG, so I could take my time to immerse myself in them further. Still, we got a pretty solid shooter, for all of the imbalancing that goes on with the weapons. Each one feels good, don't get me wrong, and there's something satisfying about each enemy death, though there are those weapons that will stick out, and those that will probably get neglected until you've run out of ammo for the guns you prefer to use. The game actually feels more like a melee focused FPS at times, with how you'll be using your arm blade and an end-game weapon, the mace, so much. Both of which are CQC weapons. I spent SO MUCH TIME getting in the face of enemies with most of the weapons, and it's crazy. The funniest thing is the secondary on your arm blade is one of the most powerful in the ENTIRE GAME. Seriously, you'll be thrusting through enemy faces and gibbing them hard more times than you'd expect. It's not a complaint, but certainly odd. Music by Hulshult is very sublte, sometimes barely there at all, though at other times when things are quiet, you get to stand there and let the mood drape over you while you look over a dead world. I would say my favorite track (one previewed in a Tweet by Hulshult himself) is from the map "The Red Throne", and honestly hits closer to that battle-infused "drumming" that I was hoping to hear more of. Money well spent, TBH

What was the second one, you say!? Obviously, DARK! And now, thiw WRATH. This should not be something remarkable except because in more than 25 years nobody has really attempted to capture this atmosphere or type of gameplay. XXI century second decade has been defined by nostalgia, and considering this I must say it's weird to me to accept there are only two Quekish games so far. Good news?! You are going to enjoy this like hell! I don't know at which phase of development this is, I just clicked on BUY...you do the same, and will find an amazing game with cool above average level design, cool 90s graphics with todays power and lots, lots, lots of bullets and monsters to kill. Tonight I'm going to sleep like a baby and thank the earth to be alive today.

Very good shooter overall. + Levels are large, interesting and well designed with cool themes. + Satisfying gunplay and gibs, delicious stuff. + Enemies are quite well designed overall with a good variety and mixture, and can be nasty in combos to fight against. + Great visuals and art direction, really nice. + Movement is mostly very tight and fun, dashing is a lot of fun. - The final hub world tends to run out of steam a bit with some annoying level design. The game doesn't handle stairs very well so there's a lot of sliding down them and accidentally falling into pits. It's an irritant. - In the final hub there are many surprise enemy encounters which catch you off guard in a stupid way. For example, there are some areas where a very powerful enemy will spawn behind you suddenly and smack you from behind. Not really fun or challenging, more just a bit of a d**k move from the level designers here. - There are two particular enemies - the brute and fire golem - which are annoyingly tanky and do obscene amounts of dmg on hard mode. Their HP needs a bit of a debuff. ------------------------------------------------------------ It's overall very good and I do recommend it. I finished it on hard and it was mostly fine sans the two enemies I mentioned and the dmg they dealt. I don't recommend playing it on hard unless you're quite the vet of classic shooters like Quake and Unreal. It is relentlessly punishing. I found it fun, but medium is probably the way to go. Also, use the blade of ruination often (the starting melee weapon). It is VERY high dmg and can shred some of the tankier enemies very fast. The game favours offensive play. 4.5 stars.

The basic game is actually very good. Movement is fluid and fast, The Gunplay is good, The levels are well designed and reminiscent of the olden days (except bigger) and so on. But you can't see half of it. Wide portions of the levels are so dark that the first clue that an enemy is in front of me was getting his shotgun blast right into my face. I sometimes had to scan dark areas with the crosshair, seeing if it would turn orange, meaning it was right over an enemy. Also, this game being in the same vein as classics like Quake, death can come quite sudden at times. Did you just jump across a wide chasm with the secondary fire of your blade? Thus having the blade and not a better weapon equipped? And suddenly find yourself face to face with a huge acid throwing beast you couldn't see from the other side? BOOM! you're dead. Wouldn't be anything special, if you wouldn't have to rely on consumable items (soul tethers) for your saving. In a game where death can come so sudden, that is simply not a good idea. That wasn't a thing back in the day with e.g. Quake for a reason, I imagine. Why the devs chose to deviate in such an important aspect from the tried and true formula is beyond me. Especially in such an annoying way. I hope in the finished game you will at least get an indication when you're drawing near a shrine (those serve basically as one-time autosaves). I placed more than one soul-tether before turning a corner and standing in front of one of those... would be quite the quality of life improvement. As the game is now it is a great game marred by those two needless annoyances.