DUSK

Last year I had a blast playing classic FPS DOOM64, DOOM wads like Pirate Doom and Adventures of Square, as well as retroshooters AMID EVIL and Hedon. So naturally I had my eyes on DUSK as well, and yet I was unsure whether I would have the same kind of fun with it, despite the overwhelmingly positive ratings, because for one, I'm not a great fan of the horror theme and even worse, the graphics in screenshots and footage looked way uglier than most 90's FPS to me. But in the end, I decided to take the risk and just buy it anyway (not least because the dev used to be one of us goglodytes).

And I was positively surprised - all my worries were unfounded. Despite the crude graphics and theme, it plays very similar to the other games mentioned above and is just as much fun as them, if not even more so. The level design is awesome, there are lots of secrets to discover, ducts to crawl through, pools to dive in, lots of verticality as well - stairs, jumppads, underwater tunnels, chasms, and the greatest thing: no fall damage -, plus the levels are extremely varied, all of which makes exploration a joy. You also get a lot of bang for your buck, with 3 episodes à 10 (+1 secret) levels each, and yet, since the levels were so diverse and entertaining, I never felt like the game overstayed its welcome. Once you've unlocked a level you can directly select it from the start menu as well in order to replay it, e.g. to find missed secrets, try a speedrun or different difficulty, and you can modify your loadout, max or min the amount of all or specific ammunition.

The weapons are your standard FPS arsenal, but well done, and they also include more medieval weapons like sword and crossbow that can give some levels a slightly different feel, like you're in a hack and slash dungeon crawl all of a sudden. And you can pick up common items like gas cans, saw blades or soap bars and throw them at your enemies. Story and theme don't take themselves too serious, in fact it feels like a wild ride through the 90's and early 00', a pastiche of themes and tropes from all those classic FPS games, be it DOOM, Quake, Blood, Heretic, Half Life and hilariously even a bit of Wolfenstein, and yet it's all consistent and self-contained, no cheap parody; a retro hommage done right. And the graphics, while ugly, are still very atmospheric, and sometimes there is even some kind of beauty in all the ugliness. Last but not least, the sound design is creepy in a good way, and the soundtrack is kick-ass, really egging you on to wreak havoc.

I have a few points of minor criticism, or even just neutral observations that I didn't find 100% positive. First off, I don't usually have issues with motion sickness in FPS games, but in the beginning, playing DUSK actually gave me headaches and even made me slightly nauseous at times, so I could only play it in short burst, and I found that I was not the only one surprised by this problem. It's partially the Quake-like movement speed, I think, but more so the constant camera bobbing. I managed to fix it by making sure Weapon Sway, Camera Animations and Vertical Flipping was toggled off, and whenever the player character randomly got intoxicated by drinking a bottle of beer (which restores morale, the game's equivalent to armor), I did not move and just waited for the camera swaying effect to wear off bevore moving on.

I also wasn't particularly fond of the Save/Load screen, because yes, it's the same screen for saving and loading, and on top of it, instead of buttons saying "Save" and "Load", you have disk symbols that differ only in the direction that the small arrow on them is pointing to, towards the disk or away from it. I was constantly worried that I would confuse the two in the heat of the moment and load instead of save or vice versa. Thankfully it never actually happened, and in the game's defense, it asks for confirmation / renaming before overwriting an existing savegame. But all the savegames are sorted by name, not date, at least if you rename them, which made it harder to find the most recent one and I had to start naming them "00 - name", "0 - name", "- name" etc., just to make sure the latest savegame would appear among those at the very top of the list.

Lastly: RATS. I hated those in Blood already and was not happy to see them appear in DUSK as well. But the dev was probably aware of how annoying and hateable they are and used them on purpose to troll the players. The bosses also weren't that great, but considering that I don't really like boss battles in general, I found them to be okay, not frustrating, and I actually liked that you could cheese most of them (once I knew what I would be dealing with, I could end the fights pretty quickly, using the bigger guns). By the way, I thought the middle difficulty (there are five) was comparatively easy, especially considering you can save and quicksave wherever you want to (easier than DOOM, I think, and much easier than Blood). I didn't mind that at all, I had fun, just saying that the average gamer looking for a challenge might want to choose one difficulty level above it (or abstain from saving for longer intervals) at least .

Anyway, all in all, I thought it's a very entertaining retro shooter, and I did not regret buying it a single time.