It could have been a little more polished, shinier and more varied (the enemy types, room types, weapons, perks, items etc are all rather limited and the various upgrades aren't quite hard hitting) for the asking price (which is on par with games that had full production teams behind them rather than just two brothers) but I can't complain as it's good fun regardless. It definitely feels old school. Not Doom old school, instead something that could have been released alongside Quake III and Unreal Tournament, but of course this is a single player game, not an arena shooter. At the same time it doesn't feel like a copy cat or a rip off of anything else and does new things that fit the style well. I've tried some other "roguelike FPS" games that appeared recently and I feel this is the most fun and overall well made of the bunch, although the others may each do one or another element better. I hope the sales enable them to do a sequel while also contracting additional staff to improve the aspects it is most lacking in and maybe add co-op.
Cute characters, humour, graphics, dialogues, even puzzles, this game oozes charm. I'm not too far but I'll definitely keep playing. It appears to be extremely well polished and responsive with none of the minor or major issues other adventure games often display (for example badly done main character animations that you constantly have to suffer while moving around, here they have the same restrictions in frames and variety but they work perfectly with the chosen art style). I'll update the rating to be less than the four starts I'm giving it right now if it somehow turns sour later on, though as I understand it I won't be able to update the text to explain exactly what caused it.
I'm a big enough fan of old school FPS games. I adore One Unit Whole Blood, I like Duke Nukem 3D and the Doom games, I found Exhumed/Powerslave (on console, the PC game of the same name was sadly awful) to be an incredible experience. But this thing, this is half-finished at best. It has performance issues yet looks extremely garish. It has no sense of style or coherency. It has gameplay issues (hit or miss melee detection, dodgy iron sight systems, broken damage direction indicator, poor AI with hitscan weapons, flat level design, and so on). If the game it's based on is great like some of the games in my first paragraph (I haven't played it) I recommend playing that instead of this re-imagining. Hard Reset (from the same developers, right?) wasn't a great game but at least it felt finished, polished, it didn't have iron sights with weird zoom in/out behaviour and its world had a coherent look where every element blended in decently enough. I've played through a few levels of this game's Steam version and I just can't keep going. It's bad. This is not how a classic FPS should return. Go replay One Unit Whole Blood instead, it has similar b movie tones (but on the horror side) yet is far more successfully presented and leagues ahead in gameplay. And it looks better than this 2013 game. Seriously. Don't listen to the marketing shills.
A solid introduction to Spiderweb's RPGs and old school CRPGs in general. A little too streamlined and simplistic for the hardcore fan of the genre but still an enjoyable journey.
