Amazing level design, clever puzzles and ideas way before their time
Let me just start by saying that I LOVE this game. It may honestly sit on the throne of my favorite retro shooters right beside the original Doom. It features a lot more puzzle solving and exploration than your traditional 90's FPS and that's part of what makes this game so unique. You are not exploring standalone levels, you are visiting semi open worlds featuring places like catacombs, castles or dark forests with lots of detours and branching paths. What also greatly helps the level design and atmosphere is the fact that the Doom engine has been put to its absolute limit. Things like jumping and using items or coming across breakable glass or rotating walls is basically the norm here and it elevates the entire experience to the next level. I think it's also the only time I've ever seen waves on water in a doom game, so that's certainly a plus. Lot of people are complaining about the difficult puzzles and unreadabilty of the game, but I honestly think those claims are a bit overstated. During my entire playthrough, I only needed to use the guide twice or thrice, which I think is really not that awful. You will sometimes have to spend a few minutes searching for a switch or figuring out where to use a certain item, but for me that was a part of Hexen's appeal and if you're not willing to do that, you probably are going to have a bad time, but that's like playing Dark Souls and complaining that the game is too hard. You probably know what you're going into if you purchase Hexen. The game is not perfect. The pickup radius on items feels too small, so picking up ammo in a firefight might be difficult, the centaur enemies are really annoying and sometimes there just isn't enough mana around to kill everything. But if you're looking for a unique Doom experience and don't mind spending five or ten minutes on a puzzle, you definitely can't miss with Hexen. Disclaimer: I was playing with the GZDoom source port, so the experience may vary if you use something else
