It's a love letter to the 90's FPS genre that refreshes the old formula by keeping everything familiar: wide-open rooms and narrow corridors, labyrinths, multi-colored keycards and secrets galore. Running from room to room, wiping out waves of enemies with your choice of over a dozen different weapons in classic style, slinging magical spells and generally just feeling powerful as all get out- all to a wonderful soundtrack that combines creep factor, synth and chiptune sounds and pure headbanging material all perfectly suited to your frantic, blood-stained trek. Adding to the formula, Project Warlock sports a cunning upgrade and levelling system that allows you to mix and match weapon upgrades and skill point allocation, adding a level of replayability that will have you coming back to experiment time and again. Aside from a few spikes and lulls in difficulty that left me either frustrated or frankly bored, the only things I can find complaint with are the brightness and the bosses. Oftentimes I felt shackled to my Light spell (I'm looking at you, stages 3 and 4) to such a degree that I oftentimes forgot that I -had- other spells to use. Though not game-breaking, I found myself needing to light up the room between shots (or in my run's case, axe swings) just to make sure I wasn't swinging at nothing, leaving my arsenal of other powerful abilities mostly untouched. As far as the bosses go, you won't find much here I'm afraid. The bosses of the first two stages felt at least somewhat challenging, and required me to think on my feet. The others afterwards... less so. Perhaps this was the nature of my build (here's Johnny), or perhaps it was simply a matter of poor design, but of the things worth killing, the bosses weren't really it. Regardless, I had a fantastic time with this, and if you're a fan of old-timey FPS games, you will too. And at such a low price, it's worth every penny.
