This game basically tries to reboot the classic Build Engine shooter by 3D Realms into a Serious Sam game, with very mixed results. The levels are about as linear as something you'd find in a modern military shooter for the Xbox 360, with what the game calls "secrets" most of the time being just barely off the beaten path. A fair amount of the levels also consist of drab industrial areas that wouldn't feel out of place in a Call of Duty game, although the more traditionally Asian areas are pretty cool. The guns are awfully weak too; the revolver is bafflingly inaccurate, the machine gun feels like a literal pea shooter, most enemies will just charge straight through your flamethrower fire and the shotgun needs multiple blasts to bring down even small enemies at point blank range. The crossbow and rocket launcher fare somewhat better, but still pale in comparison to ones from other games. The one weapon that felt consistently good was the katana, which has some pretty cool special moves and becomes especially fun to use in new game plus. All in all, I honestly came away from this game feeling pretty disappointed. It neither plays to the strengths of the classic game it tries to reboot, nor does it do a good enough job to really stand on its own.
Oblivion has always been a game that I've felt conflicted about. On one hand, I had a lot of fun roaming Cyrodiil and looking for dungeons to loot and genuinely cool quests to do, but on the other I can't help but lament the unique atmosphere and world that was lost going from Morrowind to Oblivion. The strange, alien landscape and culture of its predecessor is pretty much completely lost, replaced with disappointly generic green hills and cookie-cutter European fantasy. A lot of the variety of Morrowind has also been stripped out, with several weapon types being completely gone or incorporated into others, and the list of guilds you can join being more than cut in half. And most annoyingly, Oblivion introduces harsh level scaling to most of the content, meaning that if you're not careful with how you level up your character combat might become damn near impossible because the game only looks at your overall level and not at which skills or attributes you've improved. I won't deny that I've probably spent over a hundred hours on the game and that I had a good time though, but it's even harder to deny that Oblivion is a marked step down from Morrowind.
Compared to the Doom and Quake, Wolfenstein 3D is easily the hardest to go back to out of Id Softwares old-school FPS games. The main thing holding the game back is really just that it lacks the variety that make those other two so great. There are three guns in the game, and they're all basically just fire rate upgrades. The levels are maze-like hallways with the same texture over and over again and very little in the way of features to orient yourself after. The enemies are also pretty much just variants of the same basic guard you see in the first level, with the occasional dog or boss thrown in. There's still fun to be had with Wolfenstein 3D, especially playing on higher difficulties where small mistakes can leave you dangerously low on health and ammo, but at the end of the day it's hard to recommend Wolfenstein 3D over pretty much any of the old-school FPS that it inspired.
I've played my fair share of FPS campaigns over the years, but this is the one I keep coming back to. It doesn't have any of the fancy set-pieces or complicated narratives of more modern games, but what it does have is some of the most fun, frantic and satisfying gameplay I've ever experienced. Doomguy runs like a cheetah, hits like a truck and has the quintessential FPS arsenal at his disposal. Blasting your way through the minions of hell with double-barreled shotguns, rocket launchers and chainsaws while scouring every nook and cranny of the level for movable walls hiding extra health, armor and ammo is still as engaging as it has ever been. That said, I do think that installing a modern source port like gzDoom is pretty much a must nowadays. The higher resolutions and wealth of control options are a godsend compared to wrestling with DOSbox, and they don't interfere at all with the original games design as long as you turn off jumping.
I was recently inspired to revisit this game after seeing Warlockracy's videos about Tamriel Rebuilt and although the beginning can be a bit rough (a low HP pool and frequent missing is a great recipe for frustration), I have to say that this game holds up remarkably well even some nineteen years and two sequels after its release. The gameplay itself is nothing to write home about, consisting mostly of clicking to swing your weapon or cast your spell and hoping that the dice rolls for hitting and how much damage you do are in your favor, but the game more than makes up for it with its setting. The island of Vvardenfell is quite unlike any other, with no generic fantasy countryside to be seen anywhere. Instead you're greeted with swamplands full of rundown little fishing villages, volcanic ash deserts where people live in houses resembling giant insect shells, rocky islets where wizard towers made from giant fungi and roots stand tall and a savanna populated by nomadic tribals, not to mention the central volcano of Red Mountain with its ash creatures and the floating city of Vivec which houses one of the living gods of the indigenous dunmer people. The island is positively bursting at the seams with character and just begging to be explored, studied and made home. I honestly can't recommend it enough for anyone looking for a strange, alien world to disappear into for a while.
