While Project Warlock is clearly a labor of love, and attempts to leverage the appeal of retro FPS quite well, it ends up being less than the sum of its parts. In it's favor, spritework is excellent, and weapons are mostly satisfying to use, and some of the enemies are interesting, The game is let down in a number of key areas -Overdone high contrast filter: I can't tell if some areas are dark, or if it's the high contrast style. -Jank: The game feels unpolished, with some wierd bugs, such as mouse sensitivity varying depending on which direction you are looking in, or some perks, such as the movement speed upgrade not appearing to do anything. The hitboxes for the environment are way off, causing crossbow bolts to get stuck on nothing, or grenades to blow up in your face by hitting a lightbulb above you. -Boring environments and encounters: Despite having a large variety of enemies to encounter across its many themed worlds, most of them react in the same way, not requiring any change in strategy in dealing with them. This meant combat felt more like quicktime events than fps combat; see monster, click. This gets better in the later episodes, and relying on melee combat can make things more interesting, but isn't really viable due to the awful, corridor/maze focused level design that has you backtracking and searching for that button you've missed until some more monsters spawn out of nowhere. By focusing on a Wolf3d style grid, it restricts many levels to a labyrinth design, which meshes poorly with so many enemies having projectile attacks; you don't have room to manoeuvre. -Crap spells: The spells are crap. -Crap RPG system: you can level up and upgrade your gear, but putting points into anything other than HP or Ammo seems pointless, and some upgrades make weapons unusable, like the shrapnel grenade which will do more damage to you than the enemy. Ultimately, it became a chore to play, which is a great shame, as it shows so much promise.
