Project Warlock is a fun retro shooter with solid gameplay, a stylish pseudo-retro look, and an awesome soundtrack. However, there are a number of issues with it I feel need to be highlighted. Mediocre RPG mechanics; You have 4 stats you can add into: Strength (increases melee damage), Life (increases health), Spirit (increases mana pool and magic damage), and Capacity (increases maximum ammo pool). Strength is absolutely worthless, while Magic is not much better, given that guns are the meat of the game, and you only have 8 spells (and one mana-powered weapon). The game has no save system, requiring you to finish a level to mark your progress. If you die, you lose a life and restart the whole level. Janky map design; the pseudo-Wolf3D map design means its mostly very flat, limiting what the devs can do with the maps. Some of the early levels were full of very tight corridors, essentially removing the need to aim or think; just a bunch of winding W+M1 snoozefest mazes. buttons are single use only, meaning you can only go up an elevator once, and take a separate elevator down once, again, severely limiting map design potential. Very few bugs, but the ones I did run into were pretty serious; sometimes my grenades would fly off perpendicular to where I was looking. When I upgraded my rockets to hitscan, occassionally my attacks would target a single spot on the map, regardless of where I was looking. After killing the final boss, my camera switched to a cinematic POV, which was cool, but the game would not continue and I had to forcibly close the game. A more harmless bug I had was that my dynamite ammo would always be replenished at the start of a new round, and I ended up using it more than might have been balanced. All that being said, I still recommend Project Warlock. Its still a fun game, and the bugs I encountered were not very frequent.
For its time, maybe Enclave was a masterpiece. It looked great for a 2003 game, and has some timeless good music. The story was interesting, and the way its told rather engaged me. Now, though, its flaws really show. The game is more or less entirely about combat, and the combat is extremely frustrating and tedious. You have one attack button and no control over which way you swing your weapon, and melee combat mostly revolves around backpedaling and diving in like you would in Doom or The Elder Scrolls, only worse. Ranged combat is not much better, as your projectiles are extremely tiny, and a little deviation from the centre of your target and it will miss altogether. There are no real RPG elements in this game aside from allocating your gold to better gear before a mission. There is no real difference in function between weapons of the same class, and while that sounds okay in a game like Diablo, it doesn't translate well into a third person hack and slash game. Aside from a different skin and attack power, all weapons do pretty much the same thing. tl;dr If you're looking for a combat ARPG, in this day and age, stuff like the Souls series are far better.
