I was pretty excited to see this here on GOG. I thought perhaps IO had finally removed all of the annoying online-only DRM from the game. Unfortunately, that's not the case, you still need to use the online DRM to do anything except the most basic run of the missions. All of the replayability is locked behind their online DRM. I don't even know why they would release it here when it's still crippled by DRM.
It's got the attitude, the gameplay, the graphical style, the lovable jankyness, the AI that works well enough to instantly kick your ass on harder difficulties, the wisecracking main character... Even the controversy of 90s era shooters. This new Build Engine game is everything you could want from a straight up first person shooter game. It's got ridiculously detailed levels for a 2.5D shooter, the gameplay is mostly finding keys to progress, but the level pathing helps make the gameplay interesting, dynamic, and fun. You can usually find multiple paths between the choke points that often serve as battle areas. You can collect weapons and health/armor pickups along the way and if you're lucky extra weapons/health/armor/timed-boosts from any secrets you can find along the way. The secrets are numerous and some are really difficult get access too. I think I found about half of them by hunting a normal amount. Once you're stocked up and come to a choke point/arena you engage in battle with waves of mixed enemy types that encourage you to switch your armaments on-the-fly to whatever is most appropriate to the enemy at the time. I find it to be great fun in practice. While the game is pretty linear, it's not all in a straight line, you often backtrack in interesting ways that allows you to experience the enemy arenas from a different POV. The levels all flow nearly seamlessly between one another which creates a nice forward narrative but still allows you to backtrack and rescue 'saved' powerups in some situations. Often 2-3 levels will form a little seamless section where you can go back and forth until you move on past some sort of environmental gate that stops you from returning later. I am very glad to see 3D Realms and Voidpoint succeed with a badass new FPS in a marketplace saturated by MMOs, lootbox singleplyer games, grinding open world games, and pre-order hell.
