I feel like a lot of people are going to pick this game up thinking it's a spiritual successor to Doom, but while it does have some Doom-like elements, its much more like Wolfenstein. If you buy this expecting Doom, you will be SLIGHTLY disappointed. Disappointed with the level design, specifically. Levels are mostly cramped, grid mazes full of baddies and goodies hidden behind humpable walls. This is a far cry from the vast, open city maps of Doom 2, even early maps from Doom are larger and more open than many of the maps you'll encounter throughout the first half of this game. If you go into this game knowing you're getting Wolfenstein maps, and not Doom maps, your experience will be much better off for it. Gameplay is fast, guns are all fun, and enemies are varied (though a few in each act are mere reskins of the same basic enemy type). There are numerous nods to classic shooters from the 90's, ranging from simple references to proper game mechanics. I don't want to spoil too much but there really is something for everyone here, even the tragically forgotten Blood fanbase. My only criticism of this wonderful game is that it lacks polish. Your remap options are... limited. I've always remapped my 6-0 weapons to z-b (I'm not weird, you're weird) and I can't do that in Warlock so boo. There's also a handful of little glitches and exploits, like infinite experience points if you keep opening/closing a secret area via a switch. Also I think maze levels are tiresome, but that might just be me.
Fairly solid beat-em-up, but is borderline unplayable unless you're playing with friends. The problem lies with the game's gimick, the "Nekro" drug that you inject yourself with and extract from fallen enemies. In a multiplayer game, this mechanic adds a lot of interesting interactions to yet another entry in an otherwise predictable genre. Since extracting Nekro takes time ( a LOT of time) you and your friends will be regularly covering one other while the other extracts. Note that you need to protect your friends while they extract, or vice versa? Guess what will definitely not be happening in solo play. As cool as the Nekro mechanics are, in single player you'll rarely have a chance to extract from enemies as you're under constant assault. Combined with the facts that enemies that carry Nekro are rare, there is a limited amount of time in which you can extract from them, AND you absolutely NEED Nekro to keep yourself alive, you have a perfect storm of frustration. To be fair, bots are available. The catch here is that the bots are pretty dumb. Nearly every stage has some sort of environmental hazzard and these bots have no idea how to handle them. Before Mother Russia Bleeds, I've never witnessed someone just hang out near a live grenade. So, bots are dumb, who cares? Just bring them along, whats the worst that could happen, you might think. Well, the game scales the size of enemy mobs based on the number of players. So, sure, bring bots, they might accidentally watch your back while you extract once or twice. And then they die, and you can either use that Nekro you've been saving up to revive them, or you can fight four players worth of enemies all alone. Basically, if you've got 1-3 friends that definately want to play this game, pick it up. Otherwise, I'd skip it.
Lots of good ideas, fun concepts, completely ruined by shoddy execution. The game features wall-jumping that only works sometimes. Sometimes you jump up and start sliding on a wall, other times you'll jump up and fall right back down as though the wall wasn't there. This is a very intense sort of game where platforming perfection is needed to elude enemies and stay out of their line of sight, so it's extremely frustrating when you try to bounce up a wall and out of sight only to instead land right back where you were and alert the enemies. More on jumping, it feels like the game was built with double-jumping in mind, but you don't actually start with double-jump unlocked. Early game, it is entirely possible to find yourself in a part of the level that you cannot get out of because you don't have double jump. You also don't start with Hacking unlocked, either. At the start of the game you need to make 100 monies in order to unlock hacking, which in turn lets you hack computers to make even more money. In fact, hacking computers IS the way you make money! So how do you make money before you can make money? In addition to computers, each level has about 8-32 pound just laying around which you can pick up. This is the only way to make money initially, and you can expect to replay that first level, A LOT, just to grab a miserable 16-24 bucks. You can potentially make around 50 pounds if you get really, really lucky and the game spawns the cash in rooms you can reach without having to use explosives, another vital item that you have to pay to unlock. Most of that would be forgivable if the stealth aspect wasn't garbage. The second you enter the enemies line of sight, the alarms go off. Most, if not all, stealth games give you a detection meter of sorts, because designers realize how frustrating it would be if players had all of their efforts undone because a pixel of their character was spotted by an enemy for a split second. Skip it until the devs fix it.
