As someone who only recently got into this franchise, I can say that I enjoyed the game. No excess puzzle or similar just kill everything hostile. Whole atmosphere and story of game is spot on. Only gripe that I have are commands, in meaning that sometimes your player will just lock in place so you have to double or triple press key in order to move or perform action. Short overview, so if it on sale buy it
I really, really wanted to like this game. And I did, until I got to a part of level that I just can't beat, either my keyboard is bad or you need controller, or just I'm bad.
Funny enough not long ago before I started playing this, did I played reboot of "Shadow Warrior". Now, why is this important? Though games are not similar, there are few thing in gameplay, that I found almost the same. In SW, you explore, find some enemies that you fight, get karma point and game lets you progress further. Here you get same thing, but you have to "purge" certain area and you don't get karma or any other points, but at least game let's you progress. So, after a while, when you get into half of the game or so, every fight will seem familiar. Starting with one boss that later becomes mini boss and so on. Huge arena where fight is going on, you get the picture. So that was all bad stuff. My advice don't play in one sit. On the good sides, graphics, music and overall atmosphere is excellent. Big plus for game is that most of enemies uses projectiles, so you play differently than most of FPS you know, old or new. So, yea. If it is on sale. Grab it. It's a mix of oldschool and new FPS.
Remember when this came out, everyone was talking about it. Finally 16 years later, thanks to GOG's discount I'm able to play it. And oh boy... is it something unique. Thought it was just FPS, but it is so much more. Best way for me to describe is mix of Half-Life and Fallout. So player does play from first person perspective, but like Fallout you can change suits, manage what you carry, money, artifacts that have pros and cons and so on. Action in real-time not turn base like Fallout, that is the part borrowed from Half-Life. No key cards to progress to next level, but huge map for player to explore, divided in locations. Story is quite addictive, set around nuclear power plant in Chernobyl some time after second disaster, now called "The Zone". Crawling with mutants, bandits, army, anomalies and of course Stalkers. Protagonist is Stalker with amnesia with task to kill another fellow Stalker. So wondering through Zone doing quests and trying to discover what happened to him. Gameplay is good, but you will have to do lot of backtracking. So this can be annoying quite a lot, but it just a way to progress in game and story line. RNG can be sometimes really, really tough. Giving you zero seconds to reacts. But than again, game is not easy. Ok, so now for bad parts of game. Every game has bugs and glitches, and that all adds to charme of game. But, you'll soon get annoyed when you save game and enemies that were in other room spawn right behind you, when they shot you trough wall, you aim straight into enemy head and it just keeps walking or killing you, shortcut key doesn't response and so and so on... If you accept that game is way far from glitches and bug free, and don't break keyboard in this process . You will enjoy game.
As someone who played Doom since it came out and read positive reviews about this, must say I'm just really disappointment. I get it, they were trying to create something exclusive for N64 and it is console so it has some limitations. But somehow it's just an average Doom clone from that time. I know, as wrote above that they made completely new engine and so on, but gameplay, atmosphere and all other things combine are just meh. Only reason why I played it because it has Doom in it's name, maybe that is the reason why went through whole game.
