The story is intriguing, in fact I wish it was presented in novel form. I won't go into more detail, just know that the story is an easy 5/5 stars. The game itself is not particularly scary. The atmosphere is spooky in the beginning, but you get used to it quickly. Still: - Sound design is excellent - Graphics are excellent as well, great play with lighting, shadows, and colors Gameplay gets boring before you can say chips: - The "puzzles" are silly - There's an absurd amount of back and forth, it gets annoying fast - Enemies are predictable - Platforming doesn't get any less frustrating the more you play; platforming is generally bad in first person perspective games The gameplay part of the game is 2/5. The fantastic story doesn't make the game fun to play, games are called games because they are played first and foremost. Still, I do recommend it to horror fans.
First of all, I didn't play wolf3d back in the day, I'm a bit younger and the first fps I played was actually return to castle wolfenstein. So there's no rose tinted glasses here. There is a lot of fast paced action and hunting for secrets. The music is beautiful, in my opinion; Bobby Prince's work is phenomenal here. The graphics are really impressive for 1992, but the age was showing even a year and a half later when doom came out; still, it is amazing use of the hardware. The story really not that important, but the setting is great none the less. The biggest problem with the game is the level design which is directly tied to the limitations of the game engine: the levels are quite repetitive, there is not enough graphical variety. This is a problem not only for lacking "pretty" graphics, but it's difficult to place landmarks in levels by which the player can orient himself. For this reason it can be tiresome to play more than five or six levels in one sitting. Taking these flaws into consideration, it is still a very fun shooter in its own right, and I also recommend you play it for experiencing history. It must have been MINDBLOWING seeing a fast paced 3d game in the midst of a bunch of platformers and point and click adventure games on the pc at that time. The cornerstone of first-person shooter games.
