Just a few hours into it, and I've experienced a mix of delight and frustration, with some really annoying moments.
PROs:
It's simple, fun, energetic and has the vibe of the early FPS of the early 90s.
CONs:
Vibe is the only thing it has inherited from those games. Mainly because:
- Despite what young gamers are led to believe, running and firing guns was not all those games were about. There was good level design, a diversity of situations, some puzzles and some strategy in it. Generally speaking, it was not so arcade-y as you imagine, except for maybe the very first titles like Catacomb Abyss, Wolfenstein 3D or Planet Strike. And those games have not aged well: they were a shock back them because of novelty, but now they feel terribly boring after a few minutes. No Doom, Heretic, Hexen or Duke Nukem 3D here, those games used a lot of creativity and level design work that seems lost here.
- If this game really aims at replicating the feel of those games, it must feature in-level saves and quicksaves. They were not there to damp challenge, they were there to skip frustrating backtracking and repetition, aside the fact you could have dinner, visit the loo, pork the wife, avoid a rant of your boss or sleep without losing progression. Without this BASIC FEATURE ALL 90s FPS HAD, and the fact that difficulty is kinda uneven, it feels like one of those hardcore platforms that masochistic kids like to grind for hours these days, but certainly not like any 90s game, easy or hard.
- Performance is kinda subpar. It is not well optimized and uses a lot of resources. This is the only accurate simulation of my first runs with Doom, when I tried it (I should say "dragged it") in a PC 386 16Mhz with 2Mb RAM.
Overall, not a bad game, but they need to address these issues. Good for a few runs, but not a classic -nor a good copy of the classics- at all.
