Pros:
-Weapons feels good and you can upgrade them all
-Variety of spells
-RPG mechanics will make this game replayable
Con:
-The levels all feels the same(only stand out one for me was the hommage of The Thing)
-The live system(it is off on easy)
-After you buy a weapon upgrade, you cannot buy the other upgarde for said weapon
In conclusion: You could do a lot worse for 15$(CDN). I'm personally just not a fan of this game.
I had a lot of fun with this game, the combat, and level design are really well put together. It's obvious the team behind it are old school shooter fans that know their craft. There's no frills, you're dropped in with a weapon, you kill everything that moves while searching for the exit. You can find secrets that give you points to upgrade your weapons and health/magic between levels. Then, every world has a boss, which basically amounts to a giant enemy with really high HP.
The game does include limited lives as a mechanic, but I honestly never had to worry about it. The few times I did die I never got close to game over. The game is tough in combat, but also generous with pickups so it was never an issue. The level layouts are similar to the more maze-like levels from Doom, also very flat.
The main draw backs I had were that the bosses could be a little disappointing. You basically circle strafe until you run out of ammo, find more, then circle strafe more. The secrets can often be a little frustrating. For example some hidden walls have to be shot at, but there's is no indication of which ones, so I ended up just shooting randomly all over the place. lastly, that the game didn't give me much incentive to replay after I was finished. I had basically seen everything at the end. Not to say that I didn't really enjoy getting there.
Overall though if you like Boomer Shooters then this game is a bargain, and if you can get it in a sale like I did, then it's an absolute steal.
Pretty good game despite an obvious difficulty problem on the very first level. Once you get your hands on potent weapons, it's all good. I wished the game would do better in the level design department: obviously inspired from Wolfenstein 3D, with square boxes as level layout, the game lacks verticality and feels very limited in terms of gameplay.
I am not a big fan of fps, but also, I am old and nostalgious :)
So - game being something lookalike to Hexen or Heretic was promising.
My feelings was accurate - P:W is great retro clone, but polished to every detail.
Pros:
- many levels, with quite nice design. But game is fast, and levels are not big as in Hexen or Heretic. They also mostly flat (but elevators are present).
- large bestiary - every of five worlds has unique monsters. Beasts are climatic, and good optimalized.
- great weaponry - many guns, each can be upgraded to one of two versions
- spells - not many, but useful
- character leveling - something new to retro genre, but it's nice addition
- graphics! - retro feeling 120%, you can even add filters to simulate CRT monitor or C64 pallete and shaders. Absolutly briliant!
- music and sfx - very ok
Cons:
- some levels are hard to beat for casual like me. Especially final boss.
- levels should be made larger, not cut into smaller maps
For prile like that - very good choice :)
Project Warlock is a fun retro shooter with solid gameplay, a stylish pseudo-retro look, and an awesome soundtrack. However, there are a number of issues with it I feel need to be highlighted.
Mediocre RPG mechanics; You have 4 stats you can add into: Strength (increases melee damage), Life (increases health), Spirit (increases mana pool and magic damage), and Capacity (increases maximum ammo pool). Strength is absolutely worthless, while Magic is not much better, given that guns are the meat of the game, and you only have 8 spells (and one mana-powered weapon). The game has no save system, requiring you to finish a level to mark your progress. If you die, you lose a life and restart the whole level.
Janky map design; the pseudo-Wolf3D map design means its mostly very flat, limiting what the devs can do with the maps. Some of the early levels were full of very tight corridors, essentially removing the need to aim or think; just a bunch of winding W+M1 snoozefest mazes. buttons are single use only, meaning you can only go up an elevator once, and take a separate elevator down once, again, severely limiting map design potential.
Very few bugs, but the ones I did run into were pretty serious; sometimes my grenades would fly off perpendicular to where I was looking. When I upgraded my rockets to hitscan, occassionally my attacks would target a single spot on the map, regardless of where I was looking. After killing the final boss, my camera switched to a cinematic POV, which was cool, but the game would not continue and I had to forcibly close the game. A more harmless bug I had was that my dynamite ammo would always be replenished at the start of a new round, and I ended up using it more than might have been balanced.
All that being said, I still recommend Project Warlock. Its still a fun game, and the bugs I encountered were not very frequent.
