First of all, to the developers - you did your job very well.
PROS:
- High quality Blood-esc level design, but with lack of details.
- Interesting monsters design.
- Good weapons feedback, but not for all weapons.
- Artefacts system.
- Monsters appearance in the key points is wonderful.
CONS:
- Horrible sound design: monster sounds, ambient sounds, music.
- Monsters behavior: stupid as hell.
- Most of weapons are not interesting to use in both mods.
- NO DRIVE - game feels dead and silent, yes it is challenging on hard and above, but it is just soulless.
And it is very sad.
Very good shooter overall.
+ Levels are large, interesting and well designed with cool themes.
+ Satisfying gunplay and gibs, delicious stuff.
+ Enemies are quite well designed overall with a good variety and mixture, and can be nasty in combos to fight against.
+ Great visuals and art direction, really nice.
+ Movement is mostly very tight and fun, dashing is a lot of fun.
- The final hub world tends to run out of steam a bit with some annoying level design. The game doesn't handle stairs very well so there's a lot of sliding down them and accidentally falling into pits. It's an irritant.
- In the final hub there are many surprise enemy encounters which catch you off guard in a stupid way. For example, there are some areas where a very powerful enemy will spawn behind you suddenly and smack you from behind. Not really fun or challenging, more just a bit of a d**k move from the level designers here.
- There are two particular enemies - the brute and fire golem - which are annoyingly tanky and do obscene amounts of dmg on hard mode. Their HP needs a bit of a debuff.
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It's overall very good and I do recommend it. I finished it on hard and it was mostly fine sans the two enemies I mentioned and the dmg they dealt.
I don't recommend playing it on hard unless you're quite the vet of classic shooters like Quake and Unreal. It is relentlessly punishing. I found it fun, but medium is probably the way to go.
Also, use the blade of ruination often (the starting melee weapon). It is VERY high dmg and can shred some of the tankier enemies very fast. The game favours offensive play.
4.5 stars.
Wrath in its completed form is a much more satisfying experience compared to the early access we received years (!) ago. It has a strong identity of its own, iterating on Quake's basic gameplay, but with larger variety in level design and enemy design. It doesn't stray too far from its forbear, but has a solid selection of satisfying weapons, dense level design, a diverse roster of very well animated enemies, and excellent sound design. I wouldn't call its art style Lovecraftian, though, it goes in a unique more alien-fantasy direction that is not predictable.
If you're an old school FPS fan at all, you really need to try it. However, if you're less invested in the genre, and the thought of a "variation on Quake" isn't as interesting to you then maybe take a star off. But for those like me that absolutely relish the thought of a new FPS in this style (Dusk was a while ago now!), the complete package is vastly improved on Early Access in many ways and you should try it now.
This showed up at the start of the Neo boomer shooter trend, along with Ion Fury. And while that game came out and was a banger build engine game, this Quake 1 like one went into early access... and stayed there for years. If this had just come out when Neo boomer shooters were fresh it might have been recieved better. I would even say its good, but it has issues and wasn't worth the years of wait, especially since other Q1 likes have been better.
The gunplay is solid, and the level architecture is pretty varied and detailed for a quake 1 like game. The secondary functions and artifacts do give you a fair few options in combat. The levels are also a lot larger than your average boomer shooter, which is also a double edges sword since it makes backtracking for supplies or secrets really tedious.
As for the negatives, well some levels are really stingy on resources, occasionally feeling like a survival horror. The boss fights just plain suck. Then there's the music... I get some people like more atmospheric music in boomer shooters like Q1, this soundtrack is just plain boring and puts me to sleep. Most of the story is told through cryptic word salid scrolls that you have to hunt down, and the "twist" at the end you can see coming a mile away. The gate power ups are rather annoying, as you are forced to use them to progress and run out at the worst time due to how strict they are. And then there's the complete lack of a map which makes the previously mentioned backtracking even worse. And there is cut content that was promised in EA, such as multiplayer. While I couldn't care less about it (lets face it, most people don't buy boomer shooters for MP) I can understand why people would be pissed off after promised content was cut AFTER they got their early access money.
Really, the game has more good than bad, but for a just fairly good game, the time for it to come out has long passed and other boomer shooters have done it better.
After playing the early access and now starting the complete game I can say that the single player campaign Is kicking In, Is what I expected It to be. Let's part like It's 1996.
They promised MP, at least, for now, there's no MP, so this Is the reason for a 4 star rating.
I'm playing on Debian Linux, so yep, I got the full game installer for Linux! :D
