FPS NIGHTMARES

[Cuellar]

What

[falafel]

That's interesting. Maybe it's because I wasn't really old enough to be playing Quake when it came out, but I always perceived Quake 2 as the more singleplayer-focused game of the two, given the lengthy campaign that tries to have a semblance of a story going on and the occasional scripted sequences.

Quake 1's singleplayer is plenty of fun on its own but the real joy of the game for me was kicking the shit out of my brother in two-player deathmatch while hopping around like a dick.

A lot is probably down to personal experience, I spose. Even Quake 2 I'm sure I only managed to play because I worked in an internet cafe (in Cyprus) where other kids used to come and play games over LAN. Mainly I remember the lighting was quite fancy, not much about the gameplay until Arena popped up.

[Lemming]

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996)



   

This is Daggerfall Unity, more on that in a minute.

STORY: A freelance agent (you!) is hired by the Emperor of Tamriel, who's doing fine after being saved from weird hell-space (TES: Arena), to investigate a strange matter in the Western province of High Rock. King Lysandus' ghost haunts the streets of Daggerfall, screaming for vengeance, and it's really starting to get on people's nerves. There's also the additional matter of a letter which the Emperor sent to Daggerfall's Queen, which apparently never arrived. He wants you to find out what happened and is very evasive about the contents, so it's probably a picture of his cock or something. The agent sets out to investigate, and is instantly shipwrecked off the coast of High Rock. Now she or he is alone and freezing in a rat-filled cave, which sort of sets the tone for everything that happens next.

MUSIC: Many tracks return from Arena albeit remastered, with a load of new tracks too. Check these ones out. Love this. Also, check out the main theme.

THE VERDICT: Instead of properly reviewing Daggerfall, I'm basically going to try and sell the game to anyone reading this who isn't already familiar with it. To review it very briefly, it's a trainwreck - the combat doesn't work, dungeons are made with procedural generation which means you won't always necessarily even be capable of completing them, literally absolutely everything is bugged, and you'll spend most of the time lost. I played using the ongoing Daggerfall Unity project, which fixes a lot of the DOS version's bugs and makes it more playable, but the game is still a bit of a clusterfuck.

There's your honest review, now the challenge is for me to try and explain to you why this is one of my favourite games.

Look at this:

This is the map. Each of these regions can be visited. Here's what you get when you click on a region:

Every one of those dots is a city, town, farm, dungeon, graveyard, plantation, shrine, temple or something else. Here's a town just to give you a taste of what they're like:

Each of those is a building, literally all of which can be entered. Hopefully you're getting the impression that the world is stupidly fucking massively big.

Those aren't isolated hubs either. You can walk from one town to another, and it will take you about 10 minutes real time, because that entire world map you see up there is literally rendered, full-scale, in game. Search "walking across Daggerfall" to see any of the multitude of videos of people attempting this. To give you an impression, here are a couple screenshots (not mine) from Daggerfall Unity, which ports the game to Unity and in doing so unlocks the draw distance:




All of this is in the DOS version, you just can't see it for the draw distance. It's insane for 1996.

How is this done? The answer is, like Arena, procedural generation. Pretty much everything in Daggerfall is procedurally generated. You go to a procedurally generated town, enter a procedurally generated guild and get a procedurally generated quest that sends you to a procedurally generated dungeon. This makes every single playthrough markedly different, bar the main quest which features hand-designed dungeons (this is a very good thing because some of the procedural dungeons will send you fucking insane).

That's the main selling point of Daggerfall, and it's what you'll see most people discussing when it comes to the game. It's fucking huge and you can go anywhere. But there's a lot more to Daggerfall than just being a novelty piece of software that generates a big worldspace.

The skill system here is better than any other Elder Scrolls game. You can make pretty much any type of character you want, and play the game accordingly. Stealth Archer? Sure. Illusion-Destruction Mage? Sure. Dagger-Wielding Bastard Who's Also Really Good At Climbing For Some Reason? Sure. In addition to a range of magic and weapon disciplines to choose from, you can also specialise in countless non-combat skills. It's theoretically possible to play the game as someone with no martial or mage skills at all, by focusing on the linguistics skills which allow you to talk enemies down (done via an invisible dice roll), or stealth so you can slip through every dungeon unnoticed. There are plenty of quests which don't involve combat, or allow you to flee when it starts, meaning this is actually a serious, viable way to play the game (don't actually try to do it, you'll get frustrated in about 5 seconds).

Combat is more than a little awkward but you really feel your skills increase, as you should in any good RPG. Like in Morrowind, you start out missing every other attack and dealing inferior damage. But soon, you consistently scoring critical strikes on your opponents and by the end of the game you steamroll everything, as long as you played wisely and made sure to play with the skills you gave yourself during character creation.

As with all Elder Scrolls games, a huge part of the appeal here is the story and world. Daggerfall can easily compete with Morrowind for most interesting story and setting in the series. Without wanting to spoil too much of the plot, you get caught in political intrigue between three rival nation-states with everyone you meet trying to fuck you over (or just trying to straight-up kill you), and as you work to uncover the complex truth behind Lysandus' death, you find yourself having to figure out what the fuck to do with a huge cosmic nightmare machine that's been lying around in space for centuries. If you've ever played Morrowind, that thing they're building in the volcano at the end is meant to be a crappy version of this thing. There's plenty of memorable characters and factions to meet along the way and you even get quite a bit of control over the plot in the second half.

There's also the spellmaker, just in case you want to destroy the game completely. Make yourself a spell that lets you fly at warp speed for ten full minutes while also poisoning and incinerating everyone you come into contact with, why not.

Another detail since I'm just randomly listing things I like at this point - the game will generate you a biographical backstory based on your race and the skills you chose. This is cool as hell, and occasionally has hilarious consequences depending on what skills you picked. Apparently my character was taken in by a kindly old woman who taught her the benefits of Short Blade and Climbing. What the fuck? Doesn't matter, it's great.

We also see the arrival of in-game books, which are obviously a big part of the identity of modern Elder Scrolls games. There's a book of racist jokes, a travel guide, a very creepy book about Wood Nymphs where the author seems to have gone missing after writing it, a book about the desert in the southern half of the map where the author seems to have gone on some kind of trip-out and been absorbed by the desert, and more. There's even a guide on etiquette and how to address rulers. Speaking of which...

There's a dialogue system. Fuck if I know how it works. I think it rolls your personality skill and checks it against your reputation with the social class of the person you're talking to? Who knows. Basically you choose "Polite", "Blunt" or neutral when talking to people. Polite and Blunt both make you say extremely stupid shit. If you ask people for quests, normal is "Hello, is there any work around here?" while "Polite" changes it to "SALUTATIONS FRIEND! DO YOU KNOW OF ANY OPPORTUNITIES FOR GAINFUL EMPLOYMENT IN THIS REGION?" People normally just yell at you and give you a lot of racial abuse if you pick either Polite or Blunt, so leave it on normal. Great feature.

There's also a ton of stuff to do outside of dungeon-exploring. You can buy and sell in towns, become a catburglar and stalk the streets at night leaping from rooftop to rooftop to break into and steal from houses (the game has a parkour system where you can climb and mount any surface if your Climbing skill is good enough), put all your money in a bank for no reason, buy a house, buy a private ship to sail around on, walk into random people's houses just to see what's up, join a religion or a cult, become a werewolf, become a vampire, and more. You can even summon a Daedra on the right day and with the right offering:


A final point, which might be the clincher that proves this is among the best games ever: you can't swim if you're carrying a lot of weight, and if you're wearing heavy armour, you'll sink in any body of water you fall into. This means this is the one and only game in history where you may find your traditional RPG dungeon-crawling experience take a sudden erotic turn as you're forced to ditch all your armour to avoid drowning, leaving you all wet and slippery and naked for the dungeon ahead. Phwoaaaaar

FINAL RATING: It's a complete mess. Nothing works as it should, everything is glitched to hell, it crashes and glitches out all the time, they didn't even try to balance the difficulty, some skills are almost functionally useless, and it's more a collection of great ideas than an actual coherent game. Love it, have played it for tens of hours and plan to play it for many tens more with Daggerfall Unity. It's tough to rate, obviously. Personally I'd like to give it 5/5 but it's a broken piece of shit. Anything less than 4 feels like it's ignoring the fact the game fucking rocks. I don't know, 4 VENGEAAAAAAANCE out of 5.



Next game: Eradicator (1996)

[purlieu]

That does sound bloody great, flaws aside. If I was younger and had discovered it, I think I'd have just stopped making music and walking my dog and spent my whole life exploring it.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Morrowind is the playable yet still deep improvement on Daggerfall.

Oblivion and Skyrim improved playability and dynamics further but lost several functions and with it, depth. Morrowind is a lovely middle ground.

[PlanktonSideburns]

Shit that sounds great!

[bgmnts]

Holy shit that horse mane looks amazing!

[Lemming]

Eradicator (1996)



   

STORY: A mining colony is under attack by bastards! THEY'RE KILLING EVERYONE!! It's up to one of three random fuckheads to get in there and take the invaders on. Yes, it's In Pursuit Of Greed again.

MUSIC: Left no impact, to the point where I'm not even 100% certain there was any music. There were some weird synth-y beeping sounds in the scary mutant lab towards the end of the game.

THE VERDICT: Good news - it's good! No idea why I've never heard of this game before, it's absolutely sound.

So as mentioned, you pick one of three characters to play as (with a fourth unlocked after you beat the game). There's a guy who's some kind of mining guild security enforcer, a reptilian-ish alien warrior, and a random hired merc who's some kind of cat-human hybrid deal. Each of these has a couple of unique weapons and their own unique intro levels, and their own HUD design. They also have their own stats, sort of like Hexen. The warrior guy can tank loads of damage, the mercenary can move and jump really fast, I forget what the boring mining guy can do.

First impressions when the game actually starts aren't great. It's a 2.5 D engine which feels already outdated in both visuals and gameplay. The art isn't exactly impressive either, with awkward sprite work and very muddy (I think that's the word?) textures. However, I came to like whatever engine this is over the course of the game - it's functional which is more than you can say for some other games in this thread.

It's a pretty standard FPS for the most part - you have a stupidly large arsenal of 15 weapons to pick from and all of them are useful. The shotgun (sonic blaster or whatever), the ripper-disc launcher (basically a pistol but it fires sawblades that bounce around like the razorjack from Unreal) and the assault rifle thing will be your main stand-bys. There's some very cool exotic weapons too, the best being the Arachnoidtron or whatever the fuck, which is a robotic spider that you throw and can then actually pilot, driving it into groups of enemies where it explodes. You've also got something that's becoming increasingly common in FPS games from the period: bombs and mines that allow you to set your own traps, which invariably backfire and fuck you over far worse than the enemy. Most weapons feel powerful and fun to use, and ammo is rationed pretty effectively, forcing you to switch weapons frequently and make full use of your arsenal. Except the boomerang, which is fucking shit.

Enemy variety isn't amazing but there's a fair amount of enemies, each with their own attack styles. There's also the mandatory erratic flying enemy that blows up on contact and seriously hurts you, awesome. AI is pretty good, and enemies will successfully ambush you from time to time by circling around you, flying behind you, stuff like that.

The difficulty is pretty fair, I think. I played as the mercenary who is apparently the worst at defence and thus relies on evasion, and I didn't have too much trouble with the game. You have three full health bars which makes you feel invulnerable for about five seconds before you realise that plenty of enemy attacks will drain literally an entire health bar.

Weirdly, you can switch to third person mode at any time. This is pointless - you can't really aim and shoot in third person. It's intended for the game's many platforming segments, I think, but it's still easier to do them in first person. Oh, and your protagonist speaks and makes really shit jokes, as I guess is a requirement of FPS games from 1996, but luckily they aren't too annoying.

Level design is where the game shines. Levels are small enough to never be overwhelming but complex enough to give you some interesting puzzles to deal with. You have themed objectives, sort of like in Dark Forces, and while it still largely amounts to finding and pushing switches it makes things a little more exciting. There's a lot of nice environmental puzzles, teleport mazes, the obligatory sewer level where you get washed away down various streams of shit, platforming challenges, and a few really creative sections where you hijack security robots located somewhere else in the map and get them to open doors or disable traps so you can move ahead. It felt to me like there was constant variety with the game asking slightly different things of you on each level.

I think that's all I can actually say about the game. I'm trying to write more because the post seems short, but there's not a great deal to say about it. It's pretty standard but it's really good for what it is. The whole game took me one night to complete, I only got stuck once in one of the lab levels in the final episode, so the whole thing flows pretty smoothly. If you're a fan of 90s FPS games and, like me, you've never played this because you had no idea it existed, definitely check it out. Varied levels, a stupidly large arsenal, and a reasonable length (lol) mean that the game feels fresh all the way to the end.

FINAL RATING: 3.5 This Is The Actual Boomerang Sprite, It Looks Like Shit As Well As Plays Like Shit, It's One Of The Worst Weapons Yet out of 5.


Next game: Deus (1996)

[Mister Six]

Oh! Fucking Deus! That's the sequel to Robinson's Requiem, which I recall getting absolutely pasted in Amiga Power, if you're bothered about skipping games. Not sure how different they are though.

[AsparagusTrevor]

I think I only ever played the tenth game in the Deus series.

[Mister Six]

Wayhey!

[Lemming]

Shit!!! Deus is broken! After walking around getting shit on by every enemy in sight for an hour, I finally gave up and went to look for a walkthrough. There's meant to be a tree with a cocoon on it that I can use to make a torch, but the tree isn't there! It didn't render for me! I can't go on without the cocoon tree! Shit!!! Shit!!!

Yeah this game is really weird. The thing I assume it's most known for is the survival mechanics, but they're fairly ridiculous. Slipping down a small incline causes you to get a spinal infection and die. Touching water causes you to drown in moments. Oddly, getting stabbed in the head or chest with a spear often only deals skin-deep damage. It's trying to do basic shit like walk around that leads to the lethal injuries. You also have to give yourself plasma transplants on the reg. The badass space bounty hunter you're playing as in this game is far more fragile than you are in real life.

I'm also not joking about the cocoon tree, it and several other things required to proceed haven't actually rendered in the game. I'll look for a workaround but otherwise I'll skip the game or do a mini-review.

Check this guy out though:

[H-O-W-L]

I'm very upset you didn't mention Daggerfall's TERRIFYING SKELETONS.

[Lemming]

So I'm writing Deus off because it's broken. We're more or less at the end of 1996, I'll have one last look through the list to make sure before writing the 1996 ROUNDUP POST.

Here's a list of the 1996 games I started playing but didn't write reviews for, for whatever reason:

Cyberdillo. Awful headache inducing nightmare, very awkward to play.

Angst. Everyone already knows why this one got ditched.

Final Doom. It's not bad but it's literally just a couple of fan map packs for Doom, there's not a huge deal to say about it. I liked Plutonia a little more than TNT.

Witchaven 2. Only played the first couple levels because Witchaven 1 is still fresh enough in my mind that I didn't want to play a whole sequel of it. It's very similar to the first game at first glance, a couple new weapons and enemies.

Terminator: SkyNET. Again, seemed very similar to its predecessor, Future Shock.

Descent 2. Again, almost identical to Descent, although with way uglier textures, at least on the first couple of levels I checked out. Ended up really liking Descent after I stopped whining like a child over the difficulty so maybe I'll play this eventually.

ZPC. I didn't really give this one a fair chance, it seemed like a kind of Marathon knockoff with an interesting but quite unappealing art style. It sort of looks like those 50s Soviet propaganda posters, dunno what that style's called.

Deus. I actually sort of want to write a mini-review of this because it's really interesting. It's clunky and hard to play but it's basically an open-world-ish game where you play as a space bounty hunter who gets dropped onto a planet to find three bastards. You have open roam around a really impressive looking near-full-3D environment. You start with only your fists and a shitty jumpsuit but soon you'll get spears, a bow, and then eventually firearms and powerful explosive weapons as well as stupid-ass futuristic armour. The big draw is the ridiculous survival system, which forces you to do all the usual stuff that never works in games like eating and drinking, but also means you have to constantly patch up injuries, set broken bones, give yourself plasma transplants (never figured out what the fuck that was about), treat poison, sleep etc.

[druss]

Looking forward to 1997, some cracking games there including my favourite (JK).

[ASFTSN]

Fucking hell, ERADICATOR. A game I finished and yet had completely forgotten it existed until now.

[Lemming]

This proved to be a pretty good year for FPS games - no surprise, since it's a flagship year for games in general. Crash Bandicoot, Tomb Raider, Red Alert, Super Mario 64, Resident Evil, Civilization 2, Diablo, so on.

TOP THREE GAMES
PowerSlave (console version)
Daggerfall
Quake

Feels odd putting Daggerfall up there - not just because it's such a mixed experience but also because it's not really an FPS game. Fuck it, I played it so it gets a place. If you don't want Daggerfall up there, Duke 3D would make it onto the list instead.

WORST GAME: Angst. Not sure if we count it because there was no review, but just fucking look at the state of it.

BEST PROTAGONIST: Duke Nukem, of course! Just kidding, I don't know. Quake guy maybe, because you get to hear Trent Reznor making obscene, inhuman sounds whenever you press jump.

WORST PROTAGONIST: Duke Nukem, of course! Just kidding, it's probably the guy from the PC version of PowerSlave. SEE YUH!! SEE YUH!! SEE YUH!! Duke is pretty annoying but he can kick both feet out in mid-air while walking forwards, as opposed to PowerSlave guy who is just a shit idiot.

BEST VILLAIN: Daggerfall spoilers: Princess Elysana. Not only does she successfully fuck you over (twice), she's fucking everyone else in the region over in a ludicrously complicated power play. According to in-game books in Morrowind, she wins!

LAMEST VILLAIN: I don't know if there was one. Shib-Niggurath is pretty unimpressive when you finally reach it. The final boss of Duke 3D deserves a mention too - I killed it first time without even taking a hit and I was playing like shit. The trash mobs that spawn at the sides of the arena are more of a threat than the boss itself.

BEST WEAPON: The grenade from PowerSlave console version, for the reasons mentioned in the review. Also obvious special mention to the Devastator Weapon from Duke Nukem.

WORST WEAPON: Eradicator's boomerang. Just shocking.

BEST ENEMY: Shambler, easy. I also really like the psychic floating things from Duke Nukem 3D too because of the weird reveberating telepathic scream when you shoot them.

WORST ENEMY: The shitty alien things in Eradicator that fly erratically towards you and then explode in your face for massive damage. Fuck off

BEST STORY AND/OR SETTING: Daggerfall. It's the Elder Scrolls setting and probably the most interesting story in the whole series, EASY WIN

NICE SURPRISES: PowerSlave and Eradicator, two games I'd never played before which turned out to be excellent and surprisingly good, respectively. Also, despite the somewhat mixed review I gave, I think I actually enjoyed Duke Nukem 3D more this time around than whenever I last played it. L.A. Meltdown is very strong throughout, and while the game never returns to that level of quality, parts of Shrapnel City come pretty close, like the flooded skyscrapers and the subway with the constantly moving trains.

CRUSHING DISAPPOINTMENTS: The disparity in quality and creativity between the PC and console versions of PowerSlave is pretty stark, and playing the PC version right after the fantastic console version didn't cast it in a positive light.

And now, some stats:
TOTAL GAMES REVIEWED SO FAR: 33 (I think?)
TOTAL FIVE OUT OF FIVE RATINGS GIVEN: 3 (System Shock, Heretic, PowerSlave)
TOTAL ONE OUT OF FIVE RATINGS GIVEN: 3 (Terminator: Rampage, Super 3D Noah's Ark, Mortal Coil: Adrenalin Intelligence)
TOTAL GAMES WITH PLAYABLE FEMALE CHARACTERS: 7
TOTAL GAMES WITH PLAYABLE FEMALE CHARACTERS WHO CAN'T BE SWAPPED FOR A MALE CHARACTER: 1
TOTAL GAMES THAT ARE ESSENTIALLY JUST THE PLOT OF DIE HARD: 3 (Doom, System Shock, Marathon)

1997 incoming.

[PlanktonSideburns]

still great thread

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

The Playstation Store is selling the original Doom games for two quid each. Being a bit flash with my cash,  I forked out for both and - even after Doom 2016, Brutal Doom etc. - they're still bloody great fun.

[Jerzy Bondov]

Yeah I've been playing through the original Doom on my Switch and it's one of the best things I've got on it. When I was playing it as a kid (too young) I don't think I ever got past Knee Deep in the Dead, and I certainly never played it without IDKFA and IDDQD. I'm most of the way through Inferno now and I just love it. It's just so addictive in a way I don't think modern FPS games usually are (except maybe Doom 2016). That said, Slough of Despair is a bull shit level

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

How is a game like Doom anything other than free?

When they made them I very much doubt they were factoring in 2020 revenue.

Games should just be free after 15 or 20 years has passed.

[Mister Six]

Still costs money to port them to the new format, playtest to make sure everything is still working, share on the Sony (or whatever) servers etc etc.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I think Lemming mentioned it in the Doom 1 review, but something I'd never really noticed before was how good the art/environment design is. It's almost a cliché at this point to say that the levels are an abstract mess that don't look like anything and that's why Duke Nukem 3D was so gobsmacking at the time - and that's not untrue. Playing E2M2 (the warehouse one) however, I was struck by how well the transition from the (relatively) mundane UAC bases to the hellscapes works: There you are, walking around a maze of industrial shipping containers, then you open a door and find yourself looking down a corridor from a gothic castle[nb]gothic arsehole?[/nb] that has no earthly (or Marsly) business being there. All of a sudden, you're on the demons' home turf. It's jarring, in a good way.

The sound effects are ace as well, all booming, crunchy and satisfying. One of my few complaints with Doom 2016 was how utterly weedy the sound was. Hopefully, with Doom Eternal bringing back some of the visual design of the originals, it will also beef up the sound effects.

[Mister Six]

You can pay extra to have the original sound effects in the game. Seriously.

[popcorn]

When they made them I very much doubt they were factoring in 2020 revenue.

So what?

[druss]

Baron of Hell screaming gave me nightmares as a kid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZDewbjVDHg

Fucking horrible. Great stuff.

[ASFTSN]

Baron of Hell screaming gave me nightmares as a kid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZDewbjVDHg

Fucking horrible. Great stuff.

Yep, still remember thinking how much it seemed like they HATE humans when I heard that as a kid. All the Doom monster sounds were altered animal noises from free sound effects libraries IIRC.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

So what?

Not to derail the thread but it's my personal view that games should be free and available in the public domain after a specific period of time. Especially as they can be duplicated infinitely at no cost, and only have a market value once you hide that fact behind shitty corporate platforms. I despise the notion that anybody is entitled to be paid in perpetuity for items of that nature. That's a wider discussion though. Back to the thread.

[Lemming]

Going out of strictly chronological order again because fuck it.

Blood (1997)



   

This is Blood: Fresh Supply. I think it's literally just Blood running on EDuke32 with some item sprites turned into 3D models for some reason, but it plays really well.

STORY: It's the 1920s (probably) and some kind of weird horrifying cult dedicated to evil gods has sacrificed Caleb, one of their own high-ranking members. Everyone is pretty surprised when he bursts out of his grave and sets out to kill the demonic god thing he formerly served.

MUSIC: Not too impressive, I can't remember any tracks. There are scare chords which I *think* play dynamically when you open certain doors or trigger certain enemies, which is cool.

I LIVE AGAIN: In the Duke 3D review I mentioned that this was always my Build game of choice. Blood does for me what Duke 3D seems to do for other people - consistently great levels filled with secrets that are fun to explore, memorable aesthetic with bizarre, inexplicable setting and great enemy design, a tone that veers wildly between horrific and just funny, and a protagonist who you really wish would shut the hell up for like five fucking seconds.

Playing it again now doesn't disappoint. Let's start with the difficulty. I love the difficulty level in this game, it's punishing without ever feeling especially cheap or unfair. It's also odd in that the game actually gets quite a bit easier as it goes on. I played on the Well Done setting and the first level took me nearly 10 tries because I would get slaughtered in the first building no matter what, armed with only the flare gun and the pitchfork, but by the time the second episode rolls around and you're armed with a tommy gun, a napalm launcher and three types of armour, you're unstoppable (until the inevitable moment where you fuck up and become 100% Stoppable). I really like the inverse difficulty curve or whatever you'd call it - the first episode is suitably tense and fights feel srappy and desperate, while later episodes feel more like you're on a rampage, which suits the story fairly well.

Speaking of weapons, there's a great selection. The shotgun, tommy gun and dynamite are the backbone of the arsenal, but there's a wealth of other weapons to choose from including the bizarre ones like the Life Leech (skull on a staff) and the voodoo doll. Most weapons also have alternate fire modes - the shotgun's is crucial, the flare gun's is insane, the tesla cannon's alt-fire mode is almost as fun as Doom's BFG, and most of the others are awesome but extremely impractical. The tommy gun one in particular is hilarious - he sort of flails the gun around madly while emptying half a clip, hitting nothing. NO POINT

The enemies are all visually memorable and all fun to fight. Zombies need to be beheaded, exploded or set on fire, because if you just shoot them they'll get back up again - unless it's a double shotgun blast at point-blank range, in which case they usually stay down. Cultists will hitscan you from across the room but all are very weak to fire. Gargoyles will rip you to pieces unless you have the tesla cannon or napalm launcher, in which case they're a joke and will go down in seconds. Ghosts are invulnerable unless you can get them to appear, which means letting them get near enough to attack and then hitting them with a shotgun double blast is the best way to stop them. Hellhounds are immune to fire but get fucked by everything else. Learning these vulnerabilities is key to the game and keeps combat constantly interesting.

I genuinely don't think there's a bad map in the whole game across all four episodes. There are one or two that feel more like filler than great levels, but absolutely nothing outright bad, and there's always something great lurking just around the corner. All four episodes are completely distinct visually too, which helps to feel like you're constantly making progress and on a journey through a really weird and varied setting.

Overall, it's pretty much the peak of the pre-Half Life FPS era for me - great enemy variety, powerful weapons, outstanding map design with many secrets, a plot that's self-aware of how silly it is,  annoying protagonist who won't stop with the pop-culture references, hapless civilians who are pretty much 100% guaranteed to get caught in the crossfire, and above all else - the constant looming threat at all times that one wrong move could see your fancy triple-armour depleted in an instant and you having to skulk around with 10 HP left until you come across more supplies. Plus there's a train level! Remember when train levels were a big thing in videogames?

Finally, a crucial point - Caleb, despite being a horrifying decaying zombie-man who used to sacrifice people to dark eldritch horrors, is one of the most relatable protagonists in all of gaming. The sole reason for this is that when he gets set on fire, he doesn't do a masculine "HNGH" grunt like Doomguy, nor does he do a weird hissing sound like other protagonists. Instead, he screams "AAH! NO! NO! IT BURNS!!! AAH!! ITBURNSITBURNS!!! AHHH!! AAAAH!!" like a frightened toddler until the flames go out.

FINAL RATING: As always with 5/5 games, it's not literally perfect, it's got flaws and room for improvement, but it's so much fun that it doesn't matter. 5 Stupid Alternate Firing Modes out of 5.


Next game: Outlaws (1997)

[Mister Six]

Some classic UX design there, with the daft gargoyle things. I miss when games used to be like that. It was a very 8-bit thing; I'm guessing this is the last flourish of the style before opaque HUDs and diegetic status clues became more popular.

Did FORBES: CORPORATE WARRIOR turn up this year?