The genesis shooter and dungeon crawler stitched with talent and love.

And then you get to level 4.
and then you die.
and then you go back to the title screen.
oh my god, the rogue-like shit it all

This twisted craft of levels did not need a rogue-like approach, since the construction of the video game itself, in theory, should stand on its own

nao sei se o problema é só no xbox, mas infelizmente vou ter que abandonar temporariamente por excesso de bug.
o jogo tem uma ideia muito legal misturando roguelike com boomer shooter, dificil até, mas beeem divertido…de primeira achei esquisito, nao sei se o pixel art escolhido casou bem com o game, acho que a estetica dele acaba tirando um pouco da profundidade dos objetos.
enfim, no xbox ocorrem alguns erros com sprites, quadrados gigantes piscam na tela, varias coisinhas que num geral acabam sim atrapalhando a gameplay e até a imersao…
espero que arrumem isso logo

Well-made, does a good job of making it feel different from other boomer shooters, just that what it does different i am not really a fan of. The skill trees and upgrades makes combat feel meatslammy. I never feel like i won because i was skilled, but because my health stat was bigger than the enemies or i spammed the grenade spell. Encounters just add more and more enemies the further you get. I don't think it's bad, i just wasn't that into this. It's not you, it's me.

Also for some reason there is a life system which is just dumb. You can play without it, but only on easy or hard, not my beloved medium difficulty for games like these.

it's a lot easier for me to settle with this one since a lot of indie shooters I've played, I kinda accidentally keep comparing them to how DUSK and Ultrakill feel in terms of mechanics. Which is more on me.

that said this is more Doom/Hexen than Quake and honestly it's a really good vibe. Lots of great enemy variety and level design with interesting bosses at the end of each episode. I think what makes it interesting is that you have an upgrade system for your character and weapons which makes it interesting and fun to play around with, especially some of the spells and how useful they can be during combat.

I think my biggest issue is the visuals though, and not so much the art style cause that rocks but more so just how the screen changes from being damaged. I'm not at risk of having a seizure but it does bother my eyes more often than I'd prefer. But I was able to get through the game with ease.

This Wolf-like tries to mix rogue-lite with a fast shooter, in what it does, tries really hard to be punitive to players. Project Warlock can seem like a waste of your time when faced with its Game Over screen, as the game forces you to restart your playthrough from step one. Surely, there could have been a better way to challenge players.
Graphics are merely disappointing, the game looks mismatched in style, trying to mix elements of newer games with retro games; its dynamic lightings look out of place, as well as certain textures, being at odds with the two-dimensional cardboard sprites. Robots, pharaohs, knights, body horrors - it seems the developers could not settle for a thematic for their games, it's all there nonetheless. All in all, the experience felt unnatural in one too many aspects to be enjoyable.

A decent throwback shooter with everything you would expect - fast-paced gameplay, weapons and enemies variety and secrets to uncover. It differentiates from others with weapons upgrades, spells and a life system.

All complaints are negated by the fact it's a cheap retro-inspired FPS, developed by a small Polish-German studio and the project was created by an 18-year-old Polе while still attending high school.

It's good. Buy it!

Feedback on what can be improved:
• I managed to beat it on Nightmare difficulty without much trouble and was kinda disappointed. You would expect a bigger challenge especially when the game saves only after you finish a level.
• The game doesn't force you to use your full arsenal. I used only the knife, shotgun and the lightning spell.
• Having mods support and community maps would have been a great way to increase the longevity and I don't understand why it's not an option.

Project Warlock is the holy grail of boomer shooters. It takes everything good about classic FPS games like Doom and Wolfenstein and turns it up to 11. Better level design, more diverse enemies, and a whole lot more guns make every level feel like a wonderful and chaotic puzzle to solve as you blast your way through hundreds of enemies in every level. Not once was I bored playing this game, and the final boss had me fighting for my life constantly. It was a satisfying challenge from start to finish that is an absolute must play for anyone who enjoys classic FPS games.

I came at this game with very little nostalgia for the design ethos of the 90s shooter; I've never played Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, Wolfenstein 3D, Marathon, Doom 2, or Hexen, largely because what little of that era I've tapped into felt like an exercise in historically contextualizing the lineage shooters have much diverged from than my seeking out a delivery mechanism of adrenaline fueled, non-stop aggressive play that is so frequently touted as the main characteristic of early 90s shooters. And, if I'm being honest, that type of hyperactive, all out play is not terribly enticing when I think about it abstractly in comparison to the mechanized, Ford-like construction of a dynamic encounter curve, differentiated with sculpted ebbs and flows of broader systemic play, that I had grown up with in 2nd gen FPSs, some of which purposely de-emphasized the shooting part of FPSs, so as to, maybe foolishly given the marketability the genre went through for 15 years after Doom, force a growth out of the simplistic interaction style gunplay enforces in a systemic state.

Nostalgia, however, has very little to do with Project Warlock's genuine thrill. Where Half-Life felt like the next iteration of the genuinely necessary, yet difficultly foreseen, integration of fidelity into game worlds that the systems pioneered and actionalized by the early Id games, only hinted at in their early shooter catalogue, affected with merely minor afterthoughts, Project Warlock (and DUSK and, to a much lesser extent, Doom (2016)) takes the mechanical interaction a step beyond the game world dissonance that shooters have largely been mired in since Duke Nukem 3D gave way to Half Life gave way to Halo gave way to Bioshock, etc. etc.

While the grounding of the play within a concerted and asserted cause and effect extension of the actual verb set beyond shoot at _____ becomes shot _______, the shooter had to grapple with shot ________ becomes why have you shot _________? As modern 'games about games' have shown, this is a largely fruitless endeavour to interrogate in AAA games because systems orientation for that initial question investigates all necessary questioning but then reinforces an ignorance of it with a game's recidivistic rhetorical structure. Project Warlock plays both sides of the bargain with the framing and world design knelling only gunplay without absolutely abstracting it. Doom did something similar obviously but the context of its gameplay came before it could be regressed, and as such, progressed.

Even if you look at Project Warlock in wireframe, the tunnelling of the PC is deterministic in a way that seems counter-intuitive - yet it sells the world with its play in a way that something like Deus Ex never could with its mechanical interactions. And what's great is you never would wireframe PW because the package is so enticing that the idea of dropping the veneer plays into the arc of the excellently scant narrative explication.

Amazing soundtrack too, wow.

So, I was all the way up to the Episode 4 boss, playing on Standard difficulty, just having a grand time. I LOVED this game, I was having a blast. And then I lost all my lives to the Episode 4 boss.

Know what happens when you lose all your lives?

FUCK YOU THAT'S WHAT. YOU START FROM SQUARE FUCKIN' ONE AGAIN. KISS ALL YOUR UPGRADES, SPELLS, AND PERKS GOOD-FUCKIN'-BYE.

It's like someone made a delicious, massive spread with all your favorite foods and more. But then, some psycho runs in from off the street, jumps on the table, and just shits all over the food with projectile diarrhea.

Why on EARTH did they think it was a good idea to put in a god-forsaken lives system?
WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

Fuck this game with a goddamned rusty anchor.

Project Warlock is a fairly unique Boomer Shooter in that it takes after Wolfenstein 3D more than its successors.

The levels are short and take about 5 minutes to complete, and there are a ton of them: from 2 to 5 per act, 5 acts per episode, 5 episodes in total.

The game is focused on collecting secrets and has light RPG elements where exp gives you the ability to level up your stats, 5 levels give you a unique perk, and special collectibles give you ability to buy new spell or upgrade your arsenal.

The weapons are insanely fun and there are a ton of it, and locations are varied. From The Thing's inspired antarctic levels to modern cityscapes, every episode has unique enemies and details.

The game suffers a bit at the end, with Hell episode being a retread of earlier episodes (but spookier!) and featuring some really tanky enemies. The game is really easy, at least on Normal, and provides enough opportunities to upgrade your ammo cap as well as spells that give you ammo, so by the end I was just running around with what's effectively an infinite rocket launcher. Fun, but gets a little stale after your 10th room of tanky enemies who have three forms.

Despite that, most of the game is incredible: the music is fantastic, the visuals are always a treat, and the length of levels for something inspired by shooters of old is perfect for quick secret hunts and "one more level" type of gaming that doesn't let you go for hours.

Project Warlock is another one of the many boomer/retro/throwback FPS I've been playing through. So far it's the first FPS of recent memory to take most of its inspiration from Wolfenstein 3D. While this leads to some impressive pixel art and sprites, it also takes a hit in the level design as there's only so much you can do with strictly horizontal Wolf 3D levels.

The game consists of 5 episodes which take place in different settings, and in each episode there are 5 chapters which usually have 2 to 4 individual levels each which can be completed pretty quickly, hence the reason for the game having over 60 levels to begin with.
Other pros of PW include the soundtrack and the upgrade system, which adds a level of experimentation to the game. Each weapon can be upgraded to one out of the two given choices through unlock points scattered throughout the levels. You can also upgrade your character statistics, such as melee strength, ammo capacity, mana capacity (known as spirit) and health. You earn upgrade points for your character through levelling up which can be done by collecting gold and killing enemies. Occasionally you will get a player perk point which you can use to buy a perk if you have reached a certain level for a particular stat.
Most of the weapons in the game feel great to use. The shotgun with its full auto upgrade can shred through hordes and the super shotgun can reliably delete enemies in a few shots. The minigun is also good at shredding through anything that gives you a dirty look. Dynamite and the rocket launcher are great explosive additions to the arsenal as the screenshake and gore effects make them hit even harder. The flamethrower can easily melt enemies in a second, making it great for those many sudden monster closets that appear later on when the game is done messing around and literally wants to murder you for collecting a key.

However, there are aspects of this game that I'm mixed on. One of them is the balancing for spells and weapons. In a game like this which is littered with upgrades for almost every aspect of the player, there is bound to be options that are objectively superior. Even if you disregard the upgrades, some weapons in your arsenal go mostly unused throughout the game due to how lacklustre they are. The pistol is only good if you upgrade it to a .50 Magnum and even then you still won't be using it a lot. There's also a crossbow, a laser rifle and a staff I didn't use a lot because the minigun, flamethrower and shotgun, all with the right upgrades, makes these weapons useless. The spells are even worse, as there's only two spells that are just objectively better than the rest, those being the freezing spell and the lightning spell. The lightning spell is ridiculously overpowered if you've upgraded your mana as it becomes so good at clearing rooms that the BFG-9000 equivalent of the game becomes overshadowed.
There's also some questionable level design and enemy placement. The 4th episode plays like a complete mess as the game throws so many projectile and explosive enemies in the cramped Wolf 3D style levels that the damage is unavoidable. There's also a surprisingly high number of levels which start with you getting attacked by a horde of enemies before you even have time to react.
The game also suffers from glitches and performance issues. Don't be fooled by the game's looks, your frame rate will tank in the more hectic battles, which is just completely unacceptable for a game that looks the way it is. Lastly, I encountered a fair amount of bugs and glitches. One of the bugs included a secret switch which I could repeatedly press to exceed the secret count for the level as it logged a secret for each time I pressed it. The more common bug I came across was elevators and moving floors just cause me to fall off the map. I could even easily replicate this bug falling through the map and it amazes me that this wasn't patched.

Overall, Project Warlock is an easy recommend for anyone who wants to try another boomer shooter in the always expanding line-up of throwback FPS games, just don't expect to be able to max out all your upgrades and stats in a single playthrough, this game is honestly perfect in length and would only take 5-6 hours to beat.

Decent Wolfenstein-like with a huge arsenal and really fun upgrades.

Maps are short and sweet, weapons are mostly pretty punchy and enemies have a lot of visual variety (although actual types don't change too much).

The magic and spell system was interesting, but can be largely ignored in favor of guns, same goes for the RPG-level system, where most of the points can be ideally put into max-health or ammo capacity.

Overall a nice game to grab on sale for its low, low price.

Solid boomer shooter fun. Not an overly long game, nor should it be, but the 5 1/2 hours it took me to beat the campaign were filled with fun levels, classic secret finding, and mostly fun boss fights. I think the game starts getting a bit spammy at the end, but it doesn't last too long thankfully. I think swapping weapons could be a bit less clunky, and getting stuck on enemies and environments is really annoying, but the gunplay and art design are cool enough to get it to the finish line for me.

Now this is some quality! Music? Great. Art? Great. This big-ass axe I found? Great.

The progressive character leveling and lives system push very hard in the Arcade-trope direction, and while I think that's a super interesting concept to pursue, Project Warlock doesn't quite capitalize on it.

Upgrade and leveling decisions are permeant, and some of them are quite bad. This wouldn't be a problem, since they reset on game reset, but a game reset isn't common enough on normal (Hard or lower) difficulties for this to come up, so it only really shines in Hardcore.

Trouble with Hardcore is that it's an ironman. I don't like ironman modes in general, and even with Project Warlock's bite-size campaign, it is to play in one sitting, so a death at almost any point will feel like a frustrating waste of time.

But, ya know, the actual game is still good.