First off, thank you to the options menu and the kind people who developed the 1.3 patch for making this game playable so that the AI were functional and also I didn't have to play with the inane save gems mechanic. Anyway.
Kinda the inverse of Quake. Where Quake is very stripped back and minimal and purely focused on making its mechanics feel razor sharp, Daikatana is a very slow burn game where there's a whole mess of systems that all have to slowly come together before the game really clicked for me. It does not help that the game opens with it's two worst levels, and then for some reason follows it up with it's 3 hardest levels. But once you've started leveling up your abilities, and once you've actually had your team mates cover you in a fight successfully a couple times (assuming u installed the 1.3 patch lol), and once you start to get a feel for the weird non-standard obscenely bloated arsenal, every now and then it all just comes together and you can see the genuinely great video game hidden behind all the broken half finished parts. The shooting here is not at all as fast nor as perfected as Quake, in fact fights are often held in awkwardly shaped cramped rooms. But weirdly enough that flavor of combat gradually grew on me as an acquired taste. A lot of fights in Daikatana force you to think critically about and utilize the restrictive environments. The best parts of the game are in the 2nd and 3rd episodes, where they experiment most with the time travel premise as a way to play into different styles and gameplay approaches in a genuinely really cool way. The dramatic shifts in tone as well as the complete overhaul of your arsenal every episode make me think that John Romero and co. wanted to make a game that felt like 4 whole different games with each episode, and for those first 3 episodes I think they genuinely succeeded. That being said, the forth episode is hard to describe as anything other than halfhearted, with most of the more unique designs of the earlier levels being absent, and it just feeling like one corridor with easy enemies after another. Another big problem is that most of the puzzles in the game are basically "figure out which indistinct object the level designer decided you can interact with/shoot to interact with this time", which were never fun to get stuck on. But like, despite All That, I still found myself having a pretty dang good time playing Daikatana, somehow? I don't know there's something about the odd shape of the gameplay loop formed by the RPG elements combined with the constant shift in tone and jagged level design that I found oddly difficult to pull away from. It's not gonna be one of my but favorite games anytime soon, but I mean, I guess he made me his bitch after all.
Kinda the inverse of Quake. Where Quake is very stripped back and minimal and purely focused on making its mechanics feel razor sharp, Daikatana is a very slow burn game where there's a whole mess of systems that all have to slowly come together before the game really clicked for me. It does not help that the game opens with it's two worst levels, and then for some reason follows it up with it's 3 hardest levels. But once you've started leveling up your abilities, and once you've actually had your team mates cover you in a fight successfully a couple times (assuming u installed the 1.3 patch lol), and once you start to get a feel for the weird non-standard obscenely bloated arsenal, every now and then it all just comes together and you can see the genuinely great video game hidden behind all the broken half finished parts. The shooting here is not at all as fast nor as perfected as Quake, in fact fights are often held in awkwardly shaped cramped rooms. But weirdly enough that flavor of combat gradually grew on me as an acquired taste. A lot of fights in Daikatana force you to think critically about and utilize the restrictive environments. The best parts of the game are in the 2nd and 3rd episodes, where they experiment most with the time travel premise as a way to play into different styles and gameplay approaches in a genuinely really cool way. The dramatic shifts in tone as well as the complete overhaul of your arsenal every episode make me think that John Romero and co. wanted to make a game that felt like 4 whole different games with each episode, and for those first 3 episodes I think they genuinely succeeded. That being said, the forth episode is hard to describe as anything other than halfhearted, with most of the more unique designs of the earlier levels being absent, and it just feeling like one corridor with easy enemies after another. Another big problem is that most of the puzzles in the game are basically "figure out which indistinct object the level designer decided you can interact with/shoot to interact with this time", which were never fun to get stuck on. But like, despite All That, I still found myself having a pretty dang good time playing Daikatana, somehow? I don't know there's something about the odd shape of the gameplay loop formed by the RPG elements combined with the constant shift in tone and jagged level design that I found oddly difficult to pull away from. It's not gonna be one of my but favorite games anytime soon, but I mean, I guess he made me his bitch after all.