Wolfenstein 3D with lots of hectic chaos, gore, beautiful pixel art and a leveling and upgrade system for its massive arsenal of guns and spells. If that sounds good to you, go in without fear.
You level up by killing enemies, collecting treasure and finding secrets, which usually contain upgrade tokens you can spend on unlocking new spells and forking each gun into two possible upgrades: want your double barrel shotgun to become a quad barrel shotgun, or do you prefer adding a napalm effect to each shell? Want your laser gun to become a laser rifle or a devastating railgun, and so on?
Leveling nets stat tokens which can be spent on melee damage, health, ammo capacity and spirit, which regulates your mana reserve as well as the MP cost and potency of your spells. Every five levels you get one perk token, which unlocks powerful passive bonuses with stat requirements, a few examples being one that lets you walk though enemies and never be stuck in a corner, or one that makes you move faster, or receive an extra random stat point for each level up. There is serious play style customization here, which creates replay value.
It even includes an endless horde mode for when the 8-10 hour campaign is done, although it is little more than a perfunctory afterthought: it's a single map with a very limited enemy roster, no spells and a fraction of the available weapons. Its drops are so incredibly random that making it anywhere into this mode is little more than a roll of the dice: you will drop very little health and hundreds of ammo boxes for weapons that you will never have, along with mana bottles which would fuel spells that are not available. I reached wave 30 before calling it and it was so incredibly easy by that point, without any higher level enemies ever spawning in, that it was going absolutely nowhere. It feels like the mode is only there to tick a box since every other boomershooter has an endless mode after Dusk had one.
From a presentation standpoint, enemies are well drawn and highly varied 2D sprites which are also beautifully animated, though you'll be excused for not noticing, due to the absolute chaos most levels will throw at you. The design of the levels themselves is largely straight out of Wolfenstein, with mostly right angles and a deliberate lack of verticality. This is never a problem, as the game is built around enemy encounters and ambushes rather than complex exploration.
There are boss encounters and these vary a bit in quality: while they're always a visual spectacle, their difficulty curve is all over the place: the second boss is pure chaos with plenty of splash damage and minons spawning in but the following ones are much easier affairs where proficient circle strafers will have a hard time getting hit. These would have definitely needed a bit more tweaking to make them more challenging.
Of particular note is its permadeath mechanic: instead of featuring a typical save system, the game makes you tackle levels in batches of two, three and even four, only saving at the end of each batch. This is never a problem since levels can usually be completed in less than five minutes, ten if secret hunting. If you die you lose a life, which is detracted from your total amount, and if you run out entirely, your run is over. You can however choose to not spend any lives and just start the level batch over, so the system is not too intrusive and highly adaptable to player preference.
On paper an interesting idea but in practice it wasn't balanced all too well: the arsenal is so powerful that the game feels a bit too easy on normal, meaning you'll likely get to the end with 20+ lives to spare. Higher difficulties ramp up to higher challenge and even unreasonable odds on the highest setting, in which permadeath happens after a single fail state.
All weapons sound suitably punchy and the war cries and meaty splattering sounds of the enemies are visceral, though the music is uneven and tends too loop a bit too much, resulting annoying here and there. Luckily it's easy to turn it down or off entirely in levels where it happens to grate on you ears.
Project Warlock is a fun shooter that can be played in short bursts and offers plenty of satisfying action. Highly recommended to retro shooter fans.
You level up by killing enemies, collecting treasure and finding secrets, which usually contain upgrade tokens you can spend on unlocking new spells and forking each gun into two possible upgrades: want your double barrel shotgun to become a quad barrel shotgun, or do you prefer adding a napalm effect to each shell? Want your laser gun to become a laser rifle or a devastating railgun, and so on?
Leveling nets stat tokens which can be spent on melee damage, health, ammo capacity and spirit, which regulates your mana reserve as well as the MP cost and potency of your spells. Every five levels you get one perk token, which unlocks powerful passive bonuses with stat requirements, a few examples being one that lets you walk though enemies and never be stuck in a corner, or one that makes you move faster, or receive an extra random stat point for each level up. There is serious play style customization here, which creates replay value.
It even includes an endless horde mode for when the 8-10 hour campaign is done, although it is little more than a perfunctory afterthought: it's a single map with a very limited enemy roster, no spells and a fraction of the available weapons. Its drops are so incredibly random that making it anywhere into this mode is little more than a roll of the dice: you will drop very little health and hundreds of ammo boxes for weapons that you will never have, along with mana bottles which would fuel spells that are not available. I reached wave 30 before calling it and it was so incredibly easy by that point, without any higher level enemies ever spawning in, that it was going absolutely nowhere. It feels like the mode is only there to tick a box since every other boomershooter has an endless mode after Dusk had one.
From a presentation standpoint, enemies are well drawn and highly varied 2D sprites which are also beautifully animated, though you'll be excused for not noticing, due to the absolute chaos most levels will throw at you. The design of the levels themselves is largely straight out of Wolfenstein, with mostly right angles and a deliberate lack of verticality. This is never a problem, as the game is built around enemy encounters and ambushes rather than complex exploration.
There are boss encounters and these vary a bit in quality: while they're always a visual spectacle, their difficulty curve is all over the place: the second boss is pure chaos with plenty of splash damage and minons spawning in but the following ones are much easier affairs where proficient circle strafers will have a hard time getting hit. These would have definitely needed a bit more tweaking to make them more challenging.
Of particular note is its permadeath mechanic: instead of featuring a typical save system, the game makes you tackle levels in batches of two, three and even four, only saving at the end of each batch. This is never a problem since levels can usually be completed in less than five minutes, ten if secret hunting. If you die you lose a life, which is detracted from your total amount, and if you run out entirely, your run is over. You can however choose to not spend any lives and just start the level batch over, so the system is not too intrusive and highly adaptable to player preference.
On paper an interesting idea but in practice it wasn't balanced all too well: the arsenal is so powerful that the game feels a bit too easy on normal, meaning you'll likely get to the end with 20+ lives to spare. Higher difficulties ramp up to higher challenge and even unreasonable odds on the highest setting, in which permadeath happens after a single fail state.
All weapons sound suitably punchy and the war cries and meaty splattering sounds of the enemies are visceral, though the music is uneven and tends too loop a bit too much, resulting annoying here and there. Luckily it's easy to turn it down or off entirely in levels where it happens to grate on you ears.
Project Warlock is a fun shooter that can be played in short bursts and offers plenty of satisfying action. Highly recommended to retro shooter fans.