Arx Fatalis is very much a relic of its time. A game that was made back when games were arguably much more willing to take creative risks to create a unique setting. It's the type of game that, even from a studio like Arkane, you probably wouldn't see. However, it being a relic of its time means that it comes with some drawbacks that are at their best jarring, and at their worst infuriating.

Arx's strongest aspect by far is the atmosphere it invokes. I always love living underground in sandbox games where it allows me to, so an entirely underground civilization is right up my alley. The artistic direction and sound design (barring some awkward transitions and harsher sounds) accentuates this beautifully, as does some of the humor the game pulls in the first half.

I also found the rather clunky combat growing on me over time. It's very slow nad methodical, but it was nice using that slower combat to weave in spells once I got more of them unlocked. Even the spell system is unique, drawing out combos of shapes to cast spells. If I do return to Arx at some point, a spell-based build is an absolute must for me.

However, these strengths are beset by some hefty negatives. The biggest issue by far was with Arx's infatuation with making things obscure. I can handle having to find some things out and puzzle solve without too much guidance, and I'll fully admit there's stuff I looked up that I probably should've pieced together. However, I can't imagine playing this game without several walkthroughs showing me how to do x, y, and z. Hell, I went through half the game completely misunderstanding the heavy attack system since it doesn't teach you.

Some of this can be explained by early PC games having manuals, but the way you progress the main quest can be unnecessarily vague and require random bits and bobs. It could be a pickaxe from a specific level here, or a specific spell there. It drew the runtime out immensely to where I eventually started noclipping through walls at times just so I could skip some parts of the busywork. One part was even necessary when one of the objectives just didn't spawn in.

The story also isn't anything to write home about. It's fairly bog standard for its time, and has plenty of exposition dumps for you to immediately forget. If you skip through most cutscenes then you should be fine, but it can be pretty tiring if you care a lot about lore like me.

I think Arx will jump comfortably in that pile of games that aren't bad, but could go so, so much further with a modern-day remake. Keeping that art direction and combat similar while not being so up its own ass with obscurity would go a lot way, as would making the main plot a little more intriguing. If you can appreciate an atmospheric RPG, and especially if you have Game Pass, this is still worth checking out.

People give BioShock shit for this all the time, but DOOM 3 is the actual poor man’s System Shock 2 meets Half-Life!

I can’t understate how bad DOOM 3 is. It's the best example of what would happen if someone looked at both of the previously mentioned games and tried to superficially imitate it without understanding why those games worked so well.

DOOM 3 is one of the prime examples of id Software’s dark age, where basically everyone from the old guard, save for John Carmack and a few others like Tim Willits, had left the company, and thus was gone the personality and charm that made id Software’s prior works so memorable, and was replaced with a studio that seemed stuck in the past and didn’t know how to make games fun anymore, where as Valve continued to rise to the top after the huge success of the Half-Life franchise.

Now, conceptually the game itself does sound interesting, it takes the foundation of the original DOOM games, specifically DOOM 64, which was already leaning into horror with the atmosphere, and goes all the way into survival horror territory, or at the very least, it could have? Because here’s the main problem, DOOM 3 feels very much confused, it doesn’t know what it wants to be, and ends up trying to be three things at once, and failing at all of them as well.

But I guess I’d need to explain why those other games work in the first place, to then explain why this one doesn’t, so here we go fellas…

Half-Life

Arguably the most obvious point of comparison, down to even plot beats being ripped straight from it, Half-Life is known for its masterful use of environmental storytelling and player immersion, taking cues from the original DOOM games and making it much more grounded than “marine tears through demons”, but what truly makes Half-Life Half-Life is its gameplay. See, the gameplay itself isn’t just about running around the map killing monsters, and what in DOOM would be diversions from the core gameplay loop (the key/secret hunting) is integral to Half-Life, between gunfights there are also puzzles and platforming segments, and areas can even vary in how their gameplay is structured, going from survival horror-esque segments in the more claustrophobic segments of the Black Mesa facility, to engaging in firefights with the military and the monsters in the desert and etcetera.

In summary, Half-Life is a game that constantly shifts in pacing to make it never get stale, making it so you are never playing through the same chapter for too long (barring Surface Tension), and since often some sections come with setpieces that excellently manage to introduce you to that one chapter, it makes every one of them stand out from each other.

Also ‘On A Rail’ is a very good level.

System Shock 2

System Shock 2 is a pure survival horror at its core, and it manages to knock it out of the park. Using Thief: The Dark Project’s Dark Engine, enemies have audio cues that instill the paranoia on the player, and creates fear not because of the unknown, but because you know there is a looming threat close to you, but you don’t know where they are exactly, and even rooms that might seem safe could have a Cyborg Midwife rushing to your position and messing with your day, and that’s not getting into how your weapons could jam during battle, or you could run out of healing items, or other unfortunate circumstances, though all put in contrast to the RPG systems that allow you circumvent those situations in a number of different ways. And System Shock 2 is no slouch at storytelling either, and is even stronger at it than Half-Life, still similarly using incredible environmental design and storytelling, but also audio logs that spectacularly capture the horrors of being trapped in a place such as the Von Braun while it goes all downhill, seeing the last words of crewmembers, whether they are dying or being turned into part of The Many, is incredibly chilling, and at times the story can reach even philosophical levels, as questions about being an individual or mistakes from the past start to creep up on the player.

I don’t want this to turn into a full blown System Shock 2 review, so to cap it off, the game consistently manages to create horror both with its narrative and moment-to-moment gameplay, while still giving you the tools to fight back against it, or even outright break it (grenade launcher and full agility go bonkers).

Right, back to sadness and darkness, AKA DOOM 3.

DOOM 3 tries to imitate several aspects of these two games, but fails at almost all of them, especially in its (non-)story. And speaking of which, the story is… Fine? Like, it’s pretty much just Half-Life 1 with a bit of System Shock in there as well for good measure and… That’s it. It just lacks the spark that made either of these games from a narrative perspective so interesting, look at the main antagonist for example, he (and Hell) lacks the complex and downright philosophical overtones of S.H.O.D.A.N and The Many as well as the mystery and visual storytelling of Xen and the black ops. Really, it’s barely above Quake 2 in terms of story, except there are more cutscenes than just the ones between each level.

But yeah, that’s still far better than the gameplay itself, which is, at least for almost 80% of the game, shit.

A lot of the gameplay in DOOM 3 feels like a trickle. The weapons are mostly terrible, lacking the beef that they had in the first three games and at times feeling more like peashooters in comparison, especially the INFAMOUS shotgun, and another problem is that it tries to be a survival horror game where you have to deal with low ammo and such, but at its core it’s still a DOOM game, and those two things gel very badly with each other. The enemy encounters are just very lacking for the majority of the game, just repeatedly reusing the same “Imp appears out of a monster closet/portal to kill ya” at a rate having a drink shot for every time that same setup was used would lead me to the fucking hospital, or the even more obnoxious “small melee enemy spam” that the game loves so much that the game has two different enemy types that serve for literally the exact same purpose, be as obnoxious as Fanboy and Chum Chum, and the few interesting enemies the game uses sometimes are either very underutilized like the Pinky (who has got a radical redesign here), or appear way, way later in the game. The level design is generally very dull and boring, just taking place in very samey industrial corridors that would make Quake 2 look like Pizza Tower, and due to taking place in those very samey industrial corridors, significantly cutting down on opportunities for interesting level design beyond reusing the same incredibly flimsy attempts at horror, and by horror I mean “oh look here’s an Imp just behind that door that you could not possibly predict unless you already knew it was there” kind of thing, and after a quarter of the way through the game, I was just expecting for every two rooms to have something like either of those previously mentioned types of encounters, while all following the exact same structure of “pick that keycard/pda to get through that door”, where as 1, 2 and 64, while still following a similar structure, at least incorporated puzzle elements into the mix to make getting each keycard more challenging than just “go through all of those corridors killing enemies”, and occasions that remotely resemble those puzzles from those games are VERY few and far between.

And the end result is a game that is BORING… Really, really, really BORING. While not having many diversions from the core gameplay loop of killing demons isn’t the worst thing, that gameplay loop in question is so repetitive, irritating and busted that after the first hour it becomes a exhaustive slog, and by the time I beat Hell, I was begging for the game to end there.

And speaking of Hell, I want to dedicate a whole paragraph to Hell, the only level that manages to be almost genuinely good and isn’t boring beyond belief. Hell is the highlight of this game, for starters this level is probably the one that best captures the feeling of being in Hell, possibly in the entire series even. You truly feel like a mere mortal that managed to get into a place no one should ever dare to, and the hellish architecture and art direction of this puts every other DOOM game up until that point to shame (yes, I am being serious), I mean just look at that loading screen, it’s so fucking foreboding and awesome it makes me wish the entire game was half as good as this. And in the gameplay department this doesn’t disappoint either, at the start of the level you are starved of ammo and is already forced to fight a Hell Knight with only your shotgun, and this is the ONLY time in the entire game where the atrocious spread of it actually makes a gunfight in this game more intense. The latter half isn’t quite up there, but it still brings to the table some challenging combat encounters using stronger enemies and more tight levels, and the best part is that it ends before boredom starts to creep up, albeit it ends in a disappointing boss fight like with every other DOOM game before it, but at least the game ends in a high note here…

Too bad it doesn’t end in Hell!

I wish every other level in the game was as good as Hell, especially in the art direction (though there are some that try).

Because in terms of sights and sounds this manages to take Quake 2’s already pretty uneven art style and make it even more bland and uninteresting here. As I said before, most levels are just boring gray industrial corridors over and over and over again, and even when there’s a different room that isn’t just that, it’s still unremarkable due to how everything else blends itself together in my mind, and I don’t think that can attributed solely because of its setting, since later on there a few moments that do try to go for something different and start mixing those industrial corridors with hell and it's pretty awesome, but they are tainted by the fact that at their core they are still those same corridors you have been seeing since the very beginning of the game.

And I don’t think this game’s setting is the root cause of this problem, specifically because if I look at a System Shock 2 (literally), while the game does take place almost entirely in a massive Star Trek-esque starship, every area in the game looks and feels different from one another even if they happen to have a similar color palette, most notably because of how each room is carefully laid out to fit that deck’s purpose, and consequently creates several memorable and noteworthy rooms because of that, and that’s not even getting into all of the body horror galore of The Many. DOOM 3 also aspires to do levels that feel like tangible real places, but it lacks the ability to do something interesting with them, and even when it does, it’s way too late in the game. Going into the sounds, they are just there, and when they aren’t just there, they suck. Again, weapons sound more like peashooters or Nerf guns, but that’s par from the course at this point.

Just before wrapping this up, this game is really not scary, I don’t know if it is because it’s a horror shooter and I am naturally far less scared of games where you can directly fight back against the source of those horrors, but yeah, DOOM 3 failed to scare me at all, most notably because of the overuse of the already mentioned to death monster closet jumpscares that are very flimsy to begin with and quickly become predictable, but maybe that’s just me and in reality this is one of the scariest games of all time according to a professional gaming journalism site like IGN or Kotaku (if the latter is even professional).

I might be sounding (or reading) like a broken record at this point, but yeah, DOOM 3 is really that bad. There are certain things I do appreciate and even like about it (again, the Hell level is great, and it does start to pick up steam at the last quarter), especially their ambition in trying to turn DOOM into pure horror affair, but they are bogged down by literally every other bad thing this game does that it is no wonder people don’t really talk about it in the same way they do about Half-Life 2 or F.E.A.R, or even lesser known ones like Dark Corners of the Earth.

They couldn’t even get killing demons right. I’ve seen bad Devour clones that put more effort into how enemies died than DOOM 3.

Though at least it probably still isn’t as bad as Rage…

A bit of a frustrating experience, because it’s sooo close to being a very good to great shmup—weapon-switching on the fly is fun, and the levels are smartly laid out to encourage it; and the music and graphics are excellent—but there’s just too much bullshit design in the way. Tons of stuff kills you without any warning on the first attempt, so it basically comes down to memorization… and once you do memorize the few BS spots in each stage, the whole thing kind of becomes a cake walk.

It’s just not balanced well. I haven’t played IV yet, but I’m hoping it’s so lauded because they kept all of the good stuff about III, and excised all of the garbage, and got the difficulty balance just right…

Pinball meets Twin Stick Shooter in a shallow indie rogue like.
Go Mecha Ball is an overwhelming blur that does everything in it power to hurt your senses. Firstly if you are considering playing this game I highly recommend turning down the music, turning off motion blur and disabling screen shake screen. Not only are all these thing obnoxious and overwhelming the colour palet and texture design is god awful too.
Now for gameplay, it's actually not all terrible. I particularly like the class that focuses on being a pinball as there's something quiet satisfying about bouncing enemy's off the map. There is a fair bit of enemy variety which is nice, however I can't say the same for the boss fights. In total there are 4 main bosses (possibly a 5th if you 100%) that are very unrewarding and painfully easy.
Overall the rogue mechanics are quiet dull and with the game play thats average at best I wouldn't recommend.