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WRATH: Aeon of Ruin - new Quake engine game from 3D Realms
- Thread starter geno
- Start date
That concludes any interest I might have had in the game.
the save crystals are for quick saving, essentially. there are also shrines that are "save points"
from what I've seen you get an over abundance of save crystals so it shouldn't be an issue unless you need to quick save every other minute
edit: there's also an unlimited save option if you are a casual
from what I've seen you get an over abundance of save crystals so it shouldn't be an issue unless you need to quick save every other minute
edit: there's also an unlimited save option if you are a casual
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Limited saving is not much of a challenge cuz you can easily accumulate dozens of spare soul tethers, but the game's pacing is. If you skimp on soul tether usage creating setbacks for yourself and search for secrets thoroughly you can easily spend up to 10 hours in first episode alone while shooting the same 5 fucking weapons and getting bored to death. The levels are not very complex, they are just huge and sloggish.
Be Kind Rewind
Dumbfuck!
Had pretty high hopes for Wrath since Ion Fury was one of few shooter revivals that actually delivered on the promise of bringing back old style shooters, partly because experienced Quake mappers were involved, and partly because they stuck to the engine which is pretty fucking important since most of these clowns couldn't even get close to a poorly done Doom mod made back in the day when they're using Unity or UE in terms of gamefeel and the nitty gritty details. The Monolith devs of Blood spent a huge part of their development time on getting that right, movement, making sure shooting is satisfying, then came the enemies and levels, and current year trannies can't compete with that level of knowhow and professionalism and craft that went into it.
I'm still in the first act and it's not doing much for me yet and everything is a mess of game design. For starters the setting feels very stale by now, someone on the team must have been obsessed with FromSoft, because it tries and fails in capturing some kind of Dark Souls atmosphere, with you arriving at the "isle of the dead", without making any visual reference to the meme painting which I was bothered by, and shooting the uninspired undead. With shooters you can tell straight away how good the game will be and you can't pull the it takes 666 hours for the game to get good excuse. The cultist of Blood is just as fun to fight the first couple of minutes into the game as in the lategame when he is equipped with more powerful armaments. So the setting wasn't doing it for me, the enemies were designed to be more annoying than interesting, fun and challenging to fight.
The movement isn't much better, older games had speed but it was distinct from the current crop of "movement shooters" that are all about parkour and doing Siamese acrobatics, which might have been enjoyable if platforming and first person shooters at all went together. Wrath doesn't know where it wants to be, and includes a magic dagger that makes the player shoot out like a cannon but only as long as it is equipped, so you have to play the game as if you were playing Counter-Strike, constantly shifting to the knife for optimal and often necssary movement. It's a lot like the blink in Dishonored but less interesting because it doesn't drain any resources or stamina. The game engine physics or just the player speed much have been tweaked, because I fucking flew around like a ping pong ball while trying to get to secrets, bouncing off and onto walls and the player speed just isn't right for precise platforming that the game wants out of you.
Level design must be the final nail in the coffin for me, because despite giving you this bunny-jumper's wet dream of a Counter-Strike gotta go fast knife they seem to not have properly designed the levels for this. I kept exploring and not just running into empty areas in the graveyard without secrets despite being hard to reach places, but also constant invisible walls. And despite being done on the Quake engine the limitations are gone so they went for a much more painterly and realistic design than the abstract corridors and halls of Quake, at times it feels like playing a poor man's version of Unreal, with how they try to wow you with environements that aren't very fun to play around it, and the encounters remind me more of Painkiller with how they most of the time just spawn in instead of encountering them more naturally and then reinforcements spawning off-screen when you're away.
The second strike against the level design beyond the abysmal encounter design and putting aesthetics above function is that they are simply too large. Ion Fury also suffered from this issue, while the real shooters of the golden age would put you in missions or levels that were bite sized and constantly changed things up with theming, design principles, and scenarios, these newer games always drag it out for too long and skimp on quanitiy and variation. I'm nearing the end of the first episode or chapter and I'm feeling very bored and I don't think putting the same undead in a desert or something like Diablo 2 did without the enemy roster changeup will improve my impression of the game.
I haven't even spent time on trashing the special powers you get, which I almost never have used at least up until now. Game is easy enough without them, I don't need I win buttons. Furthermore they are limited and work like ammo, Dark Forces 2 had these force powers you could use too and not only balanced the game around them but you got to recharge them by fighting enemies, far superior to the hidden egg hunt in this game. Limited saves are also not a big deal, I have more than 20 saving gems, they didn't do much for Daikatana, which was way more lethal, and they don't do much for this game either. Speaking of Daikatana, despite being such a maligned game it had four different episodes with radically different settings, a whole arsenal for each one of them as well as an unique enemy roster for each episode. Maybe I'm getting old and cranky but it seems like the biggest flops of the past are better than 99% of the indie shit we get these days. Say what you will about Blood 2, but I honestly had more fun blasting corpo-cultists in that game than I had fighting undead in Wrath so far.
Will have to finish this crap just in case the levels magically turn great later on and somehow save this mess of a game from the indie shooter mass grave of irrelevance.
I'm still in the first act and it's not doing much for me yet and everything is a mess of game design. For starters the setting feels very stale by now, someone on the team must have been obsessed with FromSoft, because it tries and fails in capturing some kind of Dark Souls atmosphere, with you arriving at the "isle of the dead", without making any visual reference to the meme painting which I was bothered by, and shooting the uninspired undead. With shooters you can tell straight away how good the game will be and you can't pull the it takes 666 hours for the game to get good excuse. The cultist of Blood is just as fun to fight the first couple of minutes into the game as in the lategame when he is equipped with more powerful armaments. So the setting wasn't doing it for me, the enemies were designed to be more annoying than interesting, fun and challenging to fight.
The movement isn't much better, older games had speed but it was distinct from the current crop of "movement shooters" that are all about parkour and doing Siamese acrobatics, which might have been enjoyable if platforming and first person shooters at all went together. Wrath doesn't know where it wants to be, and includes a magic dagger that makes the player shoot out like a cannon but only as long as it is equipped, so you have to play the game as if you were playing Counter-Strike, constantly shifting to the knife for optimal and often necssary movement. It's a lot like the blink in Dishonored but less interesting because it doesn't drain any resources or stamina. The game engine physics or just the player speed much have been tweaked, because I fucking flew around like a ping pong ball while trying to get to secrets, bouncing off and onto walls and the player speed just isn't right for precise platforming that the game wants out of you.
Level design must be the final nail in the coffin for me, because despite giving you this bunny-jumper's wet dream of a Counter-Strike gotta go fast knife they seem to not have properly designed the levels for this. I kept exploring and not just running into empty areas in the graveyard without secrets despite being hard to reach places, but also constant invisible walls. And despite being done on the Quake engine the limitations are gone so they went for a much more painterly and realistic design than the abstract corridors and halls of Quake, at times it feels like playing a poor man's version of Unreal, with how they try to wow you with environements that aren't very fun to play around it, and the encounters remind me more of Painkiller with how they most of the time just spawn in instead of encountering them more naturally and then reinforcements spawning off-screen when you're away.
The second strike against the level design beyond the abysmal encounter design and putting aesthetics above function is that they are simply too large. Ion Fury also suffered from this issue, while the real shooters of the golden age would put you in missions or levels that were bite sized and constantly changed things up with theming, design principles, and scenarios, these newer games always drag it out for too long and skimp on quanitiy and variation. I'm nearing the end of the first episode or chapter and I'm feeling very bored and I don't think putting the same undead in a desert or something like Diablo 2 did without the enemy roster changeup will improve my impression of the game.
I haven't even spent time on trashing the special powers you get, which I almost never have used at least up until now. Game is easy enough without them, I don't need I win buttons. Furthermore they are limited and work like ammo, Dark Forces 2 had these force powers you could use too and not only balanced the game around them but you got to recharge them by fighting enemies, far superior to the hidden egg hunt in this game. Limited saves are also not a big deal, I have more than 20 saving gems, they didn't do much for Daikatana, which was way more lethal, and they don't do much for this game either. Speaking of Daikatana, despite being such a maligned game it had four different episodes with radically different settings, a whole arsenal for each one of them as well as an unique enemy roster for each episode. Maybe I'm getting old and cranky but it seems like the biggest flops of the past are better than 99% of the indie shit we get these days. Say what you will about Blood 2, but I honestly had more fun blasting corpo-cultists in that game than I had fighting undead in Wrath so far.
Will have to finish this crap just in case the levels magically turn great later on and somehow save this mess of a game from the indie shooter mass grave of irrelevance.
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Watching some gameplay videos and it does appear to be rather monotonous. Skimmed to some later episode video and the situation appears to be the same.
A little shame, wouldn't say that i was hyped or looking forward to it but i was still keeping a tabs on it kinda.
A little shame, wouldn't say that i was hyped or looking forward to it but i was still keeping a tabs on it kinda.
Be Kind Rewind
Dumbfuck!
Having just beat the game I can confirm that the game does get better, and the last couple of levels I played actually felt like a proper shooter, but since the order is up to the player your experience may vary and you might play an ass level right before the final boss.
Not being content with ambiguously saying the game gets better towards the end I'm going to analyze why this 4/10 suddenly jumped up to around 6~7/10 in the final episode.
Why secrets and item pickup force powers suck
But before I get to why it got less shit I better point out some things that I missed in my previous post. I did complain about the powers you get in the game but I didn't explain just how much they have shat it all up. Secret hunting in shooters is something just about any game gets right, typically you will find a weapon early, a super health, invisibility, or some other small boost to reward you for exploring. Since you barely ever need or want to use these special powers in the first episode, and probably not in the second episode either, you're typically stocked up on these and can't pick up more of them than 9 at a time. So when I put in all that effort, like say using up an oxygen power-up to swim under this long frozen river to find the secret area in the first episode my reward for this was shit I didn't just not need, but couldn't even pick up.
Then there are the chests, that you not only need to find hidden but also find a key for in a separate secret. These typically drop an ammo unit of some sort, a small health item and if you are lucky one of these powers that you probably already have too many of to pick up. Towards the end of the game I had started to hate finding these since I knew it was never worth it other than having the secrets found counter go up. When fighting the final boss I think I had 9 unused quad damage powers that I was saving up for a situation when I really needed it that never came up, along with full slots of void grenades and all sorts of other bullshit. Since you can only use one at a time the only one that saw any real use other than to test it out and free a slot for a new pickup was the oxygen mask that lets you stay underwater longer and the OP shield that bounces enemy attacks back.
Credit where credit is due
There are also some good things I forgot to mention because I was pushing through the absolute slog that was the first episode and the negatives were far more prominent than the positives. While Wrath flubs the basics of movement because the Counter-Strike/blink knife should always be equipped at all times for purposes of movement and it introduces these OP powers, there are many ways in which it isn't "modernized". For one thing you don't go around the levels collecting coins like Mario to buy items in a store, you don't level up, and you don't even do gun upgrades. Nor is there a two weapon limit, or any other form of consolitis other than perhaps the power menu, which is the usual modern circle, real men use the function keys.
The levels might suffer heavily because the focus was very obviously put on looks above function, but unlike so many "retro" shooters it doesn't have that more-ass-than-the-worst-looking-software-rendered-early-3D-shooter look that most indies go for, if you've suffered it you know, if not then consider yourself lucky to have escaped mixel pixel puke with post-processing and bloom slathered on top.
Why the game gets better
As I mentioned in my previous post the first episode is total shit in terms of encounters, often putting these annoying enemies miles away while most of your weapons are meant for close encounters, which the game punishes by having enemies explode and deal damage, or the enemies with large plasma canons that start firing all over the place and then also explode. Long distances suck because your best bet in EP1 is the nail gun that shoots teeth instead of nails, in the EA this was a pretty cool weapon with great sound effects and a satisfying rhythm to it, a slow steady thunk thunk thunk. The release version, I think, not only nerfs this gun but makes it shoot faster and the ammo drops are lower. So the beater gun chews through ammo crazy quick like a late-game FPS weapon.
There was a lot of Unreal in this game, and one of those influences was the worst weapon from Unreal, the bio-rifle that shoots acid or slime, the glop gun is okay at closer distances, but due to the gravity drop it's ass when they place enemies miles away up on some platform in the distance. Perhaps the worst insult comes when the game gives you the rocket launcher or devastator equivalent and it has a Star Wars stormtrooper tier spread to it, and it stays almost entirely useless until the third episode.
Episode 2 does address some of my complaints. It's the quintessential bored Quake mapper ordeal at full display, no invisible walls since everything takes place on floating rock islands or caverns with a lot of verticality, and you are shooting the same monsters in middle-eastern and South American inspired locales except floating somewhere. It still feels a lot like Painkiller in that the Poles built these stunning levels and only after the fact figured they should put some gameplay in there and spawn in monsters into these arenas, without the exits being blocked off in this case. The game gives you two new weapons however and they are game changers. You get a railgun that looks like an alien weapon from Unreal 2, and a crystal beam weapon that can turn enemies into frozen crystals that you can then shatter, or damage multiple enemies at once in this effect typically reserved for lightning spells in ARPGs.
The enemies introduced here still seem specifically designed to be annoying. We already had that corpse throwing parts of themselves at you just like in Painkiller, but they explode in acid when you kill them and try to suicide bomb you if you come close, you had an absolute shit version of the fiend from Quake, that charge at you, but are easily slain with a single charge of the knife that you should have available at all times since that's how you avoid their attacks in the first place. You've got scrags that they seem to have made even more annoying, but I'm not sure if they did or if it just poor encounter design when they put them outside of range for your close quarters weapons above some deadly drop, making you waste ammo for the weapons that are useful. In EP2 we now get these giant spiders that can turn invisible. They are more or less entirely restricted to this chapter and the devs probably figured they were shit since they never show up again in EP3.
One rarer enemy from EP1 now finally makes sense with the new weapons, a fire elemental dude with heavy but fast weapons that you now can take out with two shots of the railgun which also staggers him. This is what elevates episode 2, a hint of having to pick the right weapons for the right enemy and task, just like in Blood or any great shooter, as well as finally being able to properly engage enemies over distances.
There are some attempts to spice up the gameplay with these temporary power gates you can enter, introduced in one level of EP1 that gave you flight, the new ones here allow you to see and interact with hidden parts of the level, I didn't care for it much and it seemed more like attempts to distract the player than something that ever properly meshed with the gameplay and combat, other than perhaps at the end with the EP2 boss fight.
Episode 3, the return of Quake (And John Romero)
I'm pretty sure this game was heavily cut down in development, heard that the original team quit or were fired and they got a whole new set of devs, and it feels like an whole episode was cut from the game here. The transition from the floating islands to a world of decaying meat, rivers of blood and magma is a whiplash, it's not just the theming but the difficulty jumps all of a sudden. While the previous episode felt like playing a pretty mid Quake level pack in many ways, Episode 3 goes full balls to the walls with the challenge and ambition. Every level is far more distinct than it was in the previous episodes, there are sadistic traps, spike pits, lava lakes and all sorts of bullshit. This is the point where I actually ran into an encounter that seemed to be designed with the power pickups you get in mind and that you probably can't survive without getting souped up.
They also introduce a homage to Daikatana, a mace that powers up the more enemies you kill with it. You can unleash an attack that just about kills anything with it once charged, but after that you need to get up close and personal again. Some sections are obviously designed with this in mind, trowing the useless zombies that never had any real purpose in the game until now at you in hordes. But even when you aren't handed zombies on a silver platter you can always make the decision to risk taking a lot of damage in order to get another charge into it. The Daikatana dilemma is back baby, do you charge your fuck-off powerful mace or do you use your precious ammo and stay safe?
On top of that you get a proper late-game enemy to fight that should have been in the rooster since EP1, a massive artillery guy with a lot of HP, he's actually fun to fight unlike the charging melee guy you kill in one or two charged knife hits like a chump. EP3 throws all the enemeis of the game in much more thoughtful and challenging compositions that are more conductive to the gameplay, and it constantly keeps you on your toes.
This was the point in the game when I finally felt I was getting something more out of it than I would have if I'd simply stuck to Quake fan maps. Just as the game starts getting good it ends however, with a somewhat decent boss fight. Was it worth the wait since I bought this in 2019? Probably not, but 1/3 of the game is actually pretty fun, and another 1/3 is passable.
The boss fights are nothing to write home about, one you shoot the weak point of and go further and further up a crumbling structure, another you do the old Quake press the switches tactic on, but it doesn't end there but you get to shoot at the boss also. Finally the obvious surprise twist end boss you get to fight in a real arena with enemies spawning in and different stages. You could just have cut out the switch pressing part of the second boss and nothing would have been lost. Overall they were okay.
Conclusion and TL;DR
The first episode is trash, the second fixes some issues but is nothing special and the third and final episode is worth slogging through the previous content for. Some of the major issues persist through the entire game, secrets being less than useless to find, the knife being mandatory to movement and very OP against some enemies that should be challenging, some of the enemies are just annoying and stay that way, and much of the game feels uninspired and stale. Even in the third episode they put these awful "teehee, I'm not like other level designers" meme columnar basalt stacks in. But regardless of if it was the first team or the cleanup crew actually tried to fix their shitshow, the game does indeed get better. I forgot to mention the music is mediocre, it's not offensive, it won't get you pumped but probably also not turn many people off. Barely noticed it was there, other than the odd electric guitar riff.
I'd wait for a sale to buy it, if the whole game would have been as good as the third episode I'd tell you to buy it at fulll price. I'm still angry about walking into one obvious trap that got my gamer sense tingling but that I walked into anyway, thinking the game was too mid to do it, only for it to launch me into a spikepit and warm my black gamer heart.
Lyric Suite
Converting to Islam
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- Mar 23, 2006
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- 58,271
I find it amusing how the vast majority of those boomer shooters, and there appears to be quite a ton now, keep failing in one way or another.
It seems a lot of people assumed the classic FPS genre would have been an easy one to exploit given how basic classic shooters seem on paper turns out it's actually quite tricky to get it right. Almost as if those nu-devs underestimated the whole genre or something.
I remember the first footage shown of this game and you could tell right there they had no clear idea what they were doing. Game looked pretty because of Quake engine but that was about it.
Some of those nu-shooters aren't that bad but it's amusing how with so much effort to revive this genre i'd still rather go play original Doom or Quake or something.
It seems a lot of people assumed the classic FPS genre would have been an easy one to exploit given how basic classic shooters seem on paper turns out it's actually quite tricky to get it right. Almost as if those nu-devs underestimated the whole genre or something.
I remember the first footage shown of this game and you could tell right there they had no clear idea what they were doing. Game looked pretty because of Quake engine but that was about it.
Some of those nu-shooters aren't that bad but it's amusing how with so much effort to revive this genre i'd still rather go play original Doom or Quake or something.
VonMiskov
Educated
- Joined
- Feb 20, 2021
- Messages
- 258
I have to say and confirm what Be Kind Rewind wrote about first episode. It tired and bored me, to the point I was not going to finish the game or at least play it more sparingly. But if it gets better...
Anyway what bothers me is, are anyone else think that hitboxes not always works? Multiple times I think that the game just doesn't acknowledge that I hit something with the pistol. Or it isn't a hit scan weapon and has some kind of dispersion because I don't see no projectile.
Anyway what bothers me is, are anyone else think that hitboxes not always works? Multiple times I think that the game just doesn't acknowledge that I hit something with the pistol. Or it isn't a hit scan weapon and has some kind of dispersion because I don't see no projectile.
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Be Kind Rewind
Dumbfuck!
It does become fun in the third episode, but it never becomes great. If you have one of the truly great shooters on your backlog you should be playing that instead since you never know how much time you got left on this God forsaken Earth. The best and worst thing about shooters is that they're for people with lives. You can blast through most of them in a weekend and still have time over for reading, going fishing and fucking your wife, and still be left with time on your hands to post about them online. That does mean they don't waste your time and you're able to touch grass, but it also means the best the genre has to offer is over quickly and will leave you wanting for more the next weekend, and those fixes of pure distilled shooter goodness are rare as fuck these days.
The second episode will give you a feeling of playing Quake maps, but with worse enemies, weapons and the design flaws mentioned in my previous posts. But the third episode did manage to scratch the itch, the game does come into its own by the end.
As a PSA to anyone who is thinking of playing this I want to list some recent games you should play before trudging through the boredom to get to the good bits of Wrath:
- Ion Fury & Aftershock
- Hedon Bloodrite
- Fortune's Run
- Prey (2006, not the Arkane turd)
- Sin (In the better timeline this was the big hit and not Half-Life)
- Requiem: Avenging Angel (Zoomers never got 90's edge right, this is the real deal)
- Nitro Family (Serious Sam but as an Korean Arcade shooter)
The pistol is dogshit and I don't know if hitboxes were the problem, just seemed like a very lame gun that dealt almost no damage to any enemy and was more useless than the Doom starting pistol. Barely ever used it other than when I was forced to in the first episode, due to the floaters appearing a mile away and all your other guns are for close encounters.
Be Kind Rewind
Dumbfuck!
Also, I'm going to play Infinitroon here and post a comment from the main guy behind Wrath, Jeremiah Fox, who was booted off the project at some point along with the Quake mappers and the rest, after which Slipgate Ironworks was sent in to sweep up the vaporware mess and release something.
I've finished it but won't type a couple of paragraphs because it'd be mostly what you have said already. I have mixed feelings, the EA was promising but the final version takes ages to "click". It does when you have most of the tools and the game almost forces you to make weapon combos. It's like at mid-development they figured out what worked out and what not. On a side note, I think that the problem with the enemy roster is that they were designed for a mobility the engine can't manage, specially considering the complexity of the levels.
I'd like to read a post-mortem about this game, it had to be a hell of a ride.
I'd like to read a post-mortem about this game, it had to be a hell of a ride.
Ion Fury is vastly overrated and has many of the same problems that you claim Wrath has.
Hedon is decent but the maps are not only huge but requires tons of backtracking, so it's odd that you are fine w/ that and not the large levels of Wrath that don't really require backtracking much
For Troon's Run is just early access dogshit and a bad game.
Be Kind Rewind
Dumbfuck!
PSA: Jenkem shills Bloodlines 2 when he isn't courting trannies in shoutbox. He's going to try to peddle you bottom of the barrel tier Unity slop if you let him.
Ion Fury is underrated and only have two problems, multi-segmented too large maps and that it lacks the action film inspiration the Build Trinity had. There is no other current shooter on the market that even comes close to what it offers otherwise. The second, if inferior, second coming of Build is the one revival where it felt like in the good old days.
Hedon is entirely its own thing and mixes Thief-like levels with more traditional shooter gameplay. The large levels are the point, and they vary quite a bit. Wrath doesn't work because the levels are oversized for the simple Quake style gameplay it is going for, which is best injected in short intensive varied doses and not a long dull slog.
Fortune's Run is the best thing we've gotten since Looking Glass and Ion Storm shut down, it's not a boomer shooter or a "retro" revival, but a pair of schizos picking up where the greats left off as console armageddon descended on them. It's Deus Ex if it actually had great shooting. Only flaw is that it isn't done yet and on EA.
These three games all are flawed, especially when compared to what we used to have in the 90's and 00's, but they are miles ahead of any other post-console era shooter. Let's see what else is on the market:
- Supplice - Negro troon Doom mod with pisspoor level and enemy design that really wants to be Marathon but fails.
- Sulaco - Troon Doom mod System Shock wannabe attempting to do Fear in space and failing terribly.
- Nu-Bluud published games - all Unity garbage and pale copies of real games
- Bluud West - Polish cuckold anti-White trash, Hedon has better sneaking mechanics. People forgot it existed five minutes after release.
- Cultic - Babby's first Unity shooter with pixel puke graphics and zoomer weapon upgrades, Blood if it had been shovelware shit.
- Zortch - Aims to be Turok with tits, don't know if it succeeds at that or not since console shooters are gay, but the shooting (gameplay) sucks.
- Graven - What if Hexen was pure ass hastily thrown together in Unity and shipped unfinished?
- Slayers X - Jewish irony poisoning: the game.
- Trepang 2 - Fear 4: the unity asset flip.
for troon's run is made by and for actual troons so not sure why you are lambasting other games for being "troon" and it is shit at trying to be an imsim. to put it in the same category as deus ex is ludicrous.
https://twitter.com/FortunesRun/status/1710438874248323312
https://twitter.com/FortunesRun/status/1710438874248323312
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otsego
Cipher
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- Aug 22, 2012
- Messages
- 238
I waited for this to go on sale because of the lukewarm reception, and thus picked it up at half-price expecting a decent $15 romp.
Can confirm what everyone is commenting on in the past few posts... I nearly cut my losses and quit this half-way through the first LEVEL (nevermind the first EPISODE) due to the boredom and tedium of the constantly spawning and respawning enemies/encounters with seemingly little thought put into it besides "build a room, ok now lets throw a shit ton of enemies in at random times in random places to fight the player". It is baffling how off-putting the first episode of this game is, because as we know the trend tends to follow that the first episode of shooters is the best because its seen the most polish/QA/etc... the 'first impression' is supposed to be what sucks you in.
Complete opposite with Wrath... the first episode repulses you almost immediately.
And after wading through that shit, you enter the second episode and things IMMEDIATELY get better. That's when the drugs you took 45 minutes ago finally kick in and it becomes a whole lot more fun. Rather than hiding behind corners and backpedalling to deal with spawns in the first episode, I was running into rooms guns blazing, swapping weapons to deal with the encounters (properly designed, finally), and the intention behind enemy placement is apparent. I was getting Amid Evil vibes at one point and I love Amid Evil.
The weapons are standard fare, as are the enemies, but when it works it works pretty well. Not as well as what has come before, but serviceable.
The levels are still too god damn long though, and even though the game improves immensely, even the best levels tend to overstay their welcome and should be 25% shorter. This may be a symptom of a general lack of variety in level design and enemies.
I can't see myself replaying this like I have with Ion Fury, Dusk, Amid Evil... but for $15 (and a few hours of 'what the fuck were they thinking?'), I'd say it was worth the price of admission.
Can confirm what everyone is commenting on in the past few posts... I nearly cut my losses and quit this half-way through the first LEVEL (nevermind the first EPISODE) due to the boredom and tedium of the constantly spawning and respawning enemies/encounters with seemingly little thought put into it besides "build a room, ok now lets throw a shit ton of enemies in at random times in random places to fight the player". It is baffling how off-putting the first episode of this game is, because as we know the trend tends to follow that the first episode of shooters is the best because its seen the most polish/QA/etc... the 'first impression' is supposed to be what sucks you in.
Complete opposite with Wrath... the first episode repulses you almost immediately.
And after wading through that shit, you enter the second episode and things IMMEDIATELY get better. That's when the drugs you took 45 minutes ago finally kick in and it becomes a whole lot more fun. Rather than hiding behind corners and backpedalling to deal with spawns in the first episode, I was running into rooms guns blazing, swapping weapons to deal with the encounters (properly designed, finally), and the intention behind enemy placement is apparent. I was getting Amid Evil vibes at one point and I love Amid Evil.
The weapons are standard fare, as are the enemies, but when it works it works pretty well. Not as well as what has come before, but serviceable.
The levels are still too god damn long though, and even though the game improves immensely, even the best levels tend to overstay their welcome and should be 25% shorter. This may be a symptom of a general lack of variety in level design and enemies.
I can't see myself replaying this like I have with Ion Fury, Dusk, Amid Evil... but for $15 (and a few hours of 'what the fuck were they thinking?'), I'd say it was worth the price of admission.
wrath is the best nu-3d realms game tbqh
MaxPaint
Literate
- Joined
- Jun 26, 2024
- Messages
- 43
Just finished it and yeah, it was a disappointment. I don't even think the later levels improve that much and episode 2 was the one I liked the least. The game is a tedious slog and so far the worst 'throwback shooter' I've played.
— the save system is dumb and I turned it off in the middle of EP2. Why tf would anyone think this is acceptable in a game with the levels that big with so much enemies is beyond my understanding
— levels are too big for their own good combined with their maze-like nature, verticality and lack of any kind of a map, I was constantly lost and stumble upon things just by chance half the time
— the option to revisit finished maps to find secrets without respawning killed enemies is great but you can only do so before killing a boss and finishing the hub. Also good luck finding those secrets or the chests that you saw without a map
— TOO MANY ENEMIES. Jesus, I understand the game was in EA for eternity but is there really any need to prolong it that way? Some maps had ~400 enemies, that's far beyond being reasonable
— enemies spawn out of thin air in big groups, sometimes right behind you, sometimes far ahead which combined with a lack of long range weapons makes it even more tedious to clean the map. In later levels you enter a new room spawn, you pick up ammo spawn, you make a step forward spam. It's tedious
— balance is off I'm not sure they themselves tested some encounters because the only way to stay alive is to use the magic. The only tactics is to throw as many enemies at you as possible
— long range enemies never stop shooting. If you're behind a wall they will shoot at the wall constantly. This combined with the number of enemies sometimes lead to a game turning into bullet hell
— enemies give little feedback to being shot. No reaction from the enemies, no crosshair flash or something. I wondered if I'm even doing any damage or maybe hitting an invisible wall a lot
— weapons in feel very weak. The shotgun's spread it too tight, the reload time is too long, so is the alternative attack. Nailgun or whatever it is called there eats ammo in a couple of seconds. The blade on the other hand was surprisingly good at killing some beefier enemies. The ones that don't explode
— a lot of enemies explode or do some type of aoe damage after which makes you stop or evade for some time, sometimes during the bullet hell encounters. Not only that but the fire elemental enemies drop the ammo that is on fire after their death and you can't take it right away without taking damage. Prolonging the game again
— you need to be rather precise in a game with that number of enemies and maps that big. Combine that with the lack of hit feedback
— movement inertia. It is fine in games with flat terrain like doom or games with more simple map design in general but here we have all those mazes with great verticality with a number of jumping sections and sometimes it leads to a frustration when you end up in the beginning of the level because you super mario 64'd a step farther then needed. You also bounce off the enemies, I had a couple of moments where I lounged them with the blade, killed them but was thrown back into the bottomless pit
— I don't know if I was just unlucky, but there were gotcha moments with enemies spawning right when you enter the savepoint
— again, it may be my side issue because I have an AMD gpu and it doesn't work well with opengl but in later levels I had a very visible stuttering with a big number of enemies spawning at once
They spent 5 years on making this. Instead of creating these giant beautiful maps should've thought about if it will be fun to play them.
— the save system is dumb and I turned it off in the middle of EP2. Why tf would anyone think this is acceptable in a game with the levels that big with so much enemies is beyond my understanding
— levels are too big for their own good combined with their maze-like nature, verticality and lack of any kind of a map, I was constantly lost and stumble upon things just by chance half the time
— the option to revisit finished maps to find secrets without respawning killed enemies is great but you can only do so before killing a boss and finishing the hub. Also good luck finding those secrets or the chests that you saw without a map
— TOO MANY ENEMIES. Jesus, I understand the game was in EA for eternity but is there really any need to prolong it that way? Some maps had ~400 enemies, that's far beyond being reasonable
— enemies spawn out of thin air in big groups, sometimes right behind you, sometimes far ahead which combined with a lack of long range weapons makes it even more tedious to clean the map. In later levels you enter a new room spawn, you pick up ammo spawn, you make a step forward spam. It's tedious
— balance is off I'm not sure they themselves tested some encounters because the only way to stay alive is to use the magic. The only tactics is to throw as many enemies at you as possible
— long range enemies never stop shooting. If you're behind a wall they will shoot at the wall constantly. This combined with the number of enemies sometimes lead to a game turning into bullet hell
— enemies give little feedback to being shot. No reaction from the enemies, no crosshair flash or something. I wondered if I'm even doing any damage or maybe hitting an invisible wall a lot
— weapons in feel very weak. The shotgun's spread it too tight, the reload time is too long, so is the alternative attack. Nailgun or whatever it is called there eats ammo in a couple of seconds. The blade on the other hand was surprisingly good at killing some beefier enemies. The ones that don't explode
— a lot of enemies explode or do some type of aoe damage after which makes you stop or evade for some time, sometimes during the bullet hell encounters. Not only that but the fire elemental enemies drop the ammo that is on fire after their death and you can't take it right away without taking damage. Prolonging the game again
— you need to be rather precise in a game with that number of enemies and maps that big. Combine that with the lack of hit feedback
— movement inertia. It is fine in games with flat terrain like doom or games with more simple map design in general but here we have all those mazes with great verticality with a number of jumping sections and sometimes it leads to a frustration when you end up in the beginning of the level because you super mario 64'd a step farther then needed. You also bounce off the enemies, I had a couple of moments where I lounged them with the blade, killed them but was thrown back into the bottomless pit
— I don't know if I was just unlucky, but there were gotcha moments with enemies spawning right when you enter the savepoint
— again, it may be my side issue because I have an AMD gpu and it doesn't work well with opengl but in later levels I had a very visible stuttering with a big number of enemies spawning at once
They spent 5 years on making this. Instead of creating these giant beautiful maps should've thought about if it will be fun to play them.
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