For a game that so thoroughly jacks itself off to completion over its own difficulty (the game literally opens with a passive aggressive content warning about how "some people may find [the game] too difficult" and calls its easiest and non-completion locked hardest difficulty "noob" and "old school" respectively) it sure does have a lack of meaningful challenge. It took me all of about two and a half hours to beat the game. Have I died a lot? Sure, but it was never what I would consider meaningfully hard. The game does the funny thing where, when it says "difficult" it actually means "enemies who can kill you in two hits will occasionally just spawn behind you and tax you for half your health." Combine that with the rarity of large health pickups and it often feels less like the game is genuinely challenging you and more that you're fighting a war of attrition. A war of attrition that ends almost as quickly as it begins.

It's hard to take the game seriously when it so consistently tries to grab you round the shoulder and go "remember when games used to be about the gameplay?" while also having less than a single afternoon's worth of gameplay. What gameplay is there is incredibly fun and I appreciate any boomer shooter that has proper bunnyhopping in it but it also takes its tagline a bit too hyper-literally. It doesn't do anything to meaningfully shake up or change the 90s shooter formula. The game's weapons include melee, shotgun, super shotgun, nailgun, rocket launcher. That's right, the game directly copies the weapon loadout of Doom 2 but without the BFG or the plasma rifle. This game has less weapon variety than Doom 2, a game that will soon be 30 years old. Considering how saturated the boomer shooter genre is with interesting games that genuinely do things to innovate rather than simply iterate (Ultrakill, DUSK, HROT, Amid Evil, Project Warlock, just to name a few) a boomer shooter that clings *this* close to conventions and also can't stop being super self-congratulatory over it just doesn't have much to offer in comparison to any number of other games in the genre.

What this game needs is a sequel, or an expansion pack, or something. The game's tagline is '90s FPS, 30 years later. A more accurate tagline would be '90s FPS, 30 years too late. There's just not enough here, not enough meat on the bones, and what meat is on the bones feels suspiciously recycled from previous generation's carcasses. Soylent green is made of Doom Clones.

For a game that so thoroughly jacks itself off to completion over its own difficulty (the game literally opens with a passive aggressive content warning about how "some people may find [the game] too difficult" and calls its easiest and non-completion locked hardest difficulty "noob" and "old school" respectively) it sure does have a lack of meaningful challenge. It took me all of about two and a half hours to beat the game. Have I died a lot? Sure, but it was never what I would consider meaningfully hard. The game does the funny thing where, when it says "difficult" it actually means "enemies who can kill you in two hits will occasionally just spawn behind you and tax you for half your health." Combine that with the rarity of large health pickups and it often feels less like the game is genuinely challenging you and more that you're fighting a war of attrition. A war of attrition that ends almost as quickly as it begins. It's hard to take the game seriously when it so consistently tries to grab you round the shoulder and go "remember when games used to be about the gameplay?" while also having less than a single afternoon's worth of gameplay. What gameplay is there is incredibly fun and I appreciate any boomer shooter that has proper bunnyhopping in it but it also takes its tagline a bit too hyper-literally. It doesn't do anything to meaningfully shake up or change the 90s shooter formula. The game's weapons include melee, shotgun, super shotgun, nailgun, rocket launcher. That's right, the game directly copies the weapon loadout of Doom 2 but without the BFG or the plasma rifle. This game has less weapon variety than Doom 2, a game that will soon be 30 years old. Considering how saturated the boomer shooter genre is with interesting games that genuinely do things to innovate rather than simply iterate (Ultrakill, DUSK, HROT, Amid Evil, Project Warlock, just to name a few) a boomer shooter that clings *this* close to conventions and also can't stop being super self-congratulatory over it just doesn't have much to offer in comparison to any number of other games in the genre. What this game needs is a sequel, or an expansion pack, or something. The game's tagline is '90s FPS, 30 years later. A more accurate tagline would be '90s FPS, 30 years too late. There's just not enough here, not enough meat on the bones, and what meat is on the bones feels suspiciously recycled from previous generation's carcasses. Soylent green is made of Doom Clones.