Before anyone reads this, yes I played the entire campaign and will be playing the DLC. “oh then you must have enjoyed it so why the negative review?!” I come from a time when the amount of time spent in a game did not mean that you were having a good time, that has always been a strange false equivalency. A game can be very short but still be high in quality and enjoyment. I wanted to give this “boomer shooter” a fair shake so that anyone, including any devs reading this, won’t try to argue “oh you just didn’t play the whole game, you gave up so you’re opinion is rendered void just because I said so.
About the one good thing about the base game and the DLC has to be the OST, but that's more due to Andrew's fantastic work.
Genuinely bad, does not hold a candle to Dusk in any way shape or form, New Blood tried far FAR too hard to make the game as "retro obnoxious" as humanly possible while making sure to cut out all of the fun. More like a Pain Killer clone than a Heretic/Hexen clone or homage, if you will. Unlike how Dusk was a Blood/Quake like homage which did it correctly.
For the first 2 or 3 zones, it was fun, each zone was different and varied while not being too obnoxious. Varied enemies types kept things fresh-ish while keeping things familiar to the other factions that came before it. Once you get to the Forges that’s where the game takes a total dump on whatever good will that it had. Painfully dark for no real reason which further muddles the visuals of this retro-esq visual game. Tons of obnoxious bad jumping puzzles and platforming in a game that does NOT handle platforming very well and enemies that just come out of no where constantly and spam attacks that takes 50% of your HP very quickly.
As you progress down the more annoying zones the developers seem to put less and less quick save sections. This out right forces you to quick save and quick load constantly because of how bad the level designs and monster spawns are. Oh you think you made it far enough? NOPE! You get to go back to the beginning because this is an arcade game with 1 life style of gameplay with auto saves apparently. What is the point of having auto save points in your game if you’re not willing to put them in locations or areas that make sense? Just go full in and have us rely on our own saves, if you’re really trying for that old school feel, don’t half ass it.
As others have pointed out, monsters tend to be far too tanky for how much damage they dish out versus how little the player can dish out, especially given that there is only one of you and 56000 of them. “oh just use your soul power” yeah? My one shot and it’s gone ability, for what? Every single encounter?! See, Raven Software understood all of this back in the mid to late ‘90s so they gave you consumable items to use in order to deal with situations where a Tomb Of Power might not be required. This game has none of that, you have one “super” and that’s it, the Soul Mode IS a Tomb of Power stand in but it’s worse in every conceivable way and takes longer to charge than just finding a Tomb and carrying a bunch around with you. Again, the New Blood interactive devs don’t have the pedigree that those who came before them had before they were banished to the COD mines. Oh they wish they did, they try, they make things that give off the illusion of a Heretic/Hexen game but it has none of the soul, none of the craftsmanship of the old Raven Software titles. So inconclusion to this section, either the enemies are too tanky or New Blood made our weapons weaker than a sneeze, either way the “gunplay” is bad, full stop.
For weapons or rather the player only weapons, on top of being weak they also have a dramatic delay between when you hit “fire” and when the animation even plays then you have to wait even more time between when the shot actually happens THEN remember everything is projectile based so then you get to wait for the shot to actually connect with whatever the game allows you to hit. The shooting because of the aforementioned weakness in the weapons or the tankiness of the enemies is made worse feeling by the fact that every single weapon has a dramatic windup animation before the projectile even leaves your weapon. This is not even remotely as good as any ‘90s era game and not as good as New Blood’s last proper arcade shooter “Dusk”.
The player movement both on foot and in the water is horrible feeling, it’s not at all reactive what so ever. There is a clear delay in one direction over the other while the enemies change movement within a single frame. Swimming is TERRIBLE, worse than HL1 swimming and forget about getting out of a small pool of water easily, you can’t just jump out or grab a ledge, nope, you need to go under the water and rise up while sprinting! It’s incredibly unintuitive and very bad when you’re in a rush to get out to escape a possible death trap or enemy spam. On top of that, your character can only jump maybe 2 to 4 inches, it’s a glorified hop and forget about walking over an ankle high edge on anything, nope again, you have to literally jump over a curb or half a curb, again bad design.
The level designs are horrible, nice to look at, I will never take that way from the level designers, but beyond the surface level of “ooo ahhh” that’s all they were able to do. Tons of pit falls that look like they should be walkable or you get areas that look like they are clear pitfalls and aren’t. The walkable areas are so inconsistent and bipolar that you end up second guessing yourself constantly which is never fun. The funny thing is, on the level design combined with the monsters? Yeah when YOU get knocked off, you die nine times out of ten, when you knock a monster off of a platform or a path they just magically fall onto some unseen platform or walkway and they then continue to fight you from under you. It’s honestly a joke how consistently bad the maps are once you get past the two demo zones. They clearly put their effort into baiting any potential member-berries players with the intro zones before they pulled the rug out from under you and suddenly the game isn’t what it was advertized as nor is it any fun. On top of that, enemies can hit you from places that you can not return fire back through. I can not actively shoot through this mesh but every ranged enemy attack does cut through it without any loss of damage to the player.
Performance was lacking as well, for how old the game is and how low the system requirements are, especially for my system which is installed on an SSD I might add. I got constant hitching whenever something would spawn or a new enemy would spawn or go active or do an attack.
Enemy design is also pretty bad as well, again early zones are completely balanced and fine, good design, good telegraphing of attacks and not too many cheap developer gimmicks that the player can’t also do. However once, again, you get past those few zones and get into the Forge and beyond then you start to see how bad the devs can really take the game. You start to see enemies that flat out phase through solid walls because the attack is a dash (by the way that we can not do) so the game says “oh this enemy has to get to this point and if a wall happens to be in the way well then too bad for the wall and the player”. Then later on still you have enemies that flat out reflect attacks (again an ability that the player can not do) with a shield that covers their entire hitbox, which again are not very fun and just a cheap unit that the devs put in to further chip damage the player. you. If there is not a clear path to you, stairs or anything else, they will flat out noclip up a total vertical face just to get to you. The AI pathing is outright insulting to anyone who has played any amount of actual retro or old school games, these devs should be ashamed of themselves with how poor the quality of this product is.
