AMID EVIL

Boring derivative sludge.

Game doesn't try too hard, and that's a good thing. Fast paced, long enough to be worth the money, but not too long to make it repetitive. The death voice animation makes me moist.

I love this game. The artstyle is amazing and so is the music, the atmosphere and pretty much everything else. The weapons are fun and the kills are satisfying. However the game has two major flaws in my opinion. First, it quickly becomes very repetitive once you have found your favorite weapon. Second, the levels are very maze-like, and that really kills the thrill and drains my fun. Other than that it’s a very good game, 8/10.

This one… Well, this one I really, really like. Tired of boring games? Gray and brown games with too similar to previous fps slop ideas you played before? Games with offices, military bases, mines, underground tunnels, destroyed cities copy-pasted over and over till you throw up? Of games with some pew-pew boring, to normal looking guns that shoot pellets and have zero good vibes attached to them? Well look no further, my friend, because I present you with this piece of creative work and passion, called AMID EVIL. Amid Evil is yet another boomer-shooter throwback build of the renaissance of genre brought to us back from the dead by Doom 2016. This is an FPS game where being fast on feet, fast with decision making and having steady aim is more important than anything else; where you travel through levels filled to the brim with deliberately placed enemies designed to push the player over the edge. The genre that is to this day the cream of the crop of the entire family of FPS games. And this game is the best example of excellent design and ideas. So, how can you describe this game in one sentence? Someone smarter than me once said: “Imagine Heretic but it's actually good”. Sounds legit, but the more you look, the more you scratch the surface, the bigger differences you can notice. Because yes, this game is more of an homage to old fantasy fps like Heretic or Hexen, where you fight with monsters like Ettins, Minotaurs or mages instead of demons and possessed marine like in Doom. But the core mechanics are here, you collect weapons, mana instead of ammo, armor and you fight in labyrinthine like levels for keys and levers that will enable path forwards. Some people to this day claim that those old games were flawed and inferior to their more grounded or sci-fi oriented counterparts. And frankly, I cannot approve or disprove these sentences, because I never played Heretic or Hexen before. However I played a lot of Amid Evil. And Amid Evil is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ good. Why? Well, I can pin point three major design principles that make this game awesome: levels design, weapons mechanics and enemies. And we are gonna talk about them to an extent. When you boot the game for the first time, the first thing that you probably will notice will be colours. I think colours are what defines this game art direction. You don’t see a normal looking brown, greys or even green. Every space, every corner, every floor or wall is plastered with an intense color palette that is almost aggressive when looking. Pink, violet, magenta, red or orange — sometimes I feel overloaded, but never to the point when it was getting annoying or confused; everything was always visible and clear to me… well, aside for darker corners, which was more common in DLC. Like, seriously, there is a torch powerup in the game, why can't we use it more sometimes? But during combat — nah, the game clearly knows when the art style should step down in favor of gameplay elements. There was only one instance — again, in DLC — when I was forced to fight in darkness, and yes, it was a cheap shot, but I can forgive that. Another important thing about levels is how they are designed. Forget about little levels from Dusk that you can finish in less than ten minutes; forget about cramped, dark and mood levels from Quake. Here we have big, open levels that include indoor and outdoor areas, castles, magical towers, forests, cathedrals or big caves. I love how they all are also vertical in design — features that developers should implement more often. You not only travel forward, but also down and up, climbing and descending, even flying sometimes, fighting around every corner. Thanks to that levels never become stale and boring, because they mix more open space arenas with tight corridors and smaller rooms. I also want to point out how diverse levels can be. So yeah, you see, there is fantasy and “fantasy”. There are plenty more “grounded” fantasy games and other media — like worlds with grey, stoney castles, horses, knights, mages, dragons, all those tropes commonly known. But there is also fantasy looking more like 80 pulp cinema. So much different, with so much variety and weirdness, that they become more alien-like. Or like an acid trip. This game belongs to the latter category. We have a big-ass tower of sun with unrealistic design, non-euclidean geometry in the void, school of wizardry suspended mid air. I never felt bored when I was playing this game. Ok, now time for weapons. Aside from two instances, they all shine. If you look at them. you can clearly see they resemble in some way their modern day counterparts. We have Axe for you melee weapon (replaced by gloves of MUDAMUDAMUDA platinum star power in dlc), staff of magic missile working like pistol, saber working like shotgun (with big horizontal projectile instead of pellets), trident is machine gun, Celestial claw — it shoot planets and stars — is a rocket launcher, Ice mace is you super shotgun, and pink ribbon (don’t ask) is you BFG, replaced in dlc by scythe with can tear fabric of reality. But all of them have specific quirks that make them useful in every combat scenario, no matter early or later game. Staff have homing missiles, sabers can hit multiple enemies, trident can overload enemies and shock the closest one, mace can pin them to the wall. On the top of that they all have an alternative mode — which you can enable by collecting enemies' souls. Basically it works like a tome of power in Heretic and Hexen. One thing I need to mention — a crucial thing. They all have excellent feedback. It's not like in modern military shooters, when you grab some SMG and start spraying, and enemies don’t flinch. No, here we have clearly, through visuals and sound cues, feedback when you hit enemies. They stagger, yell in agony, “bullets” hit them in a satisfying way, there is a good sound response — like with trident or mace — when they get shot. It’s all brilliant — and a necessity, because, aside from trident, all weapons are projectile based. You need little calculation in your head to hit them when you are running and jumping. Thank God, all monsters also have projectile based attacks, so with little focus and training you can dodge them, albeit the learning curve will take some time. There are two weapons I think devs should improve. Celestial claw — the rocket launcher — should have bigger splash damage. Enemies must be really clumped together to kill more of two with a single shot from these weapons; The “ribbon gun” should be entirely reworked — it has weak feedback and projectiles should be more visible. Before I start rambling more about enemies, we need to establish one important thing: this game has seven (!) different episodes. Each episode has only three actual levels + one boss fight, but they are not short — each can take from 20 minutes to even half an hour to accomplish. And they are full of enemies; on hard difficulty in some level there is usually between 100 to 200 (!) monsters, not packed in big arenas, but spreaded from start to finish. What is more important — they are tied to episodes. Enemies from first do not ever appear in second or third. This makes them unique and more manageable: you don’t like some type of enemies (like me with shield enemies from sun episode) — do not worry, they will only show up in three levels. <rest of the review in comment section>

I was always really into Heretic though and AE hits all the same notes while having plenty of original flavor. The arsenal of weapons are unique and interesting and the levels are wonderfully themed and imaginative. Not all of them are winners, especially if you don't love 3D platforming, but taken as a whole there is a great amount of quality content here that perfectly encapsulates why the core gameplay of those early fps games holds up to this day.

本体+DLC通关，本体每一大章有一批新种类怪的设定挺有意思，关卡也都挺稳定的，武器的话冰锤玩起来很带感，将敌人钉在墙壁上很有趣，另外DLC的拳套玩起来比斧头爽多了，尤其暴走之后直接欧拉欧拉，最后BOSS对拳的桥段很有JOJO的感觉。

Игра от создателей DUSK, не понравилась, уровни не очень симпатичные, враги тоже, рубилово вроде бы и ничего, но не очень хочется в это играть. Не рекомендую, лучше в DUSK. С пушками в любом случае веселее, чем с мечами.

It just doesn't feel like something that New Blood would make. I've played just about every game that New Blood has had a hand in since Dusk, and I have NEVER been disappointed until I played AMID EVIL. The good? This game is beautiful. Honestly, this looks better than most AAA titles that come out today, and it runs significantly better. I've only have one freeze, but that was after letting it sit paused for a prolonged period of time. The enemy design is nice. Each zone completely changes the enemies, so you go from fighting basic knight-type enemies in one zone to fighting Celestial Monstrosities beyond human comprehension in another. It changes up frequently enough to keep you from getting bored of shooting the same exact bullet sponges from level to level. The soundtrack is a banger. It's not Dusk level, in my opinion, but it gets the job done. The bad? Playing through this, it feels like there was zilch in terms of communication between the teams that made this, and by that, I mean: Whoever designed the weapons failed to give them any punch, whoever designed the enemies gave them too much health, whoever designed the levels didn't think about the fact that we have no parry, dodge, etc to protect ourselves and made each level a series of narrow corridors that lead to arena sections (which are still extremely small when compared to other games with arena shooting sections) with 20 enemies that can hit you 5 times before you can hit them once. The platforming feels abysmal, as you have no sense of momentum. It's very easy to fall off the narrow ledges that they designed (which most of the time you have no choice but to go on because it's the actual path you're supposed to take) and have to do it all over again. The enemy AI is (somehow) even more intelligent than the AI for Ready or Not. And by that, I mean you will be, attacked from all angles before you even know what's happening, be shot by things from halfway across the map that you can't even SEE, and you will think they're dead but they'll stand up and stab you in the chest 34 times and overkill you. If you've never heard of New Blood or you're new to gaming in general, try out something like Dusk before you go into AMID EVIL (If you choose to pick this one up at all). You'll actually get to see how good of a game these guys can make, and this one will just leave a sour first impression. Edit: It's honestly so bad that I really wish I could refund it. Do with that what you will.