This is among the very worst games I have ever played. Let's start with a first part. Level design. In this game, most of the levels are incomprehensible, just random abstract designs (in a few cases, literally, just towers of cubes etc.), sometimes they are a series of unconnected environments, other times they are just endless blending pathways that are difficult to get your bearings on. Everything looks similar, not the same, but similar. It genuinely feels like being stuck playing user created Doom levels from 1994. Not all of them, Arena was a standout for me in that it started you in a convincing locker room, which lead you to the titular Arena for the fight one would expect there. But most of the other levels were garbage, with no indication of where you're supposed to go, or what you're supposed to do, including one level that required you to find a hidden teleporter based on one of several dozen pillars looking slightly different up close.
This could be forgivable if the game felt good to play. But it does not. And this is the most fundamental issue the game has. The controls are awful. You're either too slow, or if you turn on running, you get a bit of momentum - "ice physics" - to every surface. In itself, that's not a problem, but that has to combine with how the walls interact with the player. You either get stuck to them, bounce off them, or sometimes just pass through them. And you may be thinking "isn't that normal", no. Normal would be simply being stopped by them - the one thing these walls don't do. The worst instances happen when you hit a point where two walls connect. Those edges have a tendency to push you away, to make sure you don't get stuck inside them. This leads to any edge in the game, any corner, bouncing your player around randomly. In some cases, you can literally get stuck bouncing back and forth between a few points, in the areas where the walls are tight. This is compounded when using the jetpack to fly. Which has issues all its own of trying to get the right elevation. All the geometry in the game is made of flat polygons. Walls, floors, ramps, stairs, everything is flat. No thickness. This is where the 'passing right through' comes in. Especially when flying, don't be surprised to suddenly be below the floor you expected to land on, or above the ceiling if you're trying to get into a room. This also leads to issues in areas where the way forward is a staircase, made of the flat planes, but ONLY on the floor side... so you can't actually see it when looking toward it becuase the edge with no thickness is facing you. This is inexcusable, as the game has sloped surfaces it could use as ramps instead. But some areas the map design was too tight for them, so stairs you can't actually see.
Next is the combat. It again feels awful. All of your weapons have a degree of autoaim to them. They will always fire directly to where the enemy currently is. Which means any projectile weapon is useless against any moving enemy. The single exception being the guided missile, which has its own issues with the hit box being far larger than it looks, making you crash into surfaces and objects you should be clear of, and the aiming controls being noticeably tighter than your player movement. Even when you do hit enemies, they often take far too much damage. You'll be draining a lot of your ammo. A few weapons share ammo, and the jetpack shares with the flame thrower. (You'll not want to use the flamethrower much anyway as it is among the worst of the weapons, though it can light something on fire for a little extra damage in bursts.) Another problem weapon is one where the shots bounce off walls - and usually back to hit you. They fire far too fast to dodge, and it's not always easy to see what angle it's going to be on - becuase the projectiles themselves actually have autoaim of their own to seek out targets, including yourself. Firing a stream down a hallway will not have the shots all bounce the same way, there is variance to it.
As for the enemies, beyond usually being too tanky, many have projectiles that come far too quickly for you to dodge. And unlike your projectiles, the enemies will lead you. So you can't even use their tactic of moving to avoid being hit, that will ensure that you are hit with every shot. Even trying to just wiggle back and forth, many shots will come directly at you and still hit you. The individual shots tend to not do much damage due to this, as the damage is unavoidable, and most maps compensate by having large stashes of health all over the place. I consider this a massive failure in design when you have to resort to this workaround for the problem of "the player has no damage mitigation". The worst, though, are the flying enemies. They are four types of flying enemies that are all very fast, have fast projectiles, and are this nearly impossible to kill. Really, there are two near hit-scan weapons that are the only things that can almost reliably hit them, one of which isn't particularly accurate - at least the graphics aren't - so it's hard to tell if you're actually hurting them. Even then, their speed makes them difficult to track. And if you think you can just use the jetpack to fly around with them to hit, make note that being on the jetpack actually adds a bit of drag to your ability to aim, making it even harder to control.
The final bit that I personally dislike is the theming. There are attempts at humor here that, for me, fall flat. When it's a joke at all. A lot of things are just "this is random", but that alone isn't humor. Most of the enemy designs just seem thrown together randomly, things like what appear to be a walking pair of vampire wax lips, or the creature that's usually invisible other than its eyes that likes to get directly in your face because it only seems to have melee attacks. It then becomes this bubble creature when you've done enough damage to it. I don't actually think that one looks bad, in fact that's one of the more reasonable 'alien' designs to me, but it's an example of how random the stuff is. The flying ones tended to move too fast for me to even see what they were. There's a few robots as well that are, well, robots.
All in all, the game just feels incompetent at every level. A mishmash of random ideas slapped together with no rhyme or reason, and without enough playtesting to see if it was worth doing. I know there are people who remember this game fondly, given its origin - the 3D0. And.. it feels very 3D0, I'm not going to lie. But as a PC port, this should be avoided like the plague. There's no redeeming value to be found here.
