Requiem: Avenging Angel

Very old. Kinda ♥♥♥♥♥. [Win + P -> PC Screen Only] is your friend if you have multiple monitors and want to keep your sanity intact

I wanted to like it. I think it's a great concept, and the developers had a lot of great ideas. Those ideas were not executed on well. The gameplay is really rough and the visuals, even for the time, are lacking. Randomly, there is some really inspired texture work in a few select areas but that's all the praise I can muster.

Quake/doom but 100% better, you get to turn people into SALT, shoot lightning and make peoples blood boil, Every knee shall bow Every tongue shall confess.

Underrated oldschool-ish FPS. The gameplay itself is nothing to write home about (a few mostly hit scanning enemies, unoriginal weapons, many corridors and a few empty plaza), except for a few innovative powers (including an overpowered bullet time, many years before Max Payne). Most interesting is however the setting (cyberpunk + angel vs demons), with a design both stylish and ambitious: The demons and the bosses, in particular, have stood the test of time and of low-poly count.

"Requiem" ist Retro-FPS-Genuss pur! Was am Anfang aufgrund der offen erscheinenden Welt, den Nichtgegnercharakteren, mit denen man sprechen kann, und den vielen Engelsfähigkeiten nach einer Mischung aus Egoshooter und Adventure-Einlagen à la "Kingpin" aussah, hat sich schnell als reinrassiger, höllisch guter Shooter entpuppt. Das gefällt mir bei "Requiem" am besten: + ein spannendes Setting mit religiös inspirierten Motiven + ein fantastisches Shootererlebnis, das auch im einfachsten Schwierigkeitsgrad fordernde Schusswechsel bietet, bei denen man sich Deckung suchen und seine Waffen richtig einsetzen muss - Dauerfeuer aufgrund der Nichtnotwendigkeit zum Nachladen inklusive! + ästhetische Grafik mit exzellenter Erkennbarkeit und mit einigen Details, die das genauere Hinschauen lohnenswert machen - man sollte zum Beispiel mal aus einem der Fenster sehen An die etwas hakelige Kollisionserkennung gewöhnt man sich schnell, wenn man solche Spiele zu ihrer Entstehungszeit gespielt hat oder einfach auf etwas Retro abfährt. Etwas gewöhnungsbedürftig mögen die Engelskräfte sein, die sich nach und nach ins Kräftemenü des Spielers schleichen, zu denen es (auch in der Anleitung) keine Erklärung gibt, und die sich teilweise sehr ähneln, teilweise überhaupt nicht zum Einsatz kommen. Darüber hinaus sind manche Bosse nur mit einer Kombination von Fähigkeiten besiegbar, die man vorher niemals eingesetzt hat. Aber: Hat man seine Lieblingskräfte einmal entdeckt, genießt man die Bullettime, die Selbstheilung oder das Befeuern der Gegner mit Lichtblitzen. Mir gefällt das Spielerlebnis rund um Malachi großartig!

super hyper speedy angle

This port is quite messy and this hidden gem deserves a full on NightDive remaster imo. If you're willing to look past or attempt to work through the technical hurdles of getting this to run smoothly on modern systems, this is a very unique and charming little Quake-clone that's well worth playing. I've found the smoothest way to play this game is to set the NGlide Configurator in the game's folder to 640x800, you can't play the game smoothly on any resolution above this because the game's pause menu is hard locked to 640x800, meaning that playing in any resolution above it would result in the game jankily changing your monitor's resolution every time you pause. So, set it to that low resolution and get a cursor lock running if you're using a set up with multiple monitors, that is the best way to play this until we get a remaster unfortunately lmao The plot - There is none lol. You kill the main villain halfway through the story and it just keeps going somehow like nothing happened. There isn't much of a story or many characters in this game. Malachi, our angelic protagonist and main character, is really funny as an angel. He's just like a white guy. He swears, he invokes the lord's name in vain multiple times throughout the story, he's only a little bit troubled when he harms innocent people. He's really quite ungraceful, perhaps a bit unclean. There's not much angelic about him aside from his powers. I feel like, when it comes to angels, there's just so much potential for character writing and that's potential that is, unfortunately, almost entirely missed in Requiem, at least in terms of character anyways. The balancing in this game is a mess - You have a selection of Quake-y human weapons to use alongside your angelic powers, while some weapons are good, reliable, consistent and fun to use, there's just as many that feel incredibly unreliable and inconsistent, while a few feel completely useless. Your angel powers range from totally useless to absurdly, comically overpowered, the first spell you have unlocked, and I'm still not sure if you even have it unlocked on purpose or if it's just one of many glitches/oversights, but the first spell you have from level 1 is a giant ball of lightning that insta-kills almost every enemy in the game. And then, in the same level, the game gives you a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ pistol that kills enemies in like 5 hits, it's honestly really funny. The game gives you more and more powers to play with over time, a lot of them are incredibly cool, like the ability to turn your enemies into pillars of salt, but they're often outclassed by the lightning ball; They're either too expensive to use, too unwieldy to use, too hard to aim, or just, plain underpowered, compared to THE ORB. Still I think the selection of powers you have are all pretty unique and pretty awesome, they're very fun to play around with even if they're often too glitchy to actually be useful in a fight. You might think that this game is very easy, since you have such amazing powers to play with, but you'd be quite wrong! This game is actually quite hard in the way that most Quake/DOOM inspired games are; Enemies that hitscan you for insane amounts of damage over insane distances incredibly quickly. The enemies in this game are designed really strangely, there's bullet travel time to their shots but only sometimes, some enemies are seemingly designed to be tough to fight but are instead incredibly easy because their shots just don't hit you, while other enemies that seemingly aren't supposed to be strong are absolute monsters that kill you instantly. You get a heal power later in the game, an incredibly weak and expensive heal power, it's still incredibly useful and incredibly strong as an asset to the player, but it results in what I think are the lowest points of this game's gameplay; Sitting around doing nothing waiting for your health to regen with your painfully slow and expensive heal power. I think it takes a special kind of masochist to enjoy a game like this, but I enjoyed it and I enjoyed it a lot. The level design is perhaps this game's biggest problem - It is real bad. Let's start with visuals, I don't think this game is ugly but I do think it's definitely a bit generic when it shows at times that it could be so much better. The human side of the levels just aren't as interesting as the angelic side unfortunately, the game is really pretty and really cool to look at at times, but those times are exceptions to the rules. For every 1 haunting hellish area there's 10 generic construction sites you have to go through. For every 1 cool angelic decoration/bits of worldbuilding, there's 10 instances of the devs literally just mashing "fasdfasdfasdf" on their keyboard as text for monitors as opposed to having text that would make sense in the game's world, or even just a lorem ipsum or something. Visuals are the least of their worries tho, the biggest problems with this game's levels is the fact that, from start to finish, from level 0 all the way to the last level, it's all very confusing and hard to navigate. The game gives you few directions to work with and the way these levels are designed, they can sometimes be maze-like or sometimes it feels like you're sequence breaking maps when in reality it's the intended way to go. It's weird. Weird and bad and it just kept getting worse, I honestly have no idea how I manage to finish this game at all because at no point throughout the roughly 8 hours that I spent playing this, never even once did I feel confident in where I was heading. I think perhaps the worst part of this game's level design tho, is how often it spawns enemies behind you in past areas after you clear them and progress through them. It's incredibly frustrating, if you don't want to run into a nasty surprise when you're backtracking you have to spend a good 10-30 extra minutes clearing areas multiple times because there's so many enemy respawns/back spawns after you get through an area the first time. The bosses, God do they suck - This game has boss fights! I wish it hadn't tho, because they are all incredibly bad, like these bosses are bad in a way where they are very tiresome to fight and often feel completely broken by design. The first boss of this game kept us stuck for a good 30 minutes because it just didn't feel like we were fighting it the right way. It turns out, we were, the boss just had an enormous health pool. Not only that, on normal difficulty, you have to fight 2 of them instead of just 1 (I assume it's 3 on hard mode), and honestly I recommend you play through this game on the easy (Heaven) difficulty just for this reason IF THERE IS ANYTHING THAT YOU TAKE AWAY FROM THIS REVIEW IT SHOULD BE THIS; PLAY THE GAME ON EASY MODE. IT'S STILL COOL TO ME THO DAMN IT!! - Even after I've spent so much time thinking back about our experience playing this game, and how bad it often was, how often this game fails as a game, I still don't dislike this game, I still think it's really cool, actually. This game is creative, daring, stylish, and just so damn cool when it wants to be. It's charming in the ways that only an old ass obscure shooter game from the 90s that's based entirely around angels can be. I still had a lot of fun playing through this game. I like this game a lot and I really hope for a remaster or modern port sometime. I still think this game is a hidden gem, and I wish I could give it a more positive review, but unfortunately, both because of the technical issues with this release and the general quality of the design beyond the tech issues, I don't think I can recommend this game to many people. It's still cool tho. If you're the type of person who just thinks this is cool and you want to play it, yeah! It is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cool! Go play it! It's neat. ;-;