Hexen: Beyond Heretic (1995)

What started as a retro romp, slowly became a test of patience. Its cathartic melee momentum was continually stifled into backtracking and uncommunicative design elements.

I played the game with a keyboard only. A charming throwback turned to fiddling panic by the final boss. Fingers clawed into a position I could only describe as occult.

Its safe to say I've banished the mystery of Hexen from my world like some kind of cursed exorcism. I'm left tith a tired, furrowed brow and the guilt of resorting to youtube walkthroughs to complete the adventure.

What started as a retro romp, slowly became a test of patience. Its cathartic melee momentum was continually stifled into backtracking and uncommunicative design elements.

I played the game with a keyboard only. A charming throwback turned to fiddling panic by the final boss. Fingers clawed into a position I could only describe as occult.

Its safe to say I've banished the mystery of Hexen from my world like some kind of cursed exorcism. I'm left tith a tired, furrowed brow and the guilt of resorting to youtube walkthroughs to complete the adventure.

Hexen largely evolves the game play set in Heretic. Levels are large non-linear hubs that create a sense of exploration and adventure. The design is intricate and typically inner loops on itself (which I found to be both satisfying and a sign of thoughtful design) which leads naturally to a portal to take you back to the central hub as you complete a given area's "puzzles."

The plot, like the first game, is meh. You're basically just going for another serpent rider. Sure fuck it why not. The game does a much better job creating a sense of a world through the hub based level system which feels progressive given when it was made. Most levels you are free to tackle in any order you see fit and strongly rewards thorough exploration. The order you choose can impact how challenging your experience is depending on which class you play. This is due to weapon locations (which vary for each class) and typically only affects the first or second hub (once you have all weapons it really doesn't matter too much beyond efficiency).

Your class selection doesn't impact level progression, only the weapons you can use. This still adds replayability, but not by much. The warrior is the best starter class with a heavy melee focus. His base weapon are his fists and it can be pretty satisfying punching a demon to death in the face. His axe is short range (a little beyond melee) and hits like a truck while consuming very little mana. His third weapon is a mace that throws an explosive hammer which expands the warrior's arsenal to incorporate a ranged option. His ultimate weapon is a flame sword that shoots out a wide arc and is honestly kind of disappointing. It's fine, but you will typically only kill 1-2 enemies at a time with it and it consumes a decent amount of mana. Overall, what makes the warrior strong is how powerful and mana efficient his 2nd and 3rd weapon are. The cleric has the weakest base melee weapon that takes an extra hit compared to the warrior to kill a demon. It honestly sucks. His second weapon is a rod that fires rapidly and steals life when in melee range. It's significantly weaker than the warrior's axe, but is ranged and can heal to make up for that. The clerics third weapon is like a shotgun. He hurls holy fire at a foe to incinerate them. It's both strong and satisfying to use. His ultimate weapon though... OMG... it's easily the best weapon in ANY fps. It's a rod that's basically the Arc of the Covenant from the original Indiana Jones... Holy shit is it satisfying to send out a horde of spirits to tear about your foes limb by limb. It NEVER gets old to use. One blast is enough to wipe out an entire room, which makes it still more efficient sometimes despite it's massive cost. It dunks hard over the BFG from Doom. No contest. I didn't play a mage so I won't comment on them.

It's finally time to address the elephant in the room... the "puzzles." A "puzzle," according to Hexen, is an outrageously hidden switch which can be concealed behind multiple hidden doors that won't open until you visit/revisit multiple sub-levels in a given hub... this is the two steps back alluded to in the title of the review, where Hexen really doubles down on obtusely hiding switches which is directly linked to level progression. It can get both overwhelming and frustrating as you are forced to scour across multiple sub-levels multiple times, back track, and click on every wall... there is no shame in using a guide. I avoided it as much as possible, but I also didn't bang my head against a wall for hours before resorting to them. Despite this massive flaw, I still found myself engaged and wanting to see what the game had in store for me next.

Get GZDoom. In my review of Heretic I recommended against using full mouse controls because the game was designed without that in mind. I was a fool. Such a fool. Once you experience the game with modern controls it is impossible to go back. In addition, running the game through GZDoom gives you higher resolution and wide screen support. These last two features alone are more than enough reason to mod it up. With high res and wide screen the game is an objective work of art with the impressive sprite work.

Finally, the music for this game is rad AF. I felt the music in Heretic was meh and felt more like ambiance rather than something more substantial. Not the case at all this time around.

In conclusion, this game is worth playing despite it's obtuse level progression. Just use a guide. No shame in that.

Hexen, for PC

Rating: 7.8/10; Good

Played: 2020

Worth playing for old school FPS fans, but you will likely want to use a walkthrough or noclipping. Play an emulated version for sensible controls.

Hexen is the sequel to Heretic and as such is another dark fantasy first person shooter on the Doom engine. It uses that engine to an impressive degree, with intricate interconnected levels, new special effects and 3 different characters to play as, but also doubles down on the worst thing about Heretic, thus making the game even further away from the classic gameplay of Doom.

Rather than the old episodic nature of Doom and Heretic, Hexen only allows you to start a new game from the beginning, with all of your stuff carrying over between levels and chapters. The only thing that does not carry over is the flight artifact. The 3 classes are considerably different with no overlapping weapons, giving great replayability. They have different stats too. The mage is the most shootery with no melee weapons while also being the most squishy, slowest and worst at jumping (yes there is some obnoxious platforming). His starting weapon has infinite ammo and is equivalent to the Doom pistol, giving the mage a big advantage early on. His other weapons include a shotgun-like freeze spell that turns enemies into blocking statues for a short while, an accurate lightning bolt and an ultimate fireball that bounces around wrecking everything. The fighter is the opposite with higher armor, speed and jumping while being somewhat restricted to melee combat. His first 2 weapons are fists and axe, follower by an accurate long range hammer and an ultimate sword that fires a spread shot. The player's melee range is significantly longer than that of enemies, so it is not difficult to kill melee-only enemies as long as you don't get stuck or overwhelmed. Ranged enemies will likely fireball you in the face though. The last character is the cleric, who starts with a mace that is the most pathetic weapon in the game. Next he gets a staff that functions as a healing chainsaw in melee, and plasma rifle at range, an accurate long range fire spell, and the ultimate that summons a bunch of spirits that noclip their way around killing stuff while you can safely hide. There are only 2 types of ammo in the game; blue and green for the 2nd and 3rd weapons respectively. The ultimate weapons consume both types of ammo. Not only is this far more streamlined than having separate ammo for every weapon, but it creates a fair degree of tactics and resource management. You will want to evaluate every situation to determine if you really need to spend the cost for the ultimate, or if you can get away with using your free weapon to conserve ammo. The higher the difficulty the more important this will be. New enemies periodically spawn in but are most likely to be the weak melee only type. The hardest difficulty is not as crazy as Doom's Nightmare, rather the monsters move and attack at a furious rate, and any regular monster can spawn in.

Items are very similar to those in Heretic. You get the same basic healing vial with the better 2 healing items being carried and used from the inventory. The Tome of Power is noticeably missing, and the new items do not make up for its loss. There are a few differences in the items between classes, such as them using the green attack bottles completely differently. None of the enemies are the same as in Heretic. The fire hurling gargoyle/imp things return but now look made of magma and are more dangerous. The mage enemies also return with a somewhat homing spiral projectile this time. The new standouts include an ice elemental that uses the Lich's ice attack but is conspicuously missing from the later levels, and 2 types of centaurs that use shields which block or reflect damage when they block. They are a bit of a pain to deal with. Overall the enemy line up is somewhat disappointing; I feel they could have included all the enemies from Heretic, been more creative with new ones, and maybe even put in Doom style hitscanners.

The main flaw with Hexen is just how complicated the levels are. Each chapter has a hub level that links to a few sub levels, and the subs can also be interconnected. You get the typical key searching, out of the way hidden switches and backtracking, only now there is so much more ground to search while trying to figure out what to do. Things in one level can change things in another level, but the game is usually decent about giving a text message telling you about it. There are puzzles to solve, quest items to find, intricate traps to avoid, and lots of cheap instant deaths. On top of this the controls are exactly the same kind of awkward found in Heretic, to the point that you should play it emulated rather than in dosbox. I'm talking about the mouse controlling looking around as well as moving forwards and backwards without being able to rebind, and the inability to rebind the use item function from "enter", which is very awkward when 1 hand is on the mouse and the other on WSAD. It is also possible for scripts to break, making a level impossible to complete without cheating; this happened to me once and I had to noclip to fix it.

Hexen makes impressive strides in the FPS genre but uses these to be more tedious and annoying to play than even Heretic. The shooting and combat are excellent, as expected of a Doom clone, but the parts in between the killing can lead you to bang your head against the walls furiously searching for some switch or secret door you missed, when all you really want to do is litter the floor with corpses.

Deathkings of the Dark Citadel

This expansion to the base game provides an entirely new campaign to play through. It is about the same length as the base game, and the same format; that being a series of hub worlds with interconnected sub levels. The gameplay is exactly the same; it is just more Hexen. I did like how the ice elemental enemy was used more regularly, but also ran into a couple of game breaking bugs where quest items were not in my inventory after picking them up. I suspect there might be a problem with having more than 1 of a quest item, so I recommend caution and backup saves.

Beat as the cleric on 2nd hardest difficulty. I chose to play the vanilla dosbox version and it has the same control problems as Heretic. I went into setup and changed strafing to "A" and "S", using the mouse to look around, but the mouse still controls forwards and backwards movement. Will have to try an emulator next time. The cleric was a very good class. I used the poison bottles to kill the shield guys, and even finished off the 1st boss with one while he was kind of stuck. I occasionally used them against other enemies. The mace is a garbage weapon but its ability to outrange melee enemies makes it godly compared to Doom's fists and Heretic's staff. I used it to kill most of the ettins, unless there were too many or they were too close, and any basic shield guys that I did not kill with poison. The serpent staff is very good and is kind of like the plasma rifle or the elven wand under a tome of power. I never had need to use the life draining aspect and found it optimal for mid range. Firestorm is even better but I am not sure what weapon to compare it to. It has a faster projectile than the serpent staff, making it good at long range sniping, and the high damage and fire rate make it good for close range too. It is like a sniper rifle and shotgun all in one. Its only weakness is very tight corridors and steep elevation differences where it will likely hit terrain instead. The ultimate wraithverge is clearly the bfg. The fire and forget kill everything weapon. I used it for upgraded shield guys that I could not reach for poison, rooms with a lot of tricky to hit enemies where firestorm would have trouble, and the 3 human bosses. I used it a few other times but because it only does a fixed total damage it is not really the best way to deal with a large group of enemies if you can avoid damage. I did not use many items. It was late game by the time I figured out what repulsor disks did. Pressing "enter" to use items was very awkward with 1 hand on the mouse and the other on WSAD. I did use the repulsor disks in the final boss against the swarm of ettins, knocking them around and making them infight while I conserved mana by killing them with the mace. I used a few healing potions here and there but never used any urns. I use the icon of defense for boss fights, even summoned a maulator once, but overall I found the game not difficult enough to require the majority of items. I was too busy fighting off the swarms of enemies in the final fight to realize the final boss was dead. When the dust settled and everything was quiet I went out looking around for him. Oh he died?

As much as I enjoyed the combat, the level design, puzzles and platforming hold the game back. It was much worse than Heretic. I manged to mostly get through the game without any help. By the 3rd hub I got stuck and checked a walkthrough to find out there was a hidden path under stairs that was revealed by pressing a switch that I had already pressed. The other time I had to check a walkthrough was the 2nd boss, where the scripts malfunctioned and the mages did not attack. I ended up using noclipping to kill them, which revealed the boss. I used noclipping a fair bit after the 1st hub when I got stuck; find places I had not yet been and try to reverse engineer how to get to them. And that is the main problem with this game. It is a classic example of why games need objective markers, guiding paths, quest logs, or at least SOMETHING to let you know what you missed. I prefer a straight forward hack and slash shooter, and as such the game is not as good as Heretic. I do want to play again as the warrior and mage on the hardest difficulty.

7.8/10