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 …
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
