Black Labyrinth: solid but not spectacular

[Ingo lifs]

I played Black labyrinth on Evil difficulty, I enjoyed it but I felt there were a couple of fairly easy to fix things that were letting it down.

The level design, as ever was amazing and gorgeous. Maybe there were places in the first level that could've done with another lighting pass, but that's it.

The gauntlets and the void scythe were both massive improvements to the weapons they replaced.

I found the gameplay to be quite stingy with health, mana and souls. Some people I'm sure may enjoy a bit of privation in their difficulty, but I found it lent itself to some creeping gameplay and savescumming when I lost too many hit points to a low level encounter. Too many times I found myself trying to decide whether or not it was worth it to replay or press on and quicksave with 30 hp in the tank. Replaying a few levels of the original game, I was surprised by how abundant souls were, and how often I could fully heal from health lying around.

Some of the enemy designs - I don't quite know how to put it, but they are difficult to read. The guys that rush you don't make footstep sounds, so they can often sneak up on you and corner you. They also come in single file, which means you don't get a good look at how many there are. The small trick in Doom where monsters would sometimes run at you diagonally would have been a great addition here.

It's very hard to tell what's going on with the particle-based monsters. The purple fire dogs I can never tell if they're alive or dead, or how many there are in a big cluster. I struggle to see the projectiles launched from the giant horned cloud faces in time. The black shield dudes seem to have too large a hitbox on their shields. There seem to be too many attacks that are not well telegraphed and hard to avoid but also heavily damaging, which further increases that feeling of attrition on the health bar. There seemed to be too many medium-tier enemies, with quite tanky health pools. A lot of my weapons felt weak, and it did sometimes feel like a chore killing many of the enemies, especially because their hitboxes can often be quite small.

A couple of the stages of the final boss I feel like I got through by luck, because I never figured out how to avoid the damage. I also found that the monsters didn't have very distinctive sounds. I still cannot recall any of the sounds any of the enemies make.

I do think with that some more time iterating on these matters and increasing the pickups in the levels would have made a big difference to the overall quality and feel.

[lilac]

i guess you could say that evil is. amid us