Recent reviews by Hypo

"The game isn't fun if you're not being pushed." -Hugo Martin

Doom Eternal quickly became my favorite fps I'd ever played, and The Ancient Gods Part 1 actually managed to surpass my expectations and leave me wanting more.
The Ancient Gods Part 2, however, was not that "more" that I was expecting and hoping for. It's much much less, and has retroactively soured a lot of what made Part 1 and the base game so great.

A lot of people have said that Part 2 is easier than Part 1, and yeah, sure, it is, but in making it so, the encounters suffer dramatically.

Doom is and always was a game that's ALL about the encounters, no one singular demon can ever truly shine just on their own. Ever since the original Doom games, the real magic comes in the COMBINATION of enemies used cleverly with the level design. That "combat chess" design that Hugo talks about was there since the very beginning. If your encounters never do anything clever or unique with the enemy variety or the design of the map, then you have a bad encounter. And The Ancient Gods Part 2 (TAG 2) is full of bad and underwhelming encounters and underutilized or straight up misused enemies.

• Escalation Encounters: This is where most of the challenge of this DLC has been funneled into. I wish these were more substantial than just two fights per.
  
• The visuals: id Software's art teams continue to be incredible and can bring some awesome areas to life. (it's unfortunate that these environments don't manage to be as memorable as TAG1's simply due to the encounters not taking full use of them)
  
• The music: Another given. Music is mostly subjective so I won't go into my personal thoughts, but rest assured TAG2 is full of djent metal bangers that make you wish you had encounters that live up to the intensity of the music
  
• Fixes to Blood Punch and Chainsaw: If you're a regular Doom Eternal player, you've probably noticed that you couldn't chainsaw demons that are playing their jumping animations, and sometimes Blood Punch would just not work several times over. Those bugs have been mostly fixed!
  
• New chess pieces to the board: TAG2 introduces more enemy AI (well technically they're more like variations of previous enemy AI, but nonetheless) to the chess board that is Doom Eternal. New enemies are always a positive (yes even the Marauder) because no matter how they behave in a vacuum, they can always be more interesting when placed in the right place at the right time alongside the right combination of other enemies... Now these new enemies are not showing their true potential in TAG2, but they are technically new chess pieces that COULD be used better in future mods or Master Levels. (Hell Guards & Chaingunners are worthless tho)

• Underwhelming encounters & Underutilized new enemies: This is a point that requires some specific examples, but I don't have space to. To sum it up, if you're expecting an appropriate follow-up to TAG1's challenges or even challenges that build off of the end of the base campaign, then you will be very disappointed. Several times, you will be going through empty corridors encountering nothing more than two Revenants or a singular Mancubus, maybe with an Imp or two. A single Mancubus is not a challenge for post-launch content when the very first INTRODUCTION of the Mancubus in the base game gives you THREE in a tight corridor with a horde of Imps. TAG2 is full of examples like this where the overall demon count feels EXTREMELY neutered. THEY WERE ABSOLUTELY HOLDING BACK THIS TIME AND YOU CAN FEEL IT.
  
• Short maps: This sort of ties into the first con. These maps want to feel epic & grandiose, but the lackluster encounters, and a pace that seems to want to just rush you to the end, these maps take a big hit because of it. The first map is the best, being similar in length to a TAG1 map (it obviously loses steam near the end though sadly, isn't quite able to live up to any of TAG1's maps) it's able to take you to a couple of unique locations with a handful of cool and engaging encounters. Map 2 and 3 take a massive nosedive however. While they are beautiful like I mentioned, it always feels like a wasted space with the exception of the Escalation Encounters. With very little in the way of incidental encounters, platforming, or secrets!, you won't be spending too much time inbetween key areas, but the key areas are usually empty or have fights that are able to be concluded in under a minute or two if you've got a handle on the mechanics. After you finish the first map, you'll be breezing through this DLC.
  
• The Final Boss: This seems to be the main contentious point with the other reviews so I won't talk about it much. Bosses were never Doom's strong suit, so I'm not too bothered by a lackluster final fight (who's ever looking forward to playing Map30 or e3m8? lol), but needless to say, for a final *final* boss, it's pretty bad and is overshadowed by the base game's final boss by a long shot.
  
• The Story: This point also ties into the final boss somewhat, so I won't get too specific. To sum it up: Interesting elements and plot-points that have been set up in 2016, Eternal, and TAG1 are not followed through in a satisfying way. The ending feels like a sudden and abrupt wrap-up of a very complex narrative that had much much more to explore and expand upon. Arcs are left abandoned in favor of an "epic" Avengers styled climax that ends up feeling empty and uninspired. They've managed to completely reroute the narrative of The Slayer/Doomguy from being simply a bad enough dude to willingly take on all of hell for eternity, into some kind of messiah god-like "chosen one" character. Doom was never about the story so much, so I could take or leave all of this stuff, but as a lifelong Doom fan, I have to say this story and the way TAG2's narrative was handled left an extremely sour taste in my mouth. TAG2's conclusion on it all felt very slapdash and disrespectful. Also why did they set up the Intern to be a lovable comic relief reflection of the fanbase, and then not even follow up with it to give him even a single joke in this?? He has no arc, he's nothing but a disembodied voice for exposition now.
  
• THE NERFS........: (Okay now this is where id Software really lost my respect, it feels like a spit in the mouth.) With the update that launched with TAG2, they've retroactively removed A LOT from TAG1 and even made some unnecessary tweaks to a base game enemy, the Arachnotron: The Arachnotron's animations have been tweaked to make his turret easier to shoot, which is totally fine, but they also decided to reduce the fire rate AND make him completely inaccurate now. This is a reoccurring trend I've noticed when id Software "balances" things, they seem to always *OVER*tweak things unnecessarily to the point where they lose the magic. They've butchered the first map of TAG1, and ruined a handful of previously brilliant encounters throughout TAG1. Just removing chess pieces off the board is not a good way to balance. These encounters were intentionally designed to include these chess pieces in specific ways and it worked well, EVEN IF inexperienced players disagreed. My suggestion would be to simply tweak encounters based on game difficulty, like the classic games figured out in 1993!! Why do experienced players have to suffer because little Tucker had trouble fighting a Spirit?? I'd love to go on about this, because I have a lot to say about it, but essentially it shows a lack of confidence in their design, removing things across the board is not okay!
  
• Forcing tooltips down your throat after seeing them once, and the overall designing around inexperienced players while throwing dedicated players under the bus

This game sucks.

The marketing of this game really made me expect something more bombastic, engaging, and more akin to a retro FPS experience like the new DOOM games. But it's just a generic open world cover shooter with only an inch of depth to any of its mechanics.
I managed to see most of what the game had to offer in under two hours.
Don't be fooled into thinking this is a retro influenced shooter with good movement and attitude to boot, it's more akin to a Call of Duty clone than what the advertising would lead you to think.

It's also nothing like the first Rage. Now the first Rage wasn't all that great either, but it had sparks of greatness peppered throughout. Rage 2 forgets all of the best parts of Rage 1 and instead spent its focus on all the worst parts of Rage 1, and even then it barely takes anything from the first one. The combat in the first Rage was visceral and satisfying with interesting AI and great death animations+physics. There were plenty of simple pleasures in the combat of the first.
The combat in Rage 2, however, is extremely sterile in comparison. Enemies no longer feel like a part of the environment, but instead just moving targets that fall over when you kill them. It's difficult to explain, but if you've played the first Rage I think you'll know what I'm talking about.
The driving is another aspect of this. What was easily the least fun part about Rage 1 now has even more focus in this one, complete with a barren and boring open world to drive endlessly through! It's not fun and if you've played open world apocalyptic games from the 2010s (or Borderlands), you've likely gotten your fill of whatever Rage 2 has to offer.

It do be kinda pretty though!

I'm not a puzzle guy, but I still love this game. It's incredibly charming, and very generous of the creator to sell it for free.
The art and animations are delightful. Overall a really wonderful little game.

This very well might be the best video game I've ever played

This game is gonna be hecking sick when it's finished!
Just classic Quake action. Limiting the animation framerate, using software palette, turning off texture filters, and adding a good amount of extra pixelation is the only way to enjoy this game!

Movement feels great, enemies look great, weapons feel incredible, highly recommend this boomer shooter as it's on its way to being one of the best ones.
Only qualm is maybe it's a bit too generous with saves (they're limited and also a useable item in-game, it's cool) but I know that's probably subjective. I'd enjoy an "ultra-violence" equivalent with less save items or something, but the game's hard mode feels like a perfect difficulty otherwise.

I had a mouse skipping issue at first, but it was easily fixable, just do some digging in the discussion forums.

I didn't play for very long, but I didn't need to to know that this game isn't for me.

I'm a huge fan of retro classic shooters both old and new (Doom, Quake, Blood, Duke3D, Dusk, Amid Evil, Ion Fury, etc etc) and I applaud any game that also shares my love for the genre and aesthetic, but
If you want to play a singular arena wave shooter with a retro/horror/satanic aesthetic, you're better off playing Devil Daggers. Demon Pit takes the flying skulls from that game anyways.

- Demon Pit does not feel good to control, this is my largest gripe with this game. Sure it's fast, but there's a lot more that goes into classic shooter movement than just being fast.
There are huge inconsistencies with your movement; strafing left and right (just A and D) is instantaneous, but if you strafe while holding W then it's not instant and feels more like if Doom had ice physics. Running backwards is also much slower than going forward...which I feel is kind of bad for an arena wave shooter with flying Devil Dagger-esque skulls (and other enemies that chase you) where running backwards and shooting is your main defense.
Jumping is suuuper floaty and locks you into a direction, so no bunnyhopping or air-strafing as far as I could tell.
There is a grapple move, but it doesn't seem very useful for anything outside of escaping enemies and lasers or getting ontop of platforms with pickups. Maybe slowing down backwards movement is meant to encourage grappling more? But grappling isn't too useful or fun in combat to justify it I think. More control over your mid-air movement could possibly help make grappling feel better.

- Weapons are a bit bland, that'd be okay if they felt great, but they're only okay. I got up until the grenade launcher, and that weapon somehow felt exactly like the shotgun but with a weak explosion at the end. No real interest to try out the others after 4 meh weapons.

- When you take damage, it's very hard to notice it or even tell what hurt you (low FOV plays into the latter, speaking of)

- FOV can only go up to 75... really??

- Framerate isn't great. I can't tell for sure what the fps is because there's no counter or anything, but it doesn't feel like 60 to me, and it's definitely not the 144 that my monitor allows for and my 2080ti should be capable of. Even with graphics set to 'fast' it doesn't feel like I'm getting as much as I need for a frantic shooter like this.

- Options in general are limited (non rebindable controls for one), but I guess that's fine since it's a simple game.

I can't see myself coming back to this game, since it doesn't have very much of what I'm looking for in a retro boomer shooter. But if movement and framerate is improved, I'd recommend those interested give it a try. Until then though, no.

Fantastic shooter that still holds up at nearly 10 years old.
I wouldn't have my career or my passion for animation without this game and Source Filmmaker.
It's safe to say I wouldn't be half the man I am without this game.

I was hesitant on buying this, I was weary of all the terrible and lazy PC ports this year and somehow I knew in my gut that this would also fall under that category.
Sadly, I should have listened, this also is a terrible and lazy PC port.

Right off the bat my experienced was soured by the lack of control customization. Absolutely no way to rebind extra mouse buttons, you're restricted to customizing only left mouse, right mouse, scroll up, scroll down, and middle mouse click through drop down menus. If you stick with Mouse_button 4 and 5 for shooters like I do, you're out of luck. Why is it that shooters from the late 90s very easily accomidate for extra mouse buttons but this game doesn't?

The in-game audio is absolutely terrible quality. I can see how you can get used to it after a while, but not when you're constantly being reminded with the newly recorded Jon St. John voice lines (you can turn them off by the way which is good, even though I'd love to enjoy them) that everything that's not the new lines is terribly compressed and downsampled garbage audio that can really hurt your ears.

I didn't play too much of this before turning it off in outrage and honestly I really didn't have to to conclude that Megaton Edition was far better in almost every way except for the addition of a new graphics system (which is admittedly nice to look at but, you guessed it, no FOV slider so you're stuck looking through a tiny FOV) and new commentary (though the commentary, as I could see, is just Gearbox employees and not all of the actual developers of the orginal Duke 3D game).

Also there's mouse acceleration with no option to turn off.

And it's also missing the three extra episodes (Duke It Out In D.C, Duke Caribbean: Life's a Beach, and Duke: Nuclear Winter) that were included with the now removed from Steam Duke 3D Megaton Edition. So that's already a huge downside.

This is downright terrible, the negitives hugely outweigh the positives and new content of the game, especially when the downsides impact your enjoyment of even moving around as Duke.
If you have the Megaton Edition and debating on buying this version, don't even bother. And consider yourself lucky while you're at it. Gearbox's move of removing the Megaton Edition off of Steam to make way for this abomination is absolutely dispicable, though I've sadly come to expect that of Gearbox.

I can only hope they patch out all of the mouse issues and actually optimize the darn game for PC players, fix the audio, and add in the previously available extra episodes as free DLC in the future, or else I cannot recommend this version of Duke 3D. Not to anyone, and I'm honestly sad to say that.

Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey Pass the whiskey

This is a truly great game. It's kind of a mix between Half-Life, BioShock, Fallout, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. so if you like any of those games, you will really love this one. Really underrated and if you have money to spend, I suggest this game.