Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades

Criticizing a widely popular game is something that can cause trouble. You'll always get a bunch of that game's angry fans berating you for what you have said or try to show you how wrong you are by any means necessary.
But I don't care about that. Art is subjective; Which means it can be perceived in many different ways by anyone who views it. So nothing is going to stop me from saying that Prodeus is one of the most overrated boomer shooters I have ever played in my life, one that I desperately wished to wrap up sooner.

I can't deny that Prodeus leaves a damn good first impression in the first hour.
At first, this game is exactly what you expect from something that has Brutal Doom as one of its inspiration sources. Combat is very fast and thrilling. Shooting at an enemy causes them to start spraying tons of blood everywhere, which gets amplified if you hit them from point blank range or use a rapidfire weapon like the minigun. The game even has location-based damage to an extent, which means you can rip the enemies' heads and limbs off. All of the metal music tracks cause your adrenaline to pump. All of what I've mentioned so far is pretty entertaining to see.
But unfortunately, the game cannot keep this going and everything that initially makes it a treat to play becomes the bane of its existence later on.

Here's the thing: Prodeus is amazing in the first hour, but gets utterly tedious after that for a variety of reasons. The tediousness is so bad that I legitimately thought I was putting way more time in the game. I would feel like I had played for well over an hour, just for the Steam overlay to show me it was just 20 minutes.
The first cause of this is the visual style. While the game is phenomenal on the technical side, it visually looks exhausting. The mood of the whole game is dark and gloomy, and the choice of lifeless colors as the dominant color palette has caused the areas to look dull and depressing. Not only that, the environment types you go through are pretty limited, mostly consisting of caverns with orange/green lava in them or space stations. As the game very rarely tries to do something different in this regard until the very end, you will just see the same environments for multiple hours, eventually leading into visual boredom. Unfortunately, the game realizes this very late, with only the final set of levels featuring distinct visuals.
Then there's how the game handles encounters. In the beginning, Prodeus goes for controlled encounters. What I mean is that you go from room to room, find key cards, fight whatever enemy the game throws at you and have enough space to move around or take cover. But everything breaks apart when the game goes for battle arenas and keeps using them for the majority of the campaign. You constantly get dropped in big arenas with lots of ammo refills around and enemies rushing at you from all sides, with them spawning in multiple waves. Only it's at the end of the game when it goes back to its working formula in the first hour, which you will quickly realize is because of going through the same beginning levels, but backwards.
And finally, we have the limited enemy roster. Despite the number of enemy encounters in Prodeus, the enemy variety is very poor; So much so that the game has to re-use previous minibosses and introduce powered up versions of normal enemies in order to compensate for this issue. And despite this, it still utilizes these enemies en masse throughout the game, so this limitation is more easily noticeable.
Prodeus thinks just having a chaotic gameplay and going for sensory overload is fine and will keep players satisfied & interested, but the truth is far from that. It has forgotten that Brutal Doom was a mod attached to an already good game that just added these fancy stuff on top of a refined experience. Having one fight after another with no breathing room or meaningful exploration gets tiring, the limited types of enemies sets the course for stale fights and repeating tactics, and the barrage of visual effects... well... that requires its own section.

Unfortunately, the game has a horrendous case of bad visual clarity. I really struggle to see what's exactly in front of me due to a combination of the color palettes and the visual effects. First we have the enemies blending-in with the environment due to their pixelation and color palettes matching with the visual style and permanent visual effects of the game, especially when they are far away , making them hard to notice unless they are already attacking you so you can spot their bright projectiles.
Then we have everything else interfering with proper visibilty of the battlefield. The blood splatter effects are so excessive that cover other enemies and projectiles especially if you are using weapons like the minigun, the lights emitted from nexus points and enemies have a blurring effect to them that makes things incredibly hard to see , Prodeus enemy-types constantly shoot big blue projectiles that cover a large part of your view, explosions are very big and bright, getting hit by projectiles flashes your entire screen for a splitsecond and all of these are without mentioning some of your own weapons' projectiles getting in the way of visibility.
As I mentioned before, the enemy encounters are chaotic. You know, the exact type of encounter where you NEED TO be able to clearly see the screen in order to correctly respond to threats? So this horrid lack of visual clarity just makes for a lack of playingfield awareness, which then leads into pure frustration and unfair deaths. Not that death is a serious setback...

Unfortunately, there are other things about Prodeus that I have gripes with, starting with the deaths.
In Prodeus, enemies weirdly get alerted to your presence from far away or even behind doors, and prepare to attack you. In addition to all of the above, this makes for lots of frustration and possibly death, but death hardly feels like an obstacle. You can just respawn from the nearest checkpoint infinitely, which removes all tension. But considering the final stage and its lack of respawns, I think this was added to remedy the confusion caused by the utter visual chaos, and to prevent the game from getting frustrating.
Next, I'm going to join the reload criticizers. All of the weapons in Prodeus need to reload. If you run out of ammo on one weapon or switch to another mid-reload animation, you need to finish the reload process before firing it. This works in the beginning of the game, but do you seriously expect me to be careful of my location in a big arena with enemies of various sizes attacking me from every place and distance, with THAT visual clarity and manage the reloads as well?
Finally we have the way the game handles its dynamic music system. If it detects a group of enemies nearby or starts a scripted encounter, battle music starts to play. But unfortunately, it never knows exactly when to stop. Many times you will see that you are still in middle of combat and the game decides that things have calmed down and vice versa. This makes music an unreliable audio cue, because it can lie to you at any moment.


A disappointing boomer shooter. Prodeus' obsession with constant wide-scale battles without breathing rooms, coupled with a horrendous case of bad visual clarity, ultimately makes for tediousness.

[quote]Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades [/quote] Criticizing a widely popular game is something that can cause trouble. You'll always get a bunch of that game's angry fans berating you for what you have said or try to show you how wrong you are by any means necessary. But I don't care about that. Art is subjective; Which means it can be perceived in many different ways by anyone who views it. So nothing is going to stop me from saying that Prodeus is one of the most overrated boomer shooters I have ever played in my life, one that I desperately wished to wrap up sooner. [h2]RIP AND TEAR, UNTIL IT'S DONE[/h2] I can't deny that Prodeus leaves a damn good first impression in the first hour. At first, this game is exactly what you expect from something that has Brutal Doom as one of its inspiration sources. Combat is very fast and thrilling. Shooting at an enemy causes them to start spraying tons of blood everywhere, which gets amplified if you hit them from point blank range or use a rapidfire weapon like the minigun. The game even has location-based damage to an extent, which means you can rip the enemies' heads and limbs off. All of the metal music tracks cause your adrenaline to pump. All of what I've mentioned so far is pretty entertaining to see. But unfortunately, the game cannot keep this going and everything that initially makes it a treat to play becomes the bane of its existence later on. [h2]Why am I not feeling the fun?[/h2] Here's the thing: Prodeus is amazing in the first hour, but gets utterly tedious after that for a variety of reasons. The tediousness is so bad that I legitimately thought I was putting way more time in the game. I would feel like I had played for well over an hour, just for the Steam overlay to show me it was just 20 minutes. The first cause of this is the visual style. While the game is phenomenal on the technical side, it visually looks exhausting. The mood of the whole game is dark and gloomy, and the choice of lifeless colors as the dominant color palette has caused the areas to look dull and depressing. Not only that, the environment types you go through are pretty limited, mostly consisting of caverns with orange/green lava in them or space stations. As the game very rarely tries to do something different in this regard until the very end, you will just see the same environments for multiple hours, eventually leading into visual boredom. Unfortunately, the game realizes this very late, with only the final set of levels featuring distinct visuals. Then there's how the game handles encounters. In the beginning, Prodeus goes for controlled encounters. What I mean is that you go from room to room, find key cards, fight whatever enemy the game throws at you and have enough space to move around or take cover. But everything breaks apart when the game goes for battle arenas and keeps using them for the majority of the campaign. You constantly get dropped in big arenas with lots of ammo refills around and enemies rushing at you from all sides, with them spawning in multiple waves. Only it's at the end of the game when it goes back to its working formula in the first hour, which you will quickly realize is because of going through the same beginning levels, but backwards. And finally, we have the limited enemy roster. Despite the number of enemy encounters in Prodeus, the enemy variety is very poor; So much so that the game has to re-use previous minibosses and introduce powered up versions of normal enemies in order to compensate for this issue. And despite this, it still utilizes these enemies en masse throughout the game, so this limitation is more easily noticeable. Prodeus thinks just having a chaotic gameplay and going for sensory overload is fine and will keep players satisfied & interested, but the truth is far from that. It has forgotten that Brutal Doom was a mod attached to an already good game that just added these fancy stuff on top of a refined experience. Having one fight after another with no breathing room or meaningful exploration gets tiring, the limited types of enemies sets the course for stale fights and repeating tactics, and the barrage of visual effects... well... that requires its own section. [h2]Don't you just love not being able to see a damn thing?[/h2] Unfortunately, the game has a horrendous case of bad visual clarity. I really struggle to see what's exactly in front of me due to a combination of the color palettes and the visual effects. First we have the enemies blending-in with the environment due to their pixelation and color palettes matching with the visual style and permanent visual effects of the game, [url=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3416414569] especially when they are far away [/url], making them hard to notice unless they are already attacking you so you can spot their bright projectiles. Then we have everything else interfering with proper visibilty of the battlefield. The blood splatter effects are so excessive that cover other enemies and projectiles especially if you are using weapons like the minigun, [url=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3418069739] the lights emitted from nexus points and enemies have a blurring effect to them that makes things incredibly hard to see [/url], Prodeus enemy-types constantly shoot big blue projectiles that cover a large part of your view, explosions are very big and bright, getting hit by projectiles flashes your entire screen for a splitsecond and all of these are without mentioning some of your own weapons' projectiles getting in the way of visibility. As I mentioned before, the enemy encounters are chaotic. You know, the exact type of encounter where you NEED TO be able to clearly see the screen in order to correctly respond to threats? So this horrid lack of visual clarity just makes for a lack of playingfield awareness, which then leads into pure frustration and unfair deaths. Not that death is a serious setback... [h2]BUT WAIT! There's more[/h2] Unfortunately, there are other things about Prodeus that I have gripes with, starting with the deaths. In Prodeus, enemies weirdly get alerted to your presence from far away or even behind doors, and prepare to attack you. In addition to all of the above, this makes for lots of frustration and possibly death, but death hardly feels like an obstacle. You can just respawn from the nearest checkpoint infinitely, which removes all tension. But considering the final stage and its lack of respawns, I think this was added to remedy the confusion caused by the utter visual chaos, and to prevent the game from getting frustrating. Next, I'm going to join the reload criticizers. All of the weapons in Prodeus need to reload. If you run out of ammo on one weapon or switch to another mid-reload animation, you need to finish the reload process before firing it. This works in the beginning of the game, but do you seriously expect me to be careful of my location in a big arena with enemies of various sizes attacking me from every place and distance, with THAT visual clarity and manage the reloads as well? Finally we have the way the game handles its dynamic music system. If it detects a group of enemies nearby or starts a scripted encounter, battle music starts to play. But unfortunately, it never knows exactly when to stop. Many times you will see that you are still in middle of combat and the game decides that things have calmed down and vice versa. This makes music an unreliable audio cue, because it can lie to you at any moment. [h2]TL;DR[/h2] A disappointing boomer shooter. Prodeus' obsession with constant wide-scale battles without breathing rooms, coupled with a horrendous case of bad visual clarity, ultimately makes for tediousness.