Recent reviews by lotek

As a long time D&D player and fan of forgotten lands, the freedom, story telling, and faithful reproduction of mechanics here are excellent and I'd highly recommend any CRPG fan to buy this and just enjoy it.

BLUF: If you grew up on doom or marathon and miss the ol run and gun with a side of exploration, then this over the top retro fps is the love letter you've been waiting for.

Here's the deal. If doom and marathon had a baby, it would probably be prodeus. The game's movement and shooting feels tight. The enemy patterns and combinations gradually increase in complexity and are almost identical in combat to what you get in doom: grunts, imps, cacademons, pinkies, etc.

The map designs overall feel fairly well done, allowing you to move through them fairly linearly but they leave room and rewards for exploration. They create movement puzzles, and do a good job of finding that balance between too tight and just open enough to give good tactical advantage in fights while generally being well stocked with pickups. Just enough to not be frustrating, but at times forcing consideration to how you are engaging.

The aesthetic and colors feel like a fusion of the dark grit of doom with the brighter colors I remember from marathon.

Finally the game's comical levels of gore take me back to the over the top nature of games in the 90s that had Senators and Mothers everywhere worried their kids would become a homicidal maniac by simply knowing it existed, and is the very thing that makes the wholesale slaughter fun. The weapons feel familiar yet distinct, and thanks to the buckets of exploding viscera they also FEEL powerful (even the pistol and fists) which certainly gets the ol dopamine factory a cranking.

At this point I don't think you need to know if a battlefront game is fun. It is. EA got their clocks cleaned regarding loot boxes, and the game turned into something with progression, some nice extended universe single player content and the battlefield experiences you've come to either love or hate in the series of games.

Games legit. Seamlessly move between PVP and PVE content that feels rewarding to win. Penalties for losing, marginal, with some persistence that is all cosmetic in nature rather than imbalance. Skill based combat with intricacies to learn which makes what at the surface seems simple quite complex and fun.

It's alright for a few hundred hours, but then it gets good.

The growth of this game over the years, staggering. If you've never tried this before, you owe it to yourself to give it a go at least once.

It finds a good mix between Quake, Quake 3, and Doom in terms of the physics and feel of combat. There's some throw back levels, new stuff coming out pretty regularly. Honestly, if you've never really "gotten" quake, this might be a good entry point into what the actual F my generation was cracked out on during high school. For the older quake players like myself, 10 hours in is when the flicks and strafe jumping started coming back together and grooves were had on a more frequent basis. My largest complaint honestly is that there is a god awful delay on swap between rocket, rail, and lightning; but not shotty. So learning how to weapon cycle takes some adjusting from previous iterations. I dunno man, I just like it, but I'm biased.


Also, I play in linux, so there's that if you were wondering if it does/doesn't work. I'll say this though, they've done a good job optimizing this game over the years, but there's still more room. One of the few games I actually play in Linux that doesn't meet or exceed it's counterpart so that's of note. Maybe something more to do with state of parity with vulkan. I dunno, but there's my 2 cents.

If you liked SW2013, and thought to yourself, I wish they had just a bit more versatility and loot and maybe some coop... yea, coop would be nice. I loved the original shadow warrior when I was a kid, like to an insane degree, and this series being redone has been something I've been excited about. The first one made it clear, what they were doing with the series, this one feels more like they found their pocket so I have high hopes for the third one. I hope it has coop too.

If you don't own this game already just buy it. If you do own it, buy it for that friend who refuses to buy it because they have "real life things to do".

If you loved shadow warrior, well, then you'll love this. Only downside is, unlike the other build engine updates this one is woefully lacking on an updated multiplayer which is a damn shame.