Game Review: Project Warlock
2020-Apr-01, Wednesday 10:25![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
I first learned about Project Warlock through one of the few parts of game streamer culture I actually participate in, the Continue? Show. I've been watching them for six years now and have seen almost everything game-related they put out, so when they posted a video about a retro-styled PC shooter I'd never heard of, one that reminded me a lot of a modernized version of Catacomb Abyss mixed with Doom, I immediately put it on my wishlist. And when it went on sale, I bought it. Especially when I saw someone online describe it as "Hexenstein 3D," since I've played two of those three references and loved both of them. I don't really like playing modern first-person shooters because the more realistic the violence gets the less I want to play it--this is true of other game genres as well, but it comes out strongest in first-person shooters and fighting games--but pixel games? Bring it on.
End result? It was pretty good, but I do wonder if I should have played Hexen or Heretic instead.
Ancient surroundings, high-tech weaponry.
The basic conceit of Project Warlock is that, well, the main character is a Warlock. Unlike Hexen, which takes Doom's weapon system and recasts all the weapons in a medieval fantasy theme, Project Warlock has both weapons and spells and the protagonist--who has no name or motivation other than "kill all the bad guys" and honestly doesn't need one--can use them both simultaneously. Shoot a killer robot in the face with a shotgun, throw a Freezing Blast to catch the remaining enemies and freeze them, toss a grenade to shatter them into icy shards, switch to the rocket launcher and kick down the door to the next room, use Sammoner [sic] to call up more ammunition in a burst of magic, and then drop a Storm Rage to blast every nearby enemy in a storm of lightning bolts.
There were a bunch of weapons and spells to find, and much like Axiom Verge, I really appreciated the variety even if a lot of the weapons didn't get much use. I defaulted to the shotgun, the king of all FPS weapons, but I used every other weapon at least occasionally. The submachine gun hits so often that it was able to stunlock some enemies, so against them I'd occasionally switch to it. I killed one of the bosses with the flamethrower--appropriately enough, the one in Antarctica--and once I got the laser rifle I'd use it all the time as well, because even though ammo for it was scarce, the Sammoner spell let me call up as much ammo as I needed.
There are fewer spells, but each of them I tried had a major impact. Freezing Blast can freeze any non-boss enemy solid and many of them would shatter in a single blow, so I would throw out Freezing Blasts in large arena battles and then hide beneath the statues of enemies while taking shots at other enemies. The Storm Rage spell summons an electrical orb that attacks everyone in a radius, so it was an excellent room-clearer. And Holy Guard summons a shield that absorbs damage, so it was perfect for boss battles. By the time I was in Hell, I felt unstoppable, a warrior capable of taking on any challenge the game threw at me and coming through the other side in a storm of lightning and lead.
The spirit moves me.
In addition to the standard model of finding weapons and spells within the levels, Project Warlock also has an RPG system. Picking up treasure, finding secrets, and killing enemies provides experience and levels, each of which adds a stat point that can be spent in the warlock's workshop on the four stats of Strength (affects melee damage), Life (affects Health), Spirit (affects mana and spellcasting), and Capacity (affects maximum ammunition). To aid in my goal of playing a wizard in every game that supports it, I put most of my points in Spirit to support the goal of raining lightning and ice on my enemies.
Every five levels also adds a perk point, with options like Student (on gaining levels, a random stat point is also distributed in addition to the player-allocatable one), Treasure Hunter (doubles the chance of health, mana, or ammo drops from enemies or scenery), Soul Collector (all killed enemies drop a blue skull worth two mana), Toughness (+30 health and -20% damage taken), Magic Potential (+30 mana), or Ghost (ability to move through monsters). Those are all the ones I took, and you can maybe see why I felt so overpowered toward the tend of the game. The first perk I took was Student, and that meant that I essentially gained two levels for every one that I gained on paper. I put most of my discretionary points into Spirit and relied on the points from Student to fill out the other stats, so by the end of the game, I was at Strength 9, Life 12, Spirit 30, and Capacity 10 while my level was only 33. If I had put most of those points into Strength, I probably could have been running around with the axe and one-shotting everything, and if I had put them into Life, I don't know that I ever would have died.
The final system is the weapon and spell upgrade system. Upgrade points found in levels can be spent to buy spells or upgrade weapons to one of two possible options. The pistol can be upgraded to the .50 Magnum, which has massively-damaging bullets, or the Flare Gun, which sets enemies on fire. The double-barreled shotgun can be upgraded to the Harvester, which fires extremely powerful single bullets, or the Flak Cannon, which shoots shards of metal that ricocete and set enemies on fire. The staff can be upgraded to the Lightning Staff, which shoots a continuous beam of lightning at a single target, or the Freezing Staff, which fires a freezing blast at enemies. Spells don't have upgrades, but as the upgrade screen reminds you every time you buy anything, they're bought using the same pool of upgrade points, so there's a tension between becoming a powerful wizard, becoming a mighty warrior, or dabbling in both.
Not much time to stop and think here.
That's the dream, anyway. In practice, this doesn't work for several reasons, the most critical being that switching between weapons and spells is pretty clunky. Weapons are okay, I guess, though every hotkey has two separate weapons, which make scrolling through them with the mousewheel take a while and selecting them with hotkeys requires multiple presses. I never entirely got used to this and that meant I spent a lot of time cycling around the entire weapon selection to get to the one I wanted after I overshot it or, more commonly, just sticking with the shotgun no matter what situation I was in. Spell selection is even worse--it requires holding down the interaction key and then using the next weapon/previous weapon keys to scroll between them, and there is no way to change this or add hotkeys for spells.
That meant that my dream of swapping between spells to respond to different situations in the middle of battle couldn't work, so I'd have to decide which spell was best before I went into a room, or I'd have to just go with Freezing Blast and use the time it bought me to decide if I needed a different spell, or I'd use Sammoner to keep my ammo up while I just blasting everything with guns. What I really wanted was to be the Sorcelator from Penny Arcade, but Project Warlock doesn't offer any opportunity to do that.
In addition, some weapon upgrades made weapons basically useless to me. The Railgun upgrade for the laser gun makes each shot penetrate multiple enemies and do slightly more damage, but every shot takes 10 ammo and the maximum capacity for the laser gun isn't that high, so I bought it in the workshop to test it out and what I found out is that having already bought the Firelance upgrade for the flamethrower, I didn't need it. It doesn't go through walls, so I can't think of a situation where I would need it. And with no way to respec weapon upgrades and since weapons and spells shared the same pool, I spent a big chunk of the game not spending points, using my weapons during levels, and then staring at the upgrade screen in the workshop and closing it without doing anything. A system that discourages you from engaging with it is not a good system.
Just you, and me, and my Sphere of a Million Lightning Bolts.
There are also some bugs still unfixed, none of which are critical but all of which are annoying. The Storm Rage spell blasts every enemy within range intelligently and repeatedly, but it also seems to blast the destructable wall sections that lead to secret areas and doing so means you don't get credit for discovering them. There's a similar bug with the Flak Cannon, where each individual projectile that hits counts as a secret discovery, so using my default weapon made it very difficult to determine how many secrets were left in the level after that. What I resorted to was using Freezing Blast and being very careful with my shots until I knew I had found every secret in the level, after which I'd switch to Storm Rage and just blow up all the enemies in my path in a hail of lightning bolts. It made it a bit diffcult to have the kind of heavy-metal, sprinting and firing everywhere Doom gameplay the name "Project Warlock" had led to to expect.
Second was that enemy drops don't seem to account for z-levels. Project Warlock doesn't have ramps or stairways, but it does have elevators, and any time I was above ground level, the enemies wouldn't drop anything. And it wasn't just bad luck, either, because they weren't dropping the blue skulls that the Soul Collector perk should have entitled me too, which meant that any level with elevation changes meant that I had to be very careful about my mana or ammo running out.
Finally, this isn't a bug so much as a bizarre change, but if you watch that Continue? clip above you'll see that the levels are very dimly-lit, almost completely black in some places, and there are a lot of enemies lunging out of the darkness and muzzle- or spell-flashes revealing hordes of monsters waiting to take down the warlock. The first spell in the game is Light, and buying it is free, so I really expected the gameplay to be similar to Doom 3, with a trade-off between visibility through the Light spell and offensive ability through holding a gun. As my screenshots demonstrate, though, the light levels have been globally raised such that the Light spell is totally unecessary--I only ever used it to add extra detail to walls when I was hunting for secrets. I don't think I would have enjoyed the game as much if it had been as dark as it was originally, but it certainly would have been more atmospheric.
I'm not trapped in here with you, you're trapped in here with me.
The level design sticks to the old school FPS style of making levels that are primarily constructed to be places to mow down hordes of demons and undead rather than any place that would or should exist in the real world. If I can even use the term "real world" when talking about a game that starts in some kind of medieval castle populated by monstrous bats and undead sorcerers, moves to a secret Antarctic research base digging up a Great Old One, takes a detour in Ancient Egypt before moving back to civilization which has been overrun by killer robots, and finally ending in Meat Hell. There are nooks and crannies, hidden secret passages leading to teleporters, monster closets that open after you pick up the weapon in the center of the room, all the old classics.
Unfortunately, I can't say the same for the rest of the design. The monsters have a lot of variety but nothing they do is memorable. The bats are pretty cute, and I liked the tape worms that dove underground in Hell and then popped up to bite, as well as the [man]scorpions in Ancient Egypt based on the girtablilu of mythology, and giant robots of the industrial areas. But the problem with all the monsters is that they were just wheat before the scythe of my Storm Rage spell. Hordes of enemies died in a hail of lightning bolts as I dropped Storm Rage spheres all over the place, and the only time that strategy didn't work is when I was worried about failing to discover a secret or during boss battles, since Project Warlock follows the JRPG strategy of making anything that's not a direct attack totally worthless. Storm Rage would make every single boss battle trivial the same way it does to every non-boss battle, so I don't blame the designer for making it not target bosses, but it is odd that this supremely-effective spell just suddenly...doesn't work.
Also, I found the sound design especially disappointing. The music was all kind of generic background metal, with nothing as memorable as At Doom's Gate (or E1M1. There are two kinds of people...), and the monster and weapon sounds are especially weak. If you think of Doom, you immediately remember the whine-scream of the imps, the whoosh of the fireballs, the clip-clop of a demon's hooves, or the charging sound of the BFG9000. Project Warlock has nothing nearly so memorable, with even my beloved Flak Cannon making just a slight coughing sound when firing. For having such an interesting variety of well-designed levels and monsters, when I think of them now, I can't remember a single sound any of them make. Just the slight crackle of Storm Rage as it kills everything in the room and the next room over, because magic lightning goes through walls.
RIP(ped and torn).
Project Warlock was made mostly by a single person, which is an extremely impressive feat. And as a homage to the FPS games of the 90s, it really shines. I had a bunch of fun playing it and I'm glad I bought it, it just has a few strange decisions that prevent it from being a real classic in my eyes. It's possible that I played it on too low a difficulty, but I saw that the enemies did double damage on the next-highest difficulty and I immediately ignored it, since cranking the damage slider for difficulty is rarely actually balanced well, but maybe that was the intended difficulty and that's why the game became so easy toward the end? Or maybe it needed another balance pass so that Student isn't the best perk in the game by a wide margin as long as it's the first perk taken, and so that Storm Rage isn't an "I win" spell in basically any situation. I'm normally all in favor of options so I can try weird things, rather than a more controlled game experience--why I had more fun with Axiom Verge than Super Metroid even though the latter is definitely a better game--but in this case it harmed the game overall. I'd still recommend it, but it's not a game that sticks with you when it's done.
End result? It was pretty good, but I do wonder if I should have played Hexen or Heretic instead.
Ancient surroundings, high-tech weaponry.
The basic conceit of Project Warlock is that, well, the main character is a Warlock. Unlike Hexen, which takes Doom's weapon system and recasts all the weapons in a medieval fantasy theme, Project Warlock has both weapons and spells and the protagonist--who has no name or motivation other than "kill all the bad guys" and honestly doesn't need one--can use them both simultaneously. Shoot a killer robot in the face with a shotgun, throw a Freezing Blast to catch the remaining enemies and freeze them, toss a grenade to shatter them into icy shards, switch to the rocket launcher and kick down the door to the next room, use Sammoner [sic] to call up more ammunition in a burst of magic, and then drop a Storm Rage to blast every nearby enemy in a storm of lightning bolts.
There were a bunch of weapons and spells to find, and much like Axiom Verge, I really appreciated the variety even if a lot of the weapons didn't get much use. I defaulted to the shotgun, the king of all FPS weapons, but I used every other weapon at least occasionally. The submachine gun hits so often that it was able to stunlock some enemies, so against them I'd occasionally switch to it. I killed one of the bosses with the flamethrower--appropriately enough, the one in Antarctica--and once I got the laser rifle I'd use it all the time as well, because even though ammo for it was scarce, the Sammoner spell let me call up as much ammo as I needed.
There are fewer spells, but each of them I tried had a major impact. Freezing Blast can freeze any non-boss enemy solid and many of them would shatter in a single blow, so I would throw out Freezing Blasts in large arena battles and then hide beneath the statues of enemies while taking shots at other enemies. The Storm Rage spell summons an electrical orb that attacks everyone in a radius, so it was an excellent room-clearer. And Holy Guard summons a shield that absorbs damage, so it was perfect for boss battles. By the time I was in Hell, I felt unstoppable, a warrior capable of taking on any challenge the game threw at me and coming through the other side in a storm of lightning and lead.
The spirit moves me.
In addition to the standard model of finding weapons and spells within the levels, Project Warlock also has an RPG system. Picking up treasure, finding secrets, and killing enemies provides experience and levels, each of which adds a stat point that can be spent in the warlock's workshop on the four stats of Strength (affects melee damage), Life (affects Health), Spirit (affects mana and spellcasting), and Capacity (affects maximum ammunition). To aid in my goal of playing a wizard in every game that supports it, I put most of my points in Spirit to support the goal of raining lightning and ice on my enemies.
Every five levels also adds a perk point, with options like Student (on gaining levels, a random stat point is also distributed in addition to the player-allocatable one), Treasure Hunter (doubles the chance of health, mana, or ammo drops from enemies or scenery), Soul Collector (all killed enemies drop a blue skull worth two mana), Toughness (+30 health and -20% damage taken), Magic Potential (+30 mana), or Ghost (ability to move through monsters). Those are all the ones I took, and you can maybe see why I felt so overpowered toward the tend of the game. The first perk I took was Student, and that meant that I essentially gained two levels for every one that I gained on paper. I put most of my discretionary points into Spirit and relied on the points from Student to fill out the other stats, so by the end of the game, I was at Strength 9, Life 12, Spirit 30, and Capacity 10 while my level was only 33. If I had put most of those points into Strength, I probably could have been running around with the axe and one-shotting everything, and if I had put them into Life, I don't know that I ever would have died.
The final system is the weapon and spell upgrade system. Upgrade points found in levels can be spent to buy spells or upgrade weapons to one of two possible options. The pistol can be upgraded to the .50 Magnum, which has massively-damaging bullets, or the Flare Gun, which sets enemies on fire. The double-barreled shotgun can be upgraded to the Harvester, which fires extremely powerful single bullets, or the Flak Cannon, which shoots shards of metal that ricocete and set enemies on fire. The staff can be upgraded to the Lightning Staff, which shoots a continuous beam of lightning at a single target, or the Freezing Staff, which fires a freezing blast at enemies. Spells don't have upgrades, but as the upgrade screen reminds you every time you buy anything, they're bought using the same pool of upgrade points, so there's a tension between becoming a powerful wizard, becoming a mighty warrior, or dabbling in both.
Not much time to stop and think here.
That's the dream, anyway. In practice, this doesn't work for several reasons, the most critical being that switching between weapons and spells is pretty clunky. Weapons are okay, I guess, though every hotkey has two separate weapons, which make scrolling through them with the mousewheel take a while and selecting them with hotkeys requires multiple presses. I never entirely got used to this and that meant I spent a lot of time cycling around the entire weapon selection to get to the one I wanted after I overshot it or, more commonly, just sticking with the shotgun no matter what situation I was in. Spell selection is even worse--it requires holding down the interaction key and then using the next weapon/previous weapon keys to scroll between them, and there is no way to change this or add hotkeys for spells.
That meant that my dream of swapping between spells to respond to different situations in the middle of battle couldn't work, so I'd have to decide which spell was best before I went into a room, or I'd have to just go with Freezing Blast and use the time it bought me to decide if I needed a different spell, or I'd use Sammoner to keep my ammo up while I just blasting everything with guns. What I really wanted was to be the Sorcelator from Penny Arcade, but Project Warlock doesn't offer any opportunity to do that.
In addition, some weapon upgrades made weapons basically useless to me. The Railgun upgrade for the laser gun makes each shot penetrate multiple enemies and do slightly more damage, but every shot takes 10 ammo and the maximum capacity for the laser gun isn't that high, so I bought it in the workshop to test it out and what I found out is that having already bought the Firelance upgrade for the flamethrower, I didn't need it. It doesn't go through walls, so I can't think of a situation where I would need it. And with no way to respec weapon upgrades and since weapons and spells shared the same pool, I spent a big chunk of the game not spending points, using my weapons during levels, and then staring at the upgrade screen in the workshop and closing it without doing anything. A system that discourages you from engaging with it is not a good system.
Just you, and me, and my Sphere of a Million Lightning Bolts.
There are also some bugs still unfixed, none of which are critical but all of which are annoying. The Storm Rage spell blasts every enemy within range intelligently and repeatedly, but it also seems to blast the destructable wall sections that lead to secret areas and doing so means you don't get credit for discovering them. There's a similar bug with the Flak Cannon, where each individual projectile that hits counts as a secret discovery, so using my default weapon made it very difficult to determine how many secrets were left in the level after that. What I resorted to was using Freezing Blast and being very careful with my shots until I knew I had found every secret in the level, after which I'd switch to Storm Rage and just blow up all the enemies in my path in a hail of lightning bolts. It made it a bit diffcult to have the kind of heavy-metal, sprinting and firing everywhere Doom gameplay the name "Project Warlock" had led to to expect.
Second was that enemy drops don't seem to account for z-levels. Project Warlock doesn't have ramps or stairways, but it does have elevators, and any time I was above ground level, the enemies wouldn't drop anything. And it wasn't just bad luck, either, because they weren't dropping the blue skulls that the Soul Collector perk should have entitled me too, which meant that any level with elevation changes meant that I had to be very careful about my mana or ammo running out.
Finally, this isn't a bug so much as a bizarre change, but if you watch that Continue? clip above you'll see that the levels are very dimly-lit, almost completely black in some places, and there are a lot of enemies lunging out of the darkness and muzzle- or spell-flashes revealing hordes of monsters waiting to take down the warlock. The first spell in the game is Light, and buying it is free, so I really expected the gameplay to be similar to Doom 3, with a trade-off between visibility through the Light spell and offensive ability through holding a gun. As my screenshots demonstrate, though, the light levels have been globally raised such that the Light spell is totally unecessary--I only ever used it to add extra detail to walls when I was hunting for secrets. I don't think I would have enjoyed the game as much if it had been as dark as it was originally, but it certainly would have been more atmospheric.
I'm not trapped in here with you, you're trapped in here with me.
The level design sticks to the old school FPS style of making levels that are primarily constructed to be places to mow down hordes of demons and undead rather than any place that would or should exist in the real world. If I can even use the term "real world" when talking about a game that starts in some kind of medieval castle populated by monstrous bats and undead sorcerers, moves to a secret Antarctic research base digging up a Great Old One, takes a detour in Ancient Egypt before moving back to civilization which has been overrun by killer robots, and finally ending in Meat Hell. There are nooks and crannies, hidden secret passages leading to teleporters, monster closets that open after you pick up the weapon in the center of the room, all the old classics.
Unfortunately, I can't say the same for the rest of the design. The monsters have a lot of variety but nothing they do is memorable. The bats are pretty cute, and I liked the tape worms that dove underground in Hell and then popped up to bite, as well as the [man]scorpions in Ancient Egypt based on the girtablilu of mythology, and giant robots of the industrial areas. But the problem with all the monsters is that they were just wheat before the scythe of my Storm Rage spell. Hordes of enemies died in a hail of lightning bolts as I dropped Storm Rage spheres all over the place, and the only time that strategy didn't work is when I was worried about failing to discover a secret or during boss battles, since Project Warlock follows the JRPG strategy of making anything that's not a direct attack totally worthless. Storm Rage would make every single boss battle trivial the same way it does to every non-boss battle, so I don't blame the designer for making it not target bosses, but it is odd that this supremely-effective spell just suddenly...doesn't work.
Also, I found the sound design especially disappointing. The music was all kind of generic background metal, with nothing as memorable as At Doom's Gate (or E1M1. There are two kinds of people...), and the monster and weapon sounds are especially weak. If you think of Doom, you immediately remember the whine-scream of the imps, the whoosh of the fireballs, the clip-clop of a demon's hooves, or the charging sound of the BFG9000. Project Warlock has nothing nearly so memorable, with even my beloved Flak Cannon making just a slight coughing sound when firing. For having such an interesting variety of well-designed levels and monsters, when I think of them now, I can't remember a single sound any of them make. Just the slight crackle of Storm Rage as it kills everything in the room and the next room over, because magic lightning goes through walls.
RIP(ped and torn).
Project Warlock was made mostly by a single person, which is an extremely impressive feat. And as a homage to the FPS games of the 90s, it really shines. I had a bunch of fun playing it and I'm glad I bought it, it just has a few strange decisions that prevent it from being a real classic in my eyes. It's possible that I played it on too low a difficulty, but I saw that the enemies did double damage on the next-highest difficulty and I immediately ignored it, since cranking the damage slider for difficulty is rarely actually balanced well, but maybe that was the intended difficulty and that's why the game became so easy toward the end? Or maybe it needed another balance pass so that Student isn't the best perk in the game by a wide margin as long as it's the first perk taken, and so that Storm Rage isn't an "I win" spell in basically any situation. I'm normally all in favor of options so I can try weird things, rather than a more controlled game experience--why I had more fun with Axiom Verge than Super Metroid even though the latter is definitely a better game--but in this case it harmed the game overall. I'd still recommend it, but it's not a game that sticks with you when it's done.
