Game Review: Jupiter Hell
2025-Aug-15, Friday 14:47![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
I'm going to start this review by talking about my first ever roguelike win, which was not in Jupiter Hell.
Over a decade ago, a single developer did a couple short roguelikes for the 7DayRL Challenge, including one based on Aliens (AliensRL) and one based on Diablo (DiabloRL). The latter is really great and I wish there had been more development on it--it has a function where you can point it at your Diablo installation and it'll play music, sound effects, and voice clips from the game, but lightning damage still hasn't been implemented, most of the levels aren't there (I think it stops at the Butcher), and the developer had a kind of Diablo++ idea of adding extra content in the Diablo mood that never came to fruition. More relevant to this review, though, was DoomRL, based obviously on Doom. You pick up a shotgun and kill demons while listening to E1M1 / At Doom's Gate. It's a roguelike, though, so you also pick a class from marine, scout, or technician, level up and get to pick perks that change your playstyle, from gaining extra HP to dodging attacks easier to being able to dual-wield pistols to auto-reloading shotguns when moving to making melee attacks with zero turn cost if you kill an enemy while doing it. Since moving increass your dodge, it may be the only roguelike in which circle-strafing is an actual viable strategy.
After playing it for a long time and eventually using a Marine with an Ammochain build and plasma rifle (every burst consumes only one ammo), I was able to consistently make it to the Cyberdemon, and eventually I made it there with a thermonuclear bomb and also having gotten an invincibility powerup the previous level, so I activated the bomb and it blew up the entire level...and revealed secret stairs down to even more levels! I kept going and made it down to the Spider Mastermind and killed it, thus attaining the true ending. Or so I thought until literally today, when I learned there's an even more secret ending if you also nuke the Spider Mastermind and then you get to go fight John Carmack. So maybe I should get back to that.
But back to Jupiter Hell, eventually id Software politely asked if DoomRL could please not use their IP, and so it become DRL, and then creator said he was going to make a graphical roguelike with the same premise called Jupiter Hell. I bought it years ago, a couple weeks ago I cracked it open seriously, and now I've beaten it. Rip and tear.
Ahhh, fresh meat.
Jupiter Hell wears its Doom influences on its sleeve and is not ashamed about it. You start when your patrol ship is shot by the automated defenses on Callisto--remember, it's Jupiter Hell, obviously a different game--with a pistol and a medkit, and fight zombie grunts with pistols, zombie sergeants with shotguns,impsfiends that throw fireballs, all to a metal soundtrack. You can pick Marine, Scout, and Technician, you get perks on level ups, you can find rare and exotic and unqiue weapons, basically everything you knew and loved from DoomRL just in an isometric perspective and with the serial numbers filed off.
The gameplay is generally the same. Levels exist on a grid--though interestingly, while you can move diagonally in DoomRL, in Jupiter Hell you're limited to the cardinal directions--and barring certain perks everyone moves at the same time. In a single turn you can move, fire a weapon, or use an item from your inventory. If your health is depleted you die, but every enemy awards you experience and hitting certain thresholds grants you additional levels. Each level is a maze of corridors and rooms in which you find groups of enemies, and when you kill the last enemy you get an acknowledgement that the level is clear and--in an extremely-welcome change--all loot becomes permanently visible even if it's out of your line of sight so you can clear up before you go on to the next floor.
DoomRL had special entries to side levels like the Arena or the Wall, but these were all single locations that you would clear and then move on. Jupiter Hell instead has semi-random side paths. For example, on Callisto you can find the entrance to the Mines, the Mimir Habitat, the Callisto Rift, or the Valhalla Terminal, but not every one of these will appear in every game. Furthermore, they take the place of normal levels, so if you enter the Mines on level two, you'll be in the Mines instead of the main levels of three through five and will re-enter the main path on Callisto level six. This makes choosing the side paths a more difficult decision, because you're committed. If you enter the Mines but the Valhalla Terminal would have spawned on level three, well, you've missed it. It's possible to hack terminals in each level to both see the layout of the level and see where the side path entrances are so you can plan out your run, but this retires a multitool so it's up to you if it's worth doing that or saving them for hacking robots.
Yeah, there are quite a few killer robots in Jupiter Hell that require their own strategies to deal with. On the other hand, if you're a technician you can get a robot army and lead them against the forces of Hell. Face my deathbots, foul demons!
Caught out in the open.
The major difference in the moment-to-moment gameplay is the importance of cover. Cover applies in DoomRL the same way it does in Doom, in that if you duck behind a wall enemy projectiles can't hit you, but other than that there are no special mechanics related to cover. Jupiter Hell has an entire cover system for both you and the demonic hordes. If you're behind cover relative to an enemy, the cover is highlighted in green and you get a cover bonus to your dodge, and the same for the enemy including the highlight. If you wait a turn, then your green highlight turns purple and you gain a hunker bonus, which gives you even more dodge and also increases your chance to hit, though this extra bonus vanishes when you return fire. Some cover is soft, like a pile of boxes, and some is hard, like a wall, with the latter providing a larger bonus than the former.
But before you think that this all dissolves into a Gear of War-style cover shooter, there are various other mechanics that affect this. I mentioned circle-strafing above, and while it's difficult to accomplish you can still do it through the appropriate traits. Every turn you move you gain an additional dodge bonus on top of your base, and two traits--Hellrunner and Dodgemaster--either increase your dodge or allow you to maintain more of it after attacking, so while at the beginning of the game you'll be hiding behind walls and peeking out to take pot-shots at demons, with the right build you'll be running circles around them. Or possibly just running straight at them, since with traits like Tough as Nails you'll have natural armor and can probably soak a couple hits. Those interactions really opened up the game for me, since when I first heard that Jupiter Hell was switching to a cover mechanic I was worried it was going to turn it into a game of just hiding, popping up to shoot, and hiding again, like the worst days of mid-00s cover shooters. Fortunately, there's enough dynamism in traits that that doesn't happen, though if that's the kind of gameplay you're into you can still set your traits up to play like modern military tactics instead of the frantic run-and-gun of 90s Doom.
I never did that, but you could.
"You need to taste blood!"
I keep bringing up traits because that's one half of character building, paired with the obvious equipment choices. Leveling up doesn't get you any more hit points or accuracy or ability to kill enemies, it gets you traits, which contain all of those things. Traits like the aforementioned Hellrunner, which reduces your move cost and increase your dodge chance; or Whizkid, which increases the potency of mods you put on items; or Son of a Gun, which increases your critical chance with all weapons and your range with pistols; or Juggler, which increases the speed that you switch weapons. These basic traits lead to advanced traits that require certain levels of basic traits to unlock, and at level six, you can pick one Master trait.
My most recent win (which led to this post), I picked one of the iconic DoomRL trait combos. I played a Scout, the fast and stealthy class, and after a couple levels I took the Gunslinger trait, which lets you wield two pistols at once. That got me through some of the early levels until I could get Gun Kata which really brought my build online. Gun Kata makes it so you automatically attack an enemy in range whenever you move, and after I grabbed that I went through Hellrunner and Dodgemaster, so nearly every enemy I just ran straight toward them firing the whole time and then killed them on the way. On Io I found the entrance to the Shadow Halls, and having beaten them I put the frozen heart from the Europa Ruins on the altar and picked Wealth, and it gave me the unique plasma pistol Death, which applies an effect on the target that will eventually kill them--it starts at two damage on the first turn and doubles every turn after. With all that together, I could even kill bosses without much trouble. That first screenshot of the Butcher I took as I pressed up on the keyboard repeatedly and by the time I my hand went back to its normal place on the keyboard, the Butcher was dead. I hadn't taken any damage at all.
That got me my win, but I should mention the other builds I liked. By far the most overpowered one was the Technician Wizard/Toxicologist build. The relies on the Toxicologist trait, which turns your Technician smokescreen ability into a poison cloud that enemies are too stupid to escape from, and the Wizard trait, which allows you to summon deathbots and the prerequisite traits of which allow you hack robots more cheaply. I got to the second-to-last level multiple times with this build, and the only problem with it is that it's not very Doom-like--you'll have the best results with it if your response to seeing an enemy is drop a poison cloud, summon a deathbot, and then run away and hide.
And while I haven't done it in Jupiter Hell, my wins in DoomRL used a Marine with Ammochain so I would just fill the air with a storm of plasma and the demons died. And there's a whole infrastructure for melee that I've never even tried. You can win with anything, you just need to find your niche.
Ah, the 'HelloS' server.
I'm going to briefly talk about the plot, such as it is. Doom III--the first real review I ever did, lo these fourteen years ago--had a ton of plot in comparison to the earlier Doom, but despite the ability to read messages on the email servers between personnel of the obviously evil corporate entity in control of these stations around Jupiter, there’s no real story to uncover. You're playing Jupiter Hell, you already know that there's going to be an evil corporation that's literally researching Hell in order to make an extra 5% profit next quarter so that line can continue to go up. The main benefit that I found from the emails is to let you know what you're going to find. While you can check the console to learn what special levels you'll have available, you can check the emails and they'll let you know what kind of loot you can find in the special locations, so you have some idea of where you want to go. At least, before you memorize all the branches.
The second-biggest difference between DoomRL and Jupiter Hell beyond the serial-numbers-filed-off setting change is that Jupiter Hell has actual graphics and it’s own music and sound. And it's mostly pretty good. Your generic warrior is voiced by the voice of Shepard from Mass Effect and it’s fine. He throws off one-liners like an 80s action hero and doesn’t take the game seriously, but it's not really possible to read the emails about how the corporation is approaching the study of Hell and take the game seriously either. The music is, to my ear, totally forgettable in a way that the Doom soundtrack isn't, but I've seen other people deliberately try to seek it out so maybe I'm in the minority opinion. On the other hand, the graphics are great. Not just because it’s nice to see animations of the various demons as you're fighting them, but because the animation seems very reactive to how quickly you're playing. Both when I was playing slowly and methodically at the beginning, firing from behind cover and hiding as the zombie grunts shot back, and at the end when I was running around spamming plasma at anything that moved, the animations for the demons reacted appropriately to my actions as they fell in a heap when my Scout zoomed by. That alone makes Jupiter Hell work trying out even if you're the world's biggest DoomRL fan.
Once you beat the big badasses and clean out the moon base you're supposed to win, aren't you? Aren't you?.
I've talked a lot about the differences between Jupiter Hell and DoomRL, and at the end of this review I can say that just a couple days ago Jupiter Hell Classic came out, so if you want the top-down classic roguelike look of DoomRL but get annoyed about assemblies meaning you need a wiki open at all times to figure out how your weapons should work, well, you have an option.
But Jupiter Hell by itself is worth your time. It fixes some of the weirdness of DoomRL and adds more strategy to consider--the additional of mechanical enemies you can hack alone is a massive change--makes you less reliant on finding specific good items in order to secure an actual win, adds more special abilities to the various enemies, adds quirks to the levels, and avoids the DoomRL meta of "shoot at enemies that you can't see because then they can't shoot back," and that isn't considering the massive graphical differences. Some of that might be disadvantage depending on your skill level, since the reduced swinginess in Jupiter Hell means that if you're a very good player you're not going to run into as many situations where you get dealt a bad hand and have to rely on your raw skill to pull out a win. But for the rest of us who can't reliably make the Berserk Armor and Dragonslayer drop in DoomRL, Jupiter Hell is in a great place.
And like I said, Jupiter Hell Classic just came out, so if you turn up your nose at anything that's not an @ sign, you still have options.
Over a decade ago, a single developer did a couple short roguelikes for the 7DayRL Challenge, including one based on Aliens (AliensRL) and one based on Diablo (DiabloRL). The latter is really great and I wish there had been more development on it--it has a function where you can point it at your Diablo installation and it'll play music, sound effects, and voice clips from the game, but lightning damage still hasn't been implemented, most of the levels aren't there (I think it stops at the Butcher), and the developer had a kind of Diablo++ idea of adding extra content in the Diablo mood that never came to fruition. More relevant to this review, though, was DoomRL, based obviously on Doom. You pick up a shotgun and kill demons while listening to E1M1 / At Doom's Gate. It's a roguelike, though, so you also pick a class from marine, scout, or technician, level up and get to pick perks that change your playstyle, from gaining extra HP to dodging attacks easier to being able to dual-wield pistols to auto-reloading shotguns when moving to making melee attacks with zero turn cost if you kill an enemy while doing it. Since moving increass your dodge, it may be the only roguelike in which circle-strafing is an actual viable strategy.
After playing it for a long time and eventually using a Marine with an Ammochain build and plasma rifle (every burst consumes only one ammo), I was able to consistently make it to the Cyberdemon, and eventually I made it there with a thermonuclear bomb and also having gotten an invincibility powerup the previous level, so I activated the bomb and it blew up the entire level...and revealed secret stairs down to even more levels! I kept going and made it down to the Spider Mastermind and killed it, thus attaining the true ending. Or so I thought until literally today, when I learned there's an even more secret ending if you also nuke the Spider Mastermind and then you get to go fight John Carmack. So maybe I should get back to that.
But back to Jupiter Hell, eventually id Software politely asked if DoomRL could please not use their IP, and so it become DRL, and then creator said he was going to make a graphical roguelike with the same premise called Jupiter Hell. I bought it years ago, a couple weeks ago I cracked it open seriously, and now I've beaten it. Rip and tear.
Ahhh, fresh meat.
Jupiter Hell wears its Doom influences on its sleeve and is not ashamed about it. You start when your patrol ship is shot by the automated defenses on Callisto--remember, it's Jupiter Hell, obviously a different game--with a pistol and a medkit, and fight zombie grunts with pistols, zombie sergeants with shotguns,
The gameplay is generally the same. Levels exist on a grid--though interestingly, while you can move diagonally in DoomRL, in Jupiter Hell you're limited to the cardinal directions--and barring certain perks everyone moves at the same time. In a single turn you can move, fire a weapon, or use an item from your inventory. If your health is depleted you die, but every enemy awards you experience and hitting certain thresholds grants you additional levels. Each level is a maze of corridors and rooms in which you find groups of enemies, and when you kill the last enemy you get an acknowledgement that the level is clear and--in an extremely-welcome change--all loot becomes permanently visible even if it's out of your line of sight so you can clear up before you go on to the next floor.
DoomRL had special entries to side levels like the Arena or the Wall, but these were all single locations that you would clear and then move on. Jupiter Hell instead has semi-random side paths. For example, on Callisto you can find the entrance to the Mines, the Mimir Habitat, the Callisto Rift, or the Valhalla Terminal, but not every one of these will appear in every game. Furthermore, they take the place of normal levels, so if you enter the Mines on level two, you'll be in the Mines instead of the main levels of three through five and will re-enter the main path on Callisto level six. This makes choosing the side paths a more difficult decision, because you're committed. If you enter the Mines but the Valhalla Terminal would have spawned on level three, well, you've missed it. It's possible to hack terminals in each level to both see the layout of the level and see where the side path entrances are so you can plan out your run, but this retires a multitool so it's up to you if it's worth doing that or saving them for hacking robots.
Yeah, there are quite a few killer robots in Jupiter Hell that require their own strategies to deal with. On the other hand, if you're a technician you can get a robot army and lead them against the forces of Hell. Face my deathbots, foul demons!
Caught out in the open.
The major difference in the moment-to-moment gameplay is the importance of cover. Cover applies in DoomRL the same way it does in Doom, in that if you duck behind a wall enemy projectiles can't hit you, but other than that there are no special mechanics related to cover. Jupiter Hell has an entire cover system for both you and the demonic hordes. If you're behind cover relative to an enemy, the cover is highlighted in green and you get a cover bonus to your dodge, and the same for the enemy including the highlight. If you wait a turn, then your green highlight turns purple and you gain a hunker bonus, which gives you even more dodge and also increases your chance to hit, though this extra bonus vanishes when you return fire. Some cover is soft, like a pile of boxes, and some is hard, like a wall, with the latter providing a larger bonus than the former.
But before you think that this all dissolves into a Gear of War-style cover shooter, there are various other mechanics that affect this. I mentioned circle-strafing above, and while it's difficult to accomplish you can still do it through the appropriate traits. Every turn you move you gain an additional dodge bonus on top of your base, and two traits--Hellrunner and Dodgemaster--either increase your dodge or allow you to maintain more of it after attacking, so while at the beginning of the game you'll be hiding behind walls and peeking out to take pot-shots at demons, with the right build you'll be running circles around them. Or possibly just running straight at them, since with traits like Tough as Nails you'll have natural armor and can probably soak a couple hits. Those interactions really opened up the game for me, since when I first heard that Jupiter Hell was switching to a cover mechanic I was worried it was going to turn it into a game of just hiding, popping up to shoot, and hiding again, like the worst days of mid-00s cover shooters. Fortunately, there's enough dynamism in traits that that doesn't happen, though if that's the kind of gameplay you're into you can still set your traits up to play like modern military tactics instead of the frantic run-and-gun of 90s Doom.
I never did that, but you could.
"You need to taste blood!"
I keep bringing up traits because that's one half of character building, paired with the obvious equipment choices. Leveling up doesn't get you any more hit points or accuracy or ability to kill enemies, it gets you traits, which contain all of those things. Traits like the aforementioned Hellrunner, which reduces your move cost and increase your dodge chance; or Whizkid, which increases the potency of mods you put on items; or Son of a Gun, which increases your critical chance with all weapons and your range with pistols; or Juggler, which increases the speed that you switch weapons. These basic traits lead to advanced traits that require certain levels of basic traits to unlock, and at level six, you can pick one Master trait.
My most recent win (which led to this post), I picked one of the iconic DoomRL trait combos. I played a Scout, the fast and stealthy class, and after a couple levels I took the Gunslinger trait, which lets you wield two pistols at once. That got me through some of the early levels until I could get Gun Kata which really brought my build online. Gun Kata makes it so you automatically attack an enemy in range whenever you move, and after I grabbed that I went through Hellrunner and Dodgemaster, so nearly every enemy I just ran straight toward them firing the whole time and then killed them on the way. On Io I found the entrance to the Shadow Halls, and having beaten them I put the frozen heart from the Europa Ruins on the altar and picked Wealth, and it gave me the unique plasma pistol Death, which applies an effect on the target that will eventually kill them--it starts at two damage on the first turn and doubles every turn after. With all that together, I could even kill bosses without much trouble. That first screenshot of the Butcher I took as I pressed up on the keyboard repeatedly and by the time I my hand went back to its normal place on the keyboard, the Butcher was dead. I hadn't taken any damage at all.
That got me my win, but I should mention the other builds I liked. By far the most overpowered one was the Technician Wizard/Toxicologist build. The relies on the Toxicologist trait, which turns your Technician smokescreen ability into a poison cloud that enemies are too stupid to escape from, and the Wizard trait, which allows you to summon deathbots and the prerequisite traits of which allow you hack robots more cheaply. I got to the second-to-last level multiple times with this build, and the only problem with it is that it's not very Doom-like--you'll have the best results with it if your response to seeing an enemy is drop a poison cloud, summon a deathbot, and then run away and hide.
And while I haven't done it in Jupiter Hell, my wins in DoomRL used a Marine with Ammochain so I would just fill the air with a storm of plasma and the demons died. And there's a whole infrastructure for melee that I've never even tried. You can win with anything, you just need to find your niche.
Ah, the 'HelloS' server.
I'm going to briefly talk about the plot, such as it is. Doom III--the first real review I ever did, lo these fourteen years ago--had a ton of plot in comparison to the earlier Doom, but despite the ability to read messages on the email servers between personnel of the obviously evil corporate entity in control of these stations around Jupiter, there’s no real story to uncover. You're playing Jupiter Hell, you already know that there's going to be an evil corporation that's literally researching Hell in order to make an extra 5% profit next quarter so that line can continue to go up. The main benefit that I found from the emails is to let you know what you're going to find. While you can check the console to learn what special levels you'll have available, you can check the emails and they'll let you know what kind of loot you can find in the special locations, so you have some idea of where you want to go. At least, before you memorize all the branches.
The second-biggest difference between DoomRL and Jupiter Hell beyond the serial-numbers-filed-off setting change is that Jupiter Hell has actual graphics and it’s own music and sound. And it's mostly pretty good. Your generic warrior is voiced by the voice of Shepard from Mass Effect and it’s fine. He throws off one-liners like an 80s action hero and doesn’t take the game seriously, but it's not really possible to read the emails about how the corporation is approaching the study of Hell and take the game seriously either. The music is, to my ear, totally forgettable in a way that the Doom soundtrack isn't, but I've seen other people deliberately try to seek it out so maybe I'm in the minority opinion. On the other hand, the graphics are great. Not just because it’s nice to see animations of the various demons as you're fighting them, but because the animation seems very reactive to how quickly you're playing. Both when I was playing slowly and methodically at the beginning, firing from behind cover and hiding as the zombie grunts shot back, and at the end when I was running around spamming plasma at anything that moved, the animations for the demons reacted appropriately to my actions as they fell in a heap when my Scout zoomed by. That alone makes Jupiter Hell work trying out even if you're the world's biggest DoomRL fan.
Once you beat the big badasses and clean out the moon base you're supposed to win, aren't you? Aren't you?.
I've talked a lot about the differences between Jupiter Hell and DoomRL, and at the end of this review I can say that just a couple days ago Jupiter Hell Classic came out, so if you want the top-down classic roguelike look of DoomRL but get annoyed about assemblies meaning you need a wiki open at all times to figure out how your weapons should work, well, you have an option.
But Jupiter Hell by itself is worth your time. It fixes some of the weirdness of DoomRL and adds more strategy to consider--the additional of mechanical enemies you can hack alone is a massive change--makes you less reliant on finding specific good items in order to secure an actual win, adds more special abilities to the various enemies, adds quirks to the levels, and avoids the DoomRL meta of "shoot at enemies that you can't see because then they can't shoot back," and that isn't considering the massive graphical differences. Some of that might be disadvantage depending on your skill level, since the reduced swinginess in Jupiter Hell means that if you're a very good player you're not going to run into as many situations where you get dealt a bad hand and have to rely on your raw skill to pull out a win. But for the rest of us who can't reliably make the Berserk Armor and Dragonslayer drop in DoomRL, Jupiter Hell is in a great place.
And like I said, Jupiter Hell Classic just came out, so if you turn up your nose at anything that's not an @ sign, you still have options.
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Date: 2025-Sep-04, Thursday 18:47 (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2025-Sep-04, Thursday 19:57 (UTC)