As I'm always looking for either oldschool "boomer" shooters, or co-op games, I somehow came across Prodeus as being both co-op campaign, and oldschool FPS. That was all the information I needed to be interested, and also was able to pick it up for very cheap.
The game starts up with a big splash screen showing that its a Unity engine game, so already I have the impression its a low budget indie game, which I later find out is a kickstarter project. That's okay, that doesnt automatically mean the games gonna suck. But it does set expectations a bit. You can select Campaign , or Multiplayer on the menu, and its easy to get a co-op session going. Everything is laid out in a sensible way to getup and going, so I have praise there because other games make it a clusterfuck to get a session going. Then the game starts, there are no cutscenes to speak of, it just drops you into the first map and straight into the action. You roam around picking up your first gun, A pistol, and fighting the first enemies. Just like Doom 1, really. Probably the most unique or differentiating feature of the game is the visual style. It has this simultaneous modern but retro look to it. The environments are all modern, high graphics with fancy lighting and shiny effects, but then things like your weapons, the enemies, look like retro spites like something out of Duke Nukem 3d, complete with the funny looking enemy corpse angle sprites depending on which way you look. Its a striking look, and helps set the game apart from the rest.
The game also strikes me as being inspired by Brutal Doom, with the over the top particle effects and especially enemy deaths spraying blood all over the place in a extreme fashion and gibs. Its not really...a good thing, I think more grounded and simple death animations could be better, like take classic Doom for example, I dont think Brutal Doom makes those games better, it makes them worse, comical, and stupid in my view.
Surprisingly, after you finish the first level, you then get taken to a sort of Mario World/Mario 3 style overworld map. Where you can choose what path to take towards each level. You can skip optional levels, or do them for rewards. This is another interesting unique feature, that you dont see often at all in shooter games, maybe ever? There are shops on the map you can enter which you can buy various permanent upgrades or weapon unlocks, that require resources such as Ore that you can find secretly scattered around the maps. So we keep playing through the levels in co-op, with a good first impression, excited to see what else the game has to offer.
Many of the enemies, weapons, and style of the game is very derivative of Doom, which isn't automatically a bad thing, sometimes you just want more of the same thing. The enemies here are essentially clones of the Imps, flying skulls, cacodemons, basic troops, and hitscan chaingunner except in this game its a hitscan Sniper. I cant really think of that many new enemies, maybe 1 or 2 but mostly they are just copies of doom enemies in both visuals and abilities. Theres this one monster with big creepy wings that shoots some beam at you, he looks cool but eventually I just realized he was a clone of Archvile. At some point in the game for some reason all the enemies are blue for a few levels, which made them really uninteresting and blend together in a boring way. Like what is it about Doom enemies that makes them so iconic? its the fact they are so distinct and at a moments glance even across the map you can tell what they are, but thats not really the case in this game. It's also a mix of modern doom inspiration, mostly in the controls and the whole explore for resources to use at the store aspect. The game is a retro shooter, but its not locked to just simple left/right mouse aim like oldschool games are, you can jump around and look around freely, the controls are very slick, responsive, and fast paced. You can eventually unlock a Double jump which makes the game even more fun to control. Probably the best thing about the game is the movement and controls, really. Thankfully (for me atleast) the game doesnt copy some things from modern Doom games, such as glorykills or enemies being loot pinatas (which I didnt like about those new Doom games). Its weird because it almost looks like this game did have glorykills, because when you shoot them they kinda glow red for a brief second just like how it looks in new Doom, but really there isnt any glorykill system here its just a weird visual design choice, which I thought was kinda stupid and confusing.
The weapons also are all mostly copies from retro doom games, The Pistol, basic shotgun, Super shotgun (except this one has 4 barrels), rocket launcher, chaingun, Dual machine guns which I suppose is a new addition, plasma rifle, and later in the game you get this weird weapon that shoots goop that I used for 10 seconds and then never again. Theres also a rail gun that can be used as a sort of sniper rifle which I suppose wasnt in Doom, so thats different. But mostly its just more derivatives. There is an alternate fire mode, though, that each gun you can right click to do a different attack, this is things like shooting all 4 shotgun barrels at once, zooming in with the rail gun, aiming down sights and burst firing the pistol, and so on. It was a neat addition, but it didnt really add much to the gameplay besides maybe the super shotgun ability.
The levels are for the most part standard sort of industrial complex sci-fi maps. Its not very hellish or evil like some Doom games, its more on the exploring metallic complex and scifi hubs. Lots of pushing switches, elevators, buttons, that kind of stuff. There is some keycard hunting, but its not very extreme. The maps mostly progress in a linear fasion, I mean its not like Doom Eternal where you walk into a circular arena and the doors close behind you and you have to fight waves of enemies, its more like a standard level where you go through hallways, open rooms, walk outdoors a bit, instead of arena fighting - which I much prefer. There is some arena fighting here, but its not the main part of the level design. I do like what they were going for with many of the levels, and after each level you beat theres even a button to rate the map, Bad, Okay, or Good, which I wonder what kind of statisics that gives the dev or what impact it has for them. Theres a handful of more 'gimmick' maps that you have to do random oddities to progress, like having to shoot monsters through this magical window, or platforming levels, or this one level where you have to go around shooting yellow triangles to unlock different areas of the maps. I thought these were kinda bad and more annoying to figure out more than anything, they tried to add variety to the game but sometimes it just was annoying and "what the fuck do I do" but it wasnt nearly as anything as bad as some of the later Doom 2 maps atleast. But a lot of the maps are more standard fare, with some outdoors areas traversing past toxic waste, and other hazards. For the most part its just a lot of the same metallic looking sci-fi industrial complex levels, so actually the environmental variety is kind of lacking and a lot of the maps blend together in your mind, nothing much stands out.
But really the game seemed like it has mostly everything in place to be atleast a decent shooter, but quickly I saw many things that are unforgivable that kind of ruined the whole thing for me. For starters, in co-op, there is no easy way to find where your co-op partner is. In other games, for example, like Serious Sam, there would be a little arrow in the top left pointing you towards the general direction of your friend. Thats a great system. The game doesnt add anything interesting by not being able to find where your friend is, we would just try to move as slow as possible and constantly have to ask eachother where they are, that kind of sucks and hampers the pace. (We did find out towards the end of the game theres a fucking option in the Esc menu that says Teleport to player, so you can just teleport to your friend instantly without any penalty. What the hell kind of system is that? if we noticed it sooner it would of helped, but it just feels so slapped together and half assed). But more importantly the game has a fatal flaw which just killed my enthusiasm - the difficulty, or lack thereof. While there are difficulties you can choose from , Very easy, easy, medium, hard, very hard etc. The problem is, there is simply no penalty for dying. When either of you die, you can simply just respawn from the last Nexus checkpoint, which about one every 30 seconds, or you can even respawn directly ontop of your friend...infinitely. It makes the game almost feel meaningless, theres no tension, theres no challenge anymore. You stop caring about your health, you stop caring about even trying to play good, why care? Theres no penalty for dying anyway. A sure-fire way to ruin almost any game and make it feel pointless is to add no penalty for playing bad. This is game design 101, this is a rookie mistake. How do these devs think a game can be interesting if everything you do is meaningless? Its baffling. Why would anyone think this kind of system is acceptable? Even if they had something in the game like a lives system, if you or your co-op partner dies 3 times, then reset the level. That alone would do a lot to make the game more interesting and add a sense of urgency and meaning to your actions. But without it, everything falls flat. We even put the difficulty up to second hardest to try to compensate, but It barely did anything to change my attitude. If anything it just made it more annoying to die every 30 seconds and respawn where I was. As soon as I realized this was how the game works, my enthusiasm plummeted.
Sure, the game has other flaws, like the lack of interesting unique enemies and weapons, the kinda bland copy paste scifi industrial complex environments, even other seemingly minor flaws but actually are a significantly bad thing, such as health packs being hard to identify at a glance, they are blue and almost look identical to other pickups such as the plasma ammo, why is the health blue? Why couldn't they make it some identifiable color like Red, or even pink. Just more rookie game design mistakes, showing its low budget or lack of game dev experience. But I could forgive these things a lot more if the game had real challenge and really engaged the player to play good. But it doesnt, so what the hell is left here? Not much. A mindless kind of speedrun to the end of the game where you dont even care about anything. At least we still cared about trying to unlock things from the store, but even that isnt that rewarding or interesting. The only thing we really unlocked is first the Super shotgun, which frankly isnt that fun to use or that effective. And then the Double jump, which single handedly made the game more fun to play, so theres that. And lastly the Plasma rifle, which is probably the best gun in the game. And as for those optional levels, some of them are little time-trial optional levels like "Break all the targets" or "Get to the exit as fast as possible" , they kinda reminded me of Super Smash Bros optional levels actually, funny enough. I liked them, but even those were kinda weird like you can finish them, it would say level complete, but it was unclear if we even got the reward? I don't know.
Towards the end of the game we had a level completely bug out on us, the last exit door would not open.So we had to redo it and run around shooting the yellow dorito triangles over again, which sucked, showing its indie budget I guess. The last few levels were okay, one of them was this big castle complex where you had to run around unlocking doors and shooting this ball into a big bell to spawn waves of enemies, the architecture looked interesting, like a medieval castle, reminded me of Quake, but at the same time made me kinda say "I wish I was playing Quake". The last level was kind of a joke, its just a tiny square arena where enemies spawn ontop of you, theres a new unique enemy type of this...beast thing, which spawns like 5 times and you just spam bullets into him. You kill a few waves of enemies and...the game ends, no cutscene, just a popup with a piece of text on the screen talking about you escaping to some unknown dimension, achievement unlocked Finish Campaign and then I quit and uninstalled...pretty lame.
It could of been a good co-op retro shooter, but I guess this indie dev with lack of experience just made too many fuckups for me to say I had a great time. Its sad because many of the games problems could be fixed with like an evening or two of editing the code, its nothing major, a few simple fixes could make it significantly better, but oh well this is what we have.
6/10