Artist Spotlights - Natalia Trepenok

 

Heretic:Shadow Of The Serpent Riders Review

Continuing my streak of  older FPS games, Heretic is a dark fantasy-themed first person shooter using the Doom engine. You take control of the lone hero out to defeat some spooky monsters and douche-bag wizard dudes.

The game play is almost identical to Doom (right down to even sharing some of its sound effects), which is to say, very good. Control is tight and responsive, combat is very satisfying, Exploration is usually quite fun outside of the occasional “where is the fucking key?!” moments. One difference is that you have an inventory system, just like with Blood, so that means you can save up all your gear for really tough fights, which is very handy. Torches can be used to light dark areas, and you even get purple flasks that you can use to restore your health manually instead of having to hunt for small vials. The game does have a few unpleasant moments of first-person platforming, but these are thankfully rare.

Like many other FPS games of its era, it i divided into episodes. For some reason, you lose your weapons at the end of each episode, just like in Blood. This can make the first level of further episodes awfully rough if you’re playing on higher difficulties. Each episode was a lot of fun, though I admit one disappointment I experienced was that after the third chapter, you won’t encounter any new boss fights, instead just facing larger amounts of previously seen bosses. Still, the quality of the level design is consistently great throughout the entire game.



There’s a nice variety of weapons, and one neat detail is that the weapons are mostly separated into purely magical and “physical” weapons. It’s helpful to learn which is which because your physical weapons won’t be able to hit “phantom” enemies. They have to be taken out with magic or splash damage. I found this to be another nice little addition to the game-play. One thing that was a small annoyance at times was that some weapons had such big and bright sprites for their projectiles and impacts that it was sometimes hard to see the enemies I was fighting. This never caused me any huge problems but it could be visually distracting.

The game’s soundtrack is pretty good too, I’m usually not into MIDI computer music but the composer for this game did a great job working within the limitations. The music selection is a bit limited, however. After chapter 2, the game starts reusing previous tracks for each level.

The visuals are right on par with Doom quality-wise. Lots of great pixelated graphics and lively (or undeadly) monsters. If you like the idea of Doom but find it’s extra-gory and morbid imagery a bit much for you,  this could  be a good alternative for you. Monsters still splat into bloody messes, but I found the tone to be a lot less gruesome and more like a Dungeons and Dragons adventure.

I used the source port “Zdoom” to play it on my modern computer, which fixed the initial issue I had with the screen displaying off-center. Thus I recommend downloading Zdoom to use with this game as it may help graphical errors and it gives you a lot of options, too. You can even set up a little profile where you can choose your name and set your gender as male, female or other, which affects your death-messages in-game. It’s nice to see the developers of the source port are way more progressive than a lot of people in the gaming “community”.

Final verdict: the game is just a lot of fun and I definitely recommend it. For those who enjoy Doom and want more games that play like it, you’ll feel right at home. If you’ve not played Doom, this is a great introduction to the fast-paced and exciting world of Doom engine games.