Heretic + Hexen

This is a stop-gap review. I already published a review for the bare-bones Heretic release (Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders) that I bought on Steam many years ago. In that review, I praised the base game but gave it a negative score because of the lazy job that had been done when the game had been authorized for sale on digital sales platforms like GOG and Steam. About a year ago, the great folks at Nightdive Studios surprised me and many other fans of old school FPS games by publishing a definitive remastered collection of Heretic and Hexen. The remaster had been published in secret, and people such as myself who already bought barebones digital copies of the games automatically received this remastered collection. I haven't even touched the new episodes that had been added to Heretic and Hexen. Despite not having seen nor played any new content, I want to express that I already love this collection and will write a proper review to express why it got a favorable review from me. For now, I encourage you to read my old review for the barebones copy of Heretic. I will also conclude this stop-gap review by saying that I consider Nighdive Studios to be the best company in ga…

---{ 🎮 Gameplay 🎮 }--- ☐ Very good ☑ Good ☐ It's just gameplay ☐ Mehh ☐ Watch paint dry instead ☐ Just don't ---{ 🖼 Graphics/Art-Style 🖼 }--- ☐ You forget what reality is ☐ Beautiful ☐ Good ☐ Decent ☐ Bad ☐ Don‘t look too long at it ☑ MS-DOS ---{ 🔊 Sound Design 🔊 }--- ☐ Eargasm ☐ Very good ☑ Good ☐ Not too bad ☐ Bad ☐ I'm now deaf ---{ 🎵 Soundtrack 🎵 }--- ☐ It's all you'll listen to ☐ DOOM: Eternal ☑ Good ☐ Alright ☐ Bad ☐ You may as well listen to Baby by Justin Beiber ☐ No soundtrack ---{ 👤 Target Audience 👤 }--- ☐ Fetus ☐ Kids ☐ Teens ☑ Adults ☐ Grandma ☐ Dinosaurs ---{ 💻 PC/System Requirements 💻 }--- ☑ Check if you can run paint ☐ Potato ☐ Decent ☐ Fast ☐ NVIDIA RTX 4090 ☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer ---{ 💾 Game Size 💾 }--- ☐ Floppy Disk ☑ Old Fashioned ☐ Workable ☐ Big ☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive ☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it ☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data ---{ 🎲 Difficulty 🎲 }--- ☐ Just press 'W' ☐ Easy ☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master ☑ Significant brain usage ☐ Difficult ☐ Dark Souls ---{ ⛏ Grind ⛏ }--- ☑ Nothing …

FOR HERETIC I really like how they gave this game the Doom 1 + 2 treatment and remastered it and gave it a cut content vault. It was interesting to look through those. While this game is often not remembered as fondly I do appreciate that this did get remastered. One thing I really like that alters the sandbox from Doom's significantly is the ability to take power ups with you in an inventory and to use them at any time. Which can basically give you any advantage in hard encounters, that being said, horder mentality is real and you will likely hold onto as many items as you can until bosses or "minibosses". Many of the power ups are identical to Doom's powerups. But the timebomb is a genuinely good addition and I like the Tome of Power which alters the functionality of the weapons. The weapons are all analogous to Doom's arsenal. I wish they diverted more because the Yellow Wand and the Blue Wand feel almost identical to the pistol and the chaingun respectively. The Hellstaff is the Plasma Gun. I like the crossbow alot though. These are some of my favorite levels in any oldschool first person shooter. One of the issues in this game is that the later levels are in…

Ahh the memories, still a good games even after all these years

Two classics combined in one, medieval themes which I majorly prefer and why I like such games over the classics like Doom. My perspective will be from the angle of beating both games on the highest difficulty. Both games are visually like you know them, enhanced with a more fluid gameplay, a few changes here and there, and a remixed OST for all tracks. The music is very, very much to my liking, enhancing the already suiting and nice music with some spice added into the mix. And as someone who enjoys violin tones in music, a few tracks easily stand out to be very enjoyed by me. Movement and aiming is better compared to the originals, letting you react faster and fluent to avoid taking more damage than needed. For the people who like it, there's multiplayer and also co-op available, letting you play with friends or, if people are available, have some good old deathmatch battles going on. There's an option now which shows you key items on the map but not how you get to those, giving people who like a bit of help what they desire, and people who want to go full blind and figure things out themselves the option to just turn it off. Now for something about each game to know…

This review is for the original Heretic and the updated version of Hexen 1. It's more of a "mixed" review but leaning a bit towards positive. Heretic (original version): Despite looking like "Doom but medieval" at first, I think the item system and the effects of the items themselves do enough to differentiate it from just being a Doom WAD with a medieval fantasy skin. My biggest complaint was that (at least in the original version) I found myself running out of ammo multiple times, even though I wasn't just wasting it. Perhaps they fixed that in the updated version since they touched up the gameplay but haven't fully tried it out since I already beat it before that version came out. Hexen (updated version): Oh boy, talk about bad level design... This and its sequel are some of the most cryptic and confusing FPS games I have ever played, and I beat E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy... the original version was the title that got me stuck when I was trying to beat boomer shooters in release order (sort of) and just could not pull myself to beat it or skip it, until I tried the updated version. This version kinda fixes some of the outstanding issues with the game, including the level design …