Great game - easily an 8 out of 10 from me.

I've beaten this on the hardest difficulty with all secrets so think I can give a balanced review.

Firstly I think this game is incorrectly labelled as a retro or boomer shooter. It's not really like Quake or Doom at all and is kind of its own thing. The levels are long and sprawling and generally have a much slower pace to them and you have to take them quite carefully - esp on higher difficulties. I see this called out as a negative in a lot of reviews which is where I think comparing to Doom or Quake is really setting the wrong expectation from the get-go although if you did want a comparison I'd say Eternal Doom 4 is more like what this is going for.

Levels aside, the combat is pretty good, weapons are varied and have interesting alt-fires meaning there always lots of ways to experiment. Ammo is actually quite limited per weapon meaning you can't just rely on one gun. The items add a bit of spice but aside from a few set pieces they are not necessary, my first playthrough I barely used them. second on Outlander difficulty I made an effort to and they were mildly useful.

The movement is really nice - and underated. With good movement you can get pretty much everywhere and dodge most things it's also really fast and responsive - i.e. you can stop yourself in mid-air really precisely, you can "rocket jump" you can blade jump, and combine these to get around in a very satisfying way.

Most enemies are range based and quite fun to deal with, on Hard+ you die really quick so not getting hit is really the key to survival. I think it could have benefited from more enemies closing in on you. The basic ones that do have quite lame AI pathing and are almost comical so feel this is an area they could improve on.

The music is practically non-existent. I get they wanted atmosphere, and I'm not suggest a metal soundtrack as that wouldn't work with what the game is going for, but still I feel they missed a trick here by not having actual music.

Finally I actually think the game could really benefit from another hub or 2 - the three in the base game feels like it's missing a few pieces, its hard to put into words but I feel there was supposed to be more?

Fyi: The minimum requirements for the graphics card are BS. I'm playing this on a Lenovo x270 running Arch Linux, which obviously has an Intel onboard graphics chip. Works fine.

All the best, a gen x dude. m(

Great game