News VI: Fires of Rumorcon

It has a few wispy rpg-lite trappings but it doesn’t commit to the bit. Not only health bars, but each enemy has an armor value represented by a number next to their healthbar and all your weapons have like an anti-armor value that you need to meet or exceed to do full damage to the enemies, which firstly isn’t well signposted, I didn’t even realize this was happening until like halfway through the game, and secondly converts the game - for no reason and thru the pure application of Number rather than any qualitative criteria - into a weapon-matching exercise like Doom Eternal. See this guy, use this weapon (or one of a couple).

It’s also way too long, the levels are long, flat and meandering most of the time, the bits of cool design are usually let down by being wrapped in annoying monster closets, and all the biggest battles in the game are Doom Eternalesque arena fights with “substantial” enemies you have to clear to advance the waves and infinitely spawning mooks (though the mooks are somewhat too powerful and the game is not as clear as the Nudooms about what is mook and what is Real Enemy). Just a grab bag of poorly considered mechanics.

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