Reply To: First impressions

[rnlf]

#728

So… I played level 1 (which took about 2 minutes) and then a huge part of level 2 (which took another hour or so). Here are my thoughts so far:

The game has a rather strange balancing. Some enemies are ridiculously easy to kill, usually with a single hit from the gun. Others are really hard to kill and are very strong themselves (like the Witches). The weapon needed to easily kill them is not available until much later (it seems). And Witches hiding behind a corner and then attacking immediatly when you’re close (which is inevitable because you just ran around the corner) take about half your health points on medium difficulty. They take about 20 hits or so in return to kill. Very weird balancing.

The skeletons are almost impossible to hit. Their hitboxes are really tiny, and a single tap of the cursor keys can move the (non-existant) crosshair from too far on one side to too far on the other side. Slow turning with left shit helps, but it also means being slower to strafe back away into cover. Wolfenstein didn’t suffer from that problem because enemies were much wider sprites usually and had way bigger hitboxes.

Also, I don’t know about later weapons, but the standard pistol shoots terribly slow bullets while the enemies all use hitscan and hit without delay. That’s a bit frustrating.

On the plus side, the game looks pretty good, imho. Better than Wolfenstein with much more detailed and beautiful wall textures. I like the stairs and elevators, even though elevators could have been done in a more interesting way (making them a sperate room and teleport the player to the new floor while the doors are closed – that gives a much better impression of using an elevator, while using exactly the same engine technology).

The garden area is actually kinda cute, but I guess they could have changed the sky and floor color while leaving the house. I know that the engine can only display a single color for floor and sky at any given time, but it would have been possible to fade from one color to the other while walking out of the house into the garden and back.

So those are clearly two low hanging fruits they missed to use (but you can’t blame them, id Software did exactly the same in Wolfenstein 3D, just that they didn’t even have elevators).

On the other hand, N3D was released one year after DOOM, so they could have taken some inspiration from that, game design wise.

It’s cool that there are so many usable objects in the world, though besides stairs, elevators and doors I haven’t found a use for any of them.

Btw, kinda interesting that every single bookshelf in the game is actually a hidden door :-p