Neo Retro Shooters - The intricacies of the renaissance of the "genre" known for gibs, quips and labyrinths.

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Finished up Blood West and Prodeus recently and thought I'd give my two cents for anyone interested.

Are they worth buying? Only if heavily discounted IMO. Are they worth playing? Sure, if you like shooters they are worth checking out. I pirated both of course 🏴‍☠️

Blood West - enjoyed it more out of the two. Its less straight up shooter and more sim in the vein of System Shock and Prey so have a look if you like exploration. It has some rogue elements in that if you die you respawn at the checkpoint with a penalty but keep the items you found. Didn't like that aspect so much. I'm guessing it was originally released episodically because you can seen shit implemented in the later episodes that was missing in the early episodes, presumably because of user feedback, so it feels inconsistent. Don't waste your time on guns in the early game like I did, stealth and melee are completely OP and are the way to go. Oh also the boss battles are fucking trash and a waste of time. The episode 2 boss is literally some tree monster that slowly walks around the map and you have to set off fire traps to damage it. They are spread miles apart so you have to sit there for minutes at a time with your thumb up your ass waiting for this thing to amble up to the next trap. Overall a solid 7/10.

Prodeus - shooting action is pretty good, I'm not a huge fan of the visuals, they went way overboard with the pixel effects and it looks too visually busy. The last third of the game is ugly as sin and far too bright, everything feels like an over exposed photo and I'm pretty sure my retinas got burned to a crisp. The only level I liked visually/aesthetically is the penultimate one that looks like a medieval castle, it looks like something out of Quake. The game is very badly balanced, I played on hard and it was way too easy mainly because of a combination of monster design and AI - they are fucking dumb and for most of the game not a threat. Think the designers realised this and there are a couple in the late game that can pretty much 1 hit kill you. Up until the final few levels, the only times I died were accidental falls off the level and bullshit gank squads behind a closet that literally spawn behind you and you're dead before even realising there is an enemy there.

TL:DR - both decent but flawed games. Nowhere near in quality to some of the heavy hitters like Amid Evil and Dusk.
 
I liked Prodeus but I find it a little short and the map making community hasn't delivered very much aside from more or less proof of concept maps that try different things but are ultimately too short to be satisfying to play. I don't regret buying it but it's not something I'll return to even when the DLC comes out. I give it points for being a fully realized game on release instead of the usual Early Access crap which I am fucking sick and tired of now.

How fucking hard is it to release a fully featured game on release? I've done this so many times and yes, Dusk did it and so did Amid Evil and they're amazing. But every fucking dev taking advantage of this just burns you out. I think Postal 4 was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

Edit: never mind, Prodeus was another Early Access title. FML.
 
LEGOsneed said:
Love the crunchy Daggerfall-y/Witchhaven-y aesthetic but it feels like the art and theme would probably benefit from a game that's more interesting mechanically than a simple boomer shooter.
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Doesn't that pretty much describe the entire sub genre? Cool esthetics stapled to the indie equivalent of third person open world action RPG
 
Stasi said:
Why do some of these pixel-shit shooters have such terrible performance? Is it low budget indie devs not being able to optimise properly?

Played Blood West and tried a bit of Prodeus on my laptop and they chug like crazy while more demanding modern games do fine. Hell, I played Amid Evil and Dusk on the same machine not long ago and they did absolutely fine.

If your game looks like it came from the 90s it should run on a potato.
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What @LEGOsneed said, and one other thing. Shader compiling.
If you don't want to watch the video, the game stutters every time a new shader is cached, and due to how modern engines and graphics cards work, there's no way to do this ahead of time (yet. The video says Godot is going to add it in the future). This creates a problem where the game constantly stutters on a first playthrough, which is a problem as most people play through a game only once.

Spoilers, but he gets around this by playing a high speed demo of the entire game in the background so most of the caching is done by the time you actually play.
 
Does Serious Sam 4 count? Because I finished it a few days ago having quit at the Colosseum level fight sometime in 2022. Turns out I gave up like literally 5 minutes before the game was supposed to finally give me a minigun. :story:
I used to shit on it for being lazy, uninspired and unoptimized to hell but now I will begrudgingly admit that it's the best SS game to date, mostly carried by dual wielding and levels being more than just arena fights. I had to turn the difficulty down to tourist on the final fight because I got to the final fight with no HP and it felt impossible to get through the horde without catching at least a few stray lasers. Turned it back up for the boss himself.
Started Siberian Mayhem yesterday and can appreciate the Slav folklore in it, even if the usual hall of fame secret left a sour taste in my mouth due to it being a circlejerk full of talentless grifters (the same was true for SS4 and SS3).
 
Asian tech support said:
I didn't even know there was a Serious Sam 4. Figured the series was put on ice after the rancid shart that was BFE.
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There is, and there's even an expandalone, the Siberian Mayhem I mentioned. If either of them ran better they'd be my GOTD candidates.

Surprised I can still edit this. The second half of SM fucking blows. I had to repeat long, tedious fights multiple times because the game randomly started blocking off areas with instant death minefields and level designers didn't think it'd be a good idea to autosave when you beat a horde. To top it off the performance fucking tanked with many areas dropping to 20 fps. It's not my rig, as googling revealed it to be a pretty much universal issue.
Oh, and the final boss. Let's make you fight Armstrong from MGRR (his moveset is legitimately identical, complete with "jump on elevated surface to throw garbage at the player), but you can't see anything and can't dodge/parry. I hope some Russian autists manage to combine the first half of SM with the second half of SS4, because that would be a perfect game.
Despite all this I decided to start NG+, and sweet Jesus is it an exercise in tedium. I don't even mind the tripled spawns and Octanian sentry towers appearing in every level, but putting 20 bombers spamming cluster grenades around every encounter is cancer, because they can attack you from anywhere with pinpoint accuracy, even without having a line of sight. Same with those acid-spitting dog-like fucks. I missed one at level start (got stuck in geometry) and it was able to hurl at me across the entire fucking map.
 
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