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

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Sebben Crudele II said:
What is a good example of a Doom based mod with world building and story like Ashes? Are there any others I have missed?
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Abysm: Dawn of Innocence, and its sequel Infernal Contract which itself has two expansions, might be worth checking out.
It's an "RPG shooter" with gameplay inspired by Dark Souls 1 (Classes are just starting gear and stats, weapon damage scales off stats, but spells are all consumables anyone can use), the worlds of each game are constructed like Monster Hunter + Diablo II (Interconnected and full of twisty hidden secrets like MH, but ultimately linear like Diablo II with waypoint travel, sub-dungeons with sidequests, secret and meme levels. also sounds from Diablo 1+2, and bardmetal remixes of a lot of retro shooter and RPG music), and an aesthetic that leans heavily into fantasy retro shooters like HeXen and Strife

The Aliens: Eradication TC is a really interesting and somewhat replayable... adventure horror shooter? that kinda makes me think of Prey: Mooncrash. There's a handful of (non-RPG) Classes that not only have different starting circumstances, drastically different playstyles, different storylines, but outright play different versions of some of the same levels, get different gameplay mechanics, and I think each class gets their own totally unique level too.
I think Predators might show up at the very end, but that may only be as the final bosses for one or two Classes, or I might be completely wrong and confusing that with another Aliens mod altogether.

As something way more on the nearly-vanilla side of things, there's Strange Aeons, a mod inspired by the C'thonian mythos, Quake 1, and Chasm: The Rift. The 3 original episodes chronicle you entering various parts of the Dream Lands searching for your son who's become lost on the plane, and the 4th expansion episode is a journey to go murder some giant C'thulhu-Hellnobles. Lots of weird surreal environments and lots of frustrating secrets.
The first result when looking up the mod was the Doomworld page for the release of v5.7, rather than the guy's actual website. The author, Impie, has been banned since 2021. Seems from his profile posts like it was because he was trying to get in touch with 40oz from the Doomer Boards not long beforehand.

If you haven't played it before, you have to try out Wolfenstein: Blade of Agony. It's the ABSOLUTE PEAK of what could possibly be done with an Ashes-style formula of hub towns and heavily scripted missions and sidequesting and all kinds of shit.

And to finish on a high quality shitpost (it will definitely get a Tasteful Pairing one day), try out Strife: Veteran Edition in GZDOOM with Guncaster; the Dragon mod from the guys who did Russian Overkill and Project Brutality and Trailblazer and possibly other shit. They go as far as fucking redrawing the cutscenes and rewriting all the player's dialogue choices (and integrating cool shit like the dragon power armor as a sidequest reward) to accommodate this stupid scaly OC.
Everything's stupidly excessive and insane like DMC and Russian Overkill - quadjumping and gliding and raining down dual-wield octobarrel shotgun fire and aerially curbstomping motherfuckers and spraying around crazy spells. Shit's retarded, but like DMC you're a glass cannon for most of the game on higher difficulties.
 
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So apparently I'm already finished with Bloodshed, which came as a surprise since the third "locked" chapter just ended up being a custom mode setting. Closing thoughts:
• Runs really well, which is kind of to be expected given the simplistic style and all enemies being 2d sprites. Still can chug to ~40 fps if you let shit pile up.
• Lifesteal on any main weapon trivializes all encounters.
• That giant invisible lizard enemy that has an instant 20hp tongue attack can eat a bag of dicks. They also made him a bullet sponge, so you can't even focus him without taking a lot of damage.
• Melee weapons are useless without lifesteal, and as a consequence the Druid and Cheerleader characteers fucking suck 90% of the time. Have fun taking out the enemies that explode on contact. You can't take them out safely even with all range increases.
• Sorceress is stupidly overpowered and snowballs incredibly quickly. Her starting weapon fires homing, exploding projectiles and at higher levels it turns into a rapid fire swarm missile launcher. You just walk and point your death stick in the general direction of a swarm and watch it explode.
• Caleb Jared is probably the most fun character to use. Sawed off shotgun is great with MASSIVE point blank damage and his forward dash is a fantastic mobility tool.
• The starter guy, Flynn Whatshisname, is boring and gay. As expected of the starter character.
• Most quips are unbearably cringe. Only the Druid and Jared get a pass.
• The minigun, uzi and dual pistols are unbelievably shit. I was so excited to unlock the minigun only to find out it overheats after like 3 seconds of continuous fire, killing nothing in the process due to shit damage and massive spread.
• Both shotguns and the rocket launcher are great, especially once you acquire the autoreload perk, which allows you to play in the spastic Doom (2016)/Eternal way with quickswaps.
• The second map is the hardest one in the game solely thanks to frequent spawns of the lizard tongue fuckers I mentioned earlier.
• As long as you keep moving, nothing can really touch you.
• I certainly don't like the minimap (among other things) being lockedbehind an objective. Granted it's something trivial like getting an X amount of kills, but still annoying.
• The second boss is impossible to beat if you have no ranged weaponry. Like, actually impossible, because it hovers high above you, AND you're supposed to damage the skulls orbiting around his noggin. Plus, if you accidentally slide into the lava the arena is surrounded by, it's impossible to get back in. I had to do this fight with a fucking shotgun.
• Offensive spells are kind of bland. You have:
- autocast DoT
- autocast AoE
- autocast horizontal piercing projectile(s)
- autocast vertical projectile(s)
- autocast single target "nuke"
- autocast homing projectile(s)
There's definitely more stuff, since I still have two characters to unlock, one of them basically being Illidan Stormrage.
 
So this thread ticked off a bunch of games for me- Ultrakill (Looney Troons), Adaca (troon developer), Selaco (Dev didn't want to be associated with non-woke game awards). David Szymanski is a raging libtard with Dusk published by New Blood, but he understands fun game mechanics.

I like Woo shooters (FEAR, Trepang2, Nightmare Reaper, Severed Steel, Maximum Action). Cultic's mechanics with the new updates are falling in that category too. Are there any other fun ones that aren't filled with troonery or slop?
 
Moist Boys said:
So this thread ticked off a bunch of games for me- Ultrakill (Looney Troons), Adaca (troon developer), Selaco (Dev didn't want to be associated with non-woke game awards). David Szymanski is a raging libtard with Dusk published by New Blood, but he understands fun game mechanics.

I like Woo shooters (FEAR, Trepang2, Nightmare Reaper, Severed Steel, Maximum Action). Cultic's mechanics with the new updates are falling in that category too. Are there any other fun ones that aren't filled with troonery or slop?
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Superhot is sort of like that.
 
Damn, forgot about the Bloodshed followup since I've completed it and unlocked every character. Not much more to add, but it is kind important:
• Golden spiders and demon starfish appear as breakable objects on the minimap, in case you have trouble finding them.
• All the rapid firing weapons suck. AK47 was the last weapon I unlocked, and it's fucking terrible. And you have to upgrade the uzi, which is even worse, to level 8 during a run. The minigun is a gigantic letdown even fully upgraded.
• The frying pan is a meme, as expected.
• Forget the sorceress. The unlockable winged demon character is even more broken, but it's not due to the character itself, but the spell he starts with - fireball. You can win any map on the highest difficulty just by upgrading the fireball. Why? It's an autocast, unlimited ammo bouncing explosive with a huge radius that doesn't hurt you. Level ups allow you to upgrade its AoE, damage, number of bounces and projectiles fired. There's also a passive that can increase the amount of projectiles by an additional two. Slap some cooldown reduction on that and you'll be firing 5-6-7 fireballs every second with 4-5 bounce lifespan. Since 99% of enemies are glued to the ground you won't even need an actual ranged weapon unless you're in some gimmicky challenge stage. Pick up a HP regeneration passive or spell along the way and you can just go walkabout while everything around you explodes. It's more potent the tighter the space you fight in.
• The last unlockable character, a giant crab, is garbage. I don't understand what he's supposed to do. His gimmick is that he walks sideways faster and can dash into enemies for big damage. The issue is, half the levels spam enemies that explode on death.
I do hope they release more episodes and/or standalone maps. The game is great but it gets repetitive and boring really quickly.
 
This doesn't deserve a thread, so I will just post it here
Painkiller is "retro" enough, right? And the 2025 remake is definitely a neo-retro shooter.
Anyways, you catch anything in particular watching that trailer? Let me help you with that, here is what I noticed
here is your painkiller bro.webp
I dunno what these Diablo class rejects are doing here, but they are not Painkiller material. For reference, this is the player character in the original game
Painkiller_second_-Daniel.webp
The "story" of the game is that you're just some dude who died in a car crash, and in order to go to heaven, you must kill demons. That's it, I dunno what they're going with here, but I fear it will be overly complicated and retarded all the while taking itself way too seriously, like nu-Doom.
Oh, and gameplay sucks too, it's clearly aiming to be a movement shooter rather than the oldschool Quake clone. No doubt there is going to be censorship too.

What is it with every single Painkiller game after the first one(and it's expansion pack) that completely failed to capture the magic of the original, even a little bit? Consider the one game I was actually excited for this year written off.

Here is some comments from the video, for your viewing (dis)pleasure:
painkiller comments.webp
 
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30+GameOvers said:
What is it with every single Painkiller game after the first one(and it's expansion pack) that completely failed to capture the magic of the original
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I would include the first one in that last part. I always felt like they had something greater about to boil over but they didn't really understand what it was. The first game had brilliant sequences mixed with... decent FPS gameplay, pretty fun game.
 
Smaug's Smokey Hole 2 said:
I would include the first one in that last part. I always felt like they had something greater about to boil over but they didn't really understand what it was. The first game had brilliant sequences mixed with... decent FPS gameplay, pretty fun game.
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I loved what Painkiller had going for it, the levels and atmosphere were fantastic with some very creative enemies and settings, and only having a few weapons where each is basically two in one(which can usually combo/complement each other) was a fantastic set up for the game. I remember when I played the demo, the first time I stuck a zombie to a wall with the Stake Gun I was sold. Then I found out it has a grenade launcher.
No, Painkiller had something going for it, the devs knew what it was all about. Then it was handed over to other developers and nobody, that includes Saber with the 2025 remake btw, know what they're doing with it. It's sad, hard to find a more mismanaged IP in the shooter world unless we're talking about something that is factually dead like Unreal or SiN.
 
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30+GameOvers said:
No, Painkiller had something going for it, the devs knew what it was all about.
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The gameplay is good but the levels control the flow and the gameplay loop. Some levels/sections weren't suited for the aspects that made Painkiller great, in my opinion.
 
30+GameOvers said:
This doesn't deserve a thread, so I will just post it here
https://youtube.com/watch?v=PCZ89raRT2UPainkiller is "retro" enough, right? And the 2025 remake is definitely a neo-retro shooter.
Anyways, you catch anything in particular watching that trailer? Let me help you with that, here is what I noticed
View attachment 7559430
I dunno what these Diablo class rejects are doing here, but they are not Painkiller material. For reference, this is the player character in the original game
View attachment 7559431
The "story" of the game is that you're just some dude who died in a car crash, and in order to go to heaven, you must kill demons. That's it, I dunno what they're going with here, but I fear it will be overly complicated and retarded all the while taking itself way too seriously, like nu-Doom.
Oh, and gameplay sucks too, it's clearly aiming to be a movement shooter rather than the oldschool Quake clone. No doubt there is going to be censorship too.

What is it with every single Painkiller game after the first one(and it's expansion pack) that completely failed to capture the magic of the original, even a little bit? Consider the one game I was actually excited for this year written off.

Here is some comments from the video, for your viewing (dis)pleasure:
View attachment 7559477
Click to expand...
I HATE ZOOMERS
I HATE ZOOMERS
I HATE ZOOMERS

Fuck Troon Shooters, what is even that character design? Why can't I get normal ass lighting and guns that don't obscure 90% of my field of view when I fire them?
 
Crossposting from the Doomworld thread.
Mr. Duck

Post in thread 'Doomworld'

Nightdive and Bethesda just released a new remaster, this time it's a Heretic + Hexen collection (no Heretic 2 or Hexen 2, only the Doom engine-based games), with extra new content brought to you by the same Doomworld hacks who did Legacy of Rust, and judging by the trailer, they somehow managed to make the game slow.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=jnzow2f3Rt4
Code: 
Heretic: Faith Renewed
by Nightdive Studios

================================================================================
LEVELS
================================================================================
E1M1 - "The Plaza"...
Reactions:Winner x 1 Horrifying x 5 Thunk-Provoking x 1
 
Mr. Duck said:
Crossposting from the Doomworld thread.
Mr. Duck

Post in thread 'Doomworld'

Nightdive and Bethesda just released a new remaster, this time it's a Heretic + Hexen collection (no Heretic 2 or Hexen 2, only the Doom engine-based games), with extra new content brought to you by the same Doomworld hacks who did Legacy of Rust, and judging by the trailer, they somehow managed to make the game slow.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=jnzow2f3Rt4
Code: 
Heretic: Faith Renewed
by Nightdive Studios

================================================================================
LEVELS
================================================================================
E1M1 - "The Plaza"...
Reactions:Winner x 1 Horrifying x 5 Thunk-Provoking x 1
Click to expand...
Heretic is bleh. Just a Doom clone. Literally. Hexen is fun but... The map design and key hunting is horrible. Which is something I doubt this new port (done in Kex I assume) will not do. You'd need a better map, show on the map exactly where the switches are and what areas have been opened up by hitting said switches, and some kind of active markers telling you where shit is.

Hexen is a tragedy because the game is fun but it's completely fucked by obtuse map design.
 
BrunoMattei said:
Hexen is fun but... The map design and key hunting is horrible. Which is something I doubt this new port (done in Kex I assume) will not do. You'd need a better map, show on the map exactly where the switches are and what areas have been opened up by hitting said switches, and some kind of active markers telling you where shit is.
Click to expand...
They've implemented an objective marker on the map.
 
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