Kind of mixed feelings, but overall a pretty positive experience.
So first off, the main thing that has to be discussed is while this is an FPS, kind of, I ended up spending the back half of the game primarily in third-person mode. Third person mode seems to have better lock-on, and the crosshair will jump to enemies to signify your character is aiming at them. This sounds pretty easy-mode right? Well, this is a necessity because Eradicator has no source ports, so you gotta play the game like it's 1996 - with your hands. Keyboard control only, unless you're brave enough to use the mouse to aim, which in this game just means letting you control the horizontal axis.
I honestly had no trouble playing the game as the developers intended, but it is one of two things that contribute to making this game... very challenging to play, in 2025.
The other, is the graphics. You're playing this game at 320x200, baby! Yeah, that 4K monitor you bought this EOFY sale? 3840x2160? Yeah, you won't be needing most of that. But joking aside, this does genuinely mean the graphics are incredibly 'crunchy' so to speak. Anything further away than about 15 meters, is nothing but a pixel in the far distance. You really do get used to it, eventually, but uh yeah there's no niceties of modern gaming here. The graphics are quite good though, there's some nicely detailed textures and enemies, so it would be nice to see this cleaned up somehow. Maybe one day.
Anyway, aside from all that, the game ran pretty well for me. Everything seemed to work as it should, so there's that.
The gameplay is pretty simple. You pick one of three characters, four if you already beat the game, and then you get to play through a whole bunch of levels. There's three or four 'episodes' basically, with something like 4-6 levels each. You might think that doesn't sound very long, except the levels in this game are, not always gigantic but are so labyrinthine and complex, that I ended up averaging something like 15-20 minute completion times on most levels. Hence, it took me about 6 hours to beat the game! This is in my opinion pretty good length for the time, I feel like Duke Nukem 3D by comparison is probably half as long.
That should be addressed too. Eradicator looks and feels EXACTLY like a Build engine game. It somehow isn't, though.
Each character you pick has a different set of stats. So one character is slow but tanky, another character has middling stats, and the girl is super fast - honestly dangerously fast - but she has low defense. I played as the girl since I figured going fast would be really helpful, and it was, but it was almost genuinely TOO fast. It's like Duke Nukem's running speed on steroids but always - and this game has its own 'adrenaline stimulant' thing that you can use to get even more speed. Suffice it to say it's extremely silly on Eleena.
I think each character gets a different first mission, but after that they all kind of converge and play the rest of the game the same.
The level design is... mostly pretty solid. I think that there are too many levels where you don't have any idea where the exit is, which is frustrating when you get stuck running around wondering where the hell you are meant to go to leave. Every single level has a weird objective focused structure, which is interesting since this was 1996 and I feel like that didn't start to become a thing for a few years afterward. Dark Forces did come out a year prior, but that game still kind of mostly feels like just sprinting through the linear levels until you find the goal... for the most part.
My only real issue is that you don't get very good details on what exactly you are meant to do, and what everything is. The sci-fi world featured in Eradicator isn't really one that lines up with any known or familiar tropes. The closest I can think of might be System Shock, because every enemy is some weird robot/flesh hybrid, but that's about it. So for example, the game is all, "Shut down the mazrium crushers" or "Drain the biofluid tanks" or "Destroy the skeevin spawn vats" and it's all so vague that when you're actually trying to progress, you don't really know what anything you are doing is, you just intuit that when you see a button unpressed, you just assume that the button being pressed will allow you to continue.
Fortunately, the game is fairly straightforward in this way, so I didn't at all get frustrated. Once or twice I got annoyed at not knowing where to go or whatever, since the levels rarely have any kind of central hub, they all usually kind of fold in on themselves like some kind of awful rabbit warren.
Anyway, let's talk about enemies.
So it seems there's only a few different archetypes. There's the guys on the ground who just motor on weird tread feet, the flying dudes, and then a bunch of turrets. These archetypes get different weapons to help vary things up, and it really really does because some of the later enemies get grenade launchers and rocket launchers, with the predictable effects of that you can imagine. Chaos, and one-hit deaths. There are also later on, enemies that exist just to fly into you and explode, dealing somewhere between 50% to 70% of your health. These suicide enemies are intensely aggravating, and are placed sadistically by the level designers.
So this all means that you really want to be rotating saves very frequently, especially in the second half of the game. In the first half, you'll probably make it reasonably far without having to save all that much, but once the 'flying mines' start appearing, you're going to want to just start saving before you enter any room, because odds are there's one of these suicidal enemies just waiting on the other side of the door, or behind a thin wall waiting to flank you, or somewhere else.
These things are even more aggressive and have more frustrating AI than the drones in DN3D, and those things were already pretty toxic. The main thing that makes these ones even worse is, they do have a sound cue, but it's pretty hard to hear or intuit exactly where it is coming from. Their AI also has a habit of yoyoing from the floor of the room to the ceiling and down again just to throw off your aim, and also to prevent you even noticing their approach.
I don't honestly understand the plot. It sounds to me like, your character is commissioned to infiltrate a mining facility, to destroy a terrorist leader? But... in the process, you also systematically destroy the entire mining facility? Additionally, at the end of the game... you turn on the self-destruct, and the entire thing detonates, blowing into a billion pieces. So what was even the point of most of the game...? It's all very strange. I guess it's fine, since it's not exactly billing itself as a masterpiece of fiction, but it certainly does feel very confused.
The picture-in-picture mechanics by the way were kinda neat. Only a few levels really take advantage of it, alongside enemy possession, but this is only a good thing because the gimmick quickly wears out its welcome, and once you're done with the few levels that strongly leverage it as a puzzle element, the game then goes back to using it purely for looking through cameras, at camera stations. I'm comfortable with this.
The store page touts 'twice as many weapons as other games' except a big problem is I think, since they mostly come with very small ammo counts, it's hard to really use most of them, since you want to save them for the bosses that this game has. But the thing too is, they don't all seem all that effective, really? Or certainly, they won't help you against some of the tougher enemies you need to get rid of real fast. In that case, you just need to use the rocket launcher. So unfortunately, even though you have like 15 different weapons to play with, you'll probably only be using like 4 or 5 of them.
Anyway. I take issue with some aspects of the game, but overall it's fun enough.
