Heretic + Hexen

A blast from the past. If you played this years ago, and want to relive it, don't hesitate, just do it.

Love it, Cult classic game !!

Ravensoft Heretic, 1994 ID Software and Ravensoft did a lot of hand holding for a very long time. ID gave Ravensoft the Doom source code, they tutored them in its modification, they even gave Ravensoft the computers they needed to make Heretic. Under the hood Heretic was always going to be a Doom clone. Beneath Heretic's gauntlets, wand, crossbow and dragon claw, Doom's chainsaw purrs, his pistol bangs, his shotgun blasts and his chain gun rattles. As Heretic's protagonist Corvus runs up and down darkened corridors leaving steaming gobbets of demon flesh hither and yon, it all seems hauntingly familiar. Heretic was never going to outrun the Doom clone accusations. It didn’t want to, it didn’t need to. In 1994 being a Doom clone was the second best thing a game could be. Why fight it? That said the label does undercut some of Heretic's genius. Heretic revels in Gothic architecture. It is sufficiently dark but it still has a surprisingly friendly color palette. The overall color spread is as reliant on blue as Doom was on red. While Heretic only has something like 240 textures they are generally well made. Heretic was also good at creating spaces that felt real. Doing this while maintaining the level of asymmetry needed to make key and switch hunts interesting is a fine art. A lot of games thought they were going to do this and didn’t. Heretic did. E1M4 The Guard Tower and E2M4 The Ice Grotto in particular have always stood out to me as being noble and successful attempts at creating realistic spaces in the Doom engine. The monster roster is barely adequate. Its 10 deep, 3 of those are bosses. The bottom half of the roster comes across as a little hokey, the gargoyles are okay if lacking in detail, the golems always struck me as being a little cheesy. Higher up the food chain the enemies become more interesting fast. The undead warrior has a charged up axe attack. The Disciples of D’Sparil have a spread attack, (similar to the Mancubus in Doom 2). The Maulotaur has a variety of ground pounds that set them apart from their Cyberdemon peer back on Deimos. The Iron Liches that got a pretty dramatic introduction for an enemy fires an attack that can fling you up in the air. (Like the Archvile from Doom 2) You end throwing down with the games antagonist, D’Sparil. Thanks to appropriate level design, he appears on a great dais in front of a throne room big enough to be its own temple. As he descends to do battle with you he rides a serpent but he can also teleport, suggesting that he rides the serpent mostly because hes a ♥♥♥♥. As his health dips, and his serpent dies, he teleports more and more frequently. Reinforcements arrive, the entirety of the final level is utilized. Final battles are usually the worst parts of the traditional FPS. From Doom’s Spider Mastermind, to Bioshocks Frank Fontaine, to Halo where you have to fight the games deadliest foe, the “exhaust vents” (Jesus Christ Bungie.) These battles are usually letdowns. Heretic powers through. This is one of the strongest, most hectic, frenetic final levels in the genre. Excellent level design aside, Heretic had a few other quirks. Chief among these is the inventory system. You pick up an item and against the arcade convention of the time, it doesn’t activate the instant you touch it, instead, you store it and choose when you want to use it. By the parlance of the day having a button that didn’t kill things or open doors so you could kill things was borderline cerebral. Two thirds of Heretic's appeal can fit inside of Corvus’ Red Swollen Sack. Amongst its illustrious novelties are time bombs, medkits, night vision, invisibility, invincibility, and the mere joy of flight. Surpassing all of these is the Morph Ovum, an egg that when thrown Minecraft style turns your enemies into chickens. Watching your friends run around screaming bawk bawk bawk while trying to dodge Kentucky Fried Death was a pinnacle of joy in that time. However, the games breadbasket feature that lets Heretic slowly slip the surly gravitational bonds of Doom was the Tome of Power. Just as the famed medieval warrior Hugh Hefner, upon entering his grotto and finding that it is once again populated by gargoyles and imps realizes that he must consume a small blue pill so that he may rain hell down upon them, so too must Corvus when he sees a crowd of enemies in need of mass attitude adjustment use his Tome of Power. The Tome of Power is a gun doubler. It makes your weapons more powerful, but it also fundamentally changed their nature. Your gauntlets gain life steal, your Hell Staff ceases to be a dime store Plasma Rifle knockoff and makes it rain fire from the sky as an AOE. The Phoenix Rod changes from rocket launcher to flame thrower. Ext. This item is so important to Heretic that it became the games box art. This is also where Heretic's head hits its ceiling. When you add these items that functionally quarter conventional Doom's difficulty, how can you ramp it up and give the player a challenge? The answer arrived at cant be resource scarcity because whats the point of having an inventory if you don’t have items to put into it! You cant make the levels super huge or the monster count super high because the floppy disk does not abide! Making a level substantially bigger than Doom's E1M6 or with a monster count substantially above 120 would cause problems! They banged their head into the Resident Evil 1 problem/solution of having to make the enemies chunky hefty tanky boys! This has the effect of dramatically slowing down the pace of the game. A fodder enemy in Doom that can be shelved with a single shotgun blast may survive two or even three strikes from an equivalent weapon in Heretic! The game feels like it is being played at half speed. The tome of Power that needs to let Heretic explode past the conventional boundaries of the Doom experience only allows Heretic to match it instead! It gets worse! Heretic didn’t ship after Doom, it shipped after Doom 2! Heretic struggles to have a monster population of 80 and its now competing with a game that has a median monster population of something like 130! Bottom line it. Classic Heretic was shipped on 4 floppies. Doom 2 shipped on 5, Heretic suffers tremendously for it. What would Heretic have been if it had 25% more textures, monster types, level size and population? Well ask no longer! Nightdive Studios Faith Renewed 2025 A mere thirty years later Faith Renewed has come knocking and it is knocking hard. A few tweaks brought the tankeh chunkeh hefty boy health bars down to size. Was it the demon world version of Slimfast? Jenny Craig’s Chungus Mummy program? Damned if I know, but it worked. With the new campaign the monster population and level size has been multiplied by a stellar 3 times. 3 additional monster types have emerged including after litigation with Todd McFarlane, the Violator from Spawn. The new weapon the Tempest Wand follows the new boomer shooter agenda of turning the pistol into a mini BFG and I’m not complaining! The original campaign and its already well made levels have gone through some redecorating and use the new assets. A few sore spots in the base campaign have been polished over. This is in complete honesty a slam dunk remaster. One of the best ever. In the current world where remastering a game means adding a sneering girl boss with cushings syndrome set against graphical features that automatically come from porting existing game assets into a current generation Unreal engine, Faith Renewed represents the alternative. Nightdive put a jaw dropping amount of work into this, and they had an authenticity, original vision first, attitude while they did it. I always enjoyed Heretic and it having sold 750,000 copies before Nightdive touched it. (Those were very good numbers for a B team game at the time) suggests that a lot of people did. That said I can’t imagine ever playing it without Nightdive’s improvements again.

so peak

Only got it for Hexen and the additional Hexen campaign Was pretty good! Maybe less of those swampbeasts next time... but still pretty good.

Heretic: 8/10 Hexen: 7/10

goateed game deluxe exprendo

Miazga

Joyita oculta U.u