WRATH: Aeon of Ruin

Do try and abstain as much as you can from that blue tint of the "Positive Review" icon. My impressions of this game are effectively very mixed even if, all in all, this is some solid boomshoot. It's not that there are many levels here, there are about 15, but each one is absolutely HUGE. I'm talking about 45 minutes up to one entire hour to beat and this without attempting 100% secret hunting. Thing is, my playthrough has been made across an entire year or two because I always reached a point where either by frustration over getting lost or just pure saturation, that I simply left the game and never really felt like playing again for a couple months. I know this sounds awful but the levels are effectively decently made and they look stunning. There is simply too much of it. Every time, I felt like the level I was in was going on for way too long. By the third act, you start getting some instakill floors bringing along the annoyance of redoing a chunk of a level because you forgot to quicksave (with an absolutely redundant "quicksaves-as-resource" mechanic I might add) before slipping into a pit of lava. It's game that might be easy to like at the start, if you are a fan of the genre, but you'll come out the other end almost exhausted. If I had to take a guess, I'd say the non-linear hub design played against it as they clearly weren't able to design proper progression for the many ways people would play through each Act of the game. With all this said, I can't help but appreciate what the game does have going on for it. Once again, the levels look stunning, the overall mood is very ethereal in contrast to the carnage happening onscreen (a great part due to Andrew Hulshult flexing his ambient muscle). The arsenal is quite interesting and varied, even if familiar, with weapons helping sell the satisfaction that the limited effects and enemy animations can't really do. It's an undeniably well-produced shooter. Just a shame that this just feels way too bloated. Too much of an okay thing.

I don't hate WRATH: Aeon of Ruin but boy does it feel like a chore to play sometimes. The game boils down to "what if Quake but the levels were way too long" and that's about it. The game desperately needs more gameplay elements or systems or variety or SOMETHING to break up the tedium. On the plus side it looks and plays nice and I think the sound design is pretty good. I just wish it were more...fun.

the game works, runs fine, even looks great. but for the life of me i cant make myself to like it. i feel like im always out of ammo, that there is just too many enemies behind every corner. walking into an encounter only to be greeted by horde of enemies that are also too tanky for my liking. even though i love this genre i just cant force myself to go through this one. I tried. I've seen and i didnt like it.

Classic first-person shooter, I like it very much. The level design is very good. For my taste, there aren't enough different enemies and you often have to fight against whole hordes of them. The AI is simple and you can easily cheese your way through. So it doesn't really feel like Quake. Gamplay is great and maybe I'm just getting too old to play fast.

This game is fricking amazing. Great setting, solid gunplay, cool idea with sword-dashing and creepy enemies.

One of the best boomershooters out there. Great for a quick 30 minute game during lunch. The maps are amazing without being over stimulating. One of my alltime favorite games.

I am enjoying it, personally I say turn the infinite saves on tho. your player character is way too squishy and the enemies are far too spongy and the levels too large to not have quicksaves.

I tried to muscle my way through this awful game but eventually gave up. Basic controls are a nightmare and you just fight the same four enemies over and over in huge windy samey looking non-environments of hallway and room after hallway and room, using the same textures with no landmarks or map. God help you in any section that forces you to backtrack. What did it for me in the end is that you have zero control of your character in the air. This sounds like not a problem, but after the first chapter, much of the game is fps platforming on downward sloping ledges. When you move your character over ANY change in elevation, you become airborne. Going down a single step sends you flying uncontrolled in that direction, and ALL of the ground in this game has entirely random raises and downward slants, with almost every single jumping section being from one downward sloped edge to another, forcing you to jump long before stepping to the edge of the platform and by some miracle identifying where the slope begins because it's all one texture with no line break. This means that going anywhere that isn't a perfectly flat hallway floor (which is half of the game) has you randomly lose control of your character, and any time there is an instant death pit (more than half the game) you WILL fall down it. The game limits your saves for whatever fucking reason, then gives you hundreds of the item used for them, making the only limitation that you can only have one save at a time, so the quick save spam you would use to bypass this shitty design is gimped. The secrets are also a train wreck, but there aren't any permanent upgrades to miss so ignoring them is the way to go. Secret hunting with zero clues or indications of where one is to find a key that opens a chest in another similarly hard to find secret, only for it to spit out a randomized assortment of 3 basic pickups, is not worth it. There is an item in the game that gives you more than max armor that is super rare and could be the reward for these chests, but since it's entirely randomized, you will likely get a single ammo pickup, a single basic health pickup, and a usable inventory item, none of which actually tell you what they do. Do not give these people money.

Quake like FPS in a hellish medival style. Good stuff