As long-time readers might’ve figured out from context, I play a lot of faux-retro first-person shooters. I find something oddly meditative about games that let me run around at a thousand miles an hour with 5 to 12 guns on my back while I reduce hordes of demons/undead/etc. to increasingly evocative stains on the floor.
(I refuse to call these games “boomer shooters.” I’ve seen what boomers will play if left to their own devices. It’s puzzles, golf, and anything that takes a sober historic approach to World War II. Trying to teach someone in their 70s to circle-strafe runs the risk of firing all their neurons at once. I know “boomer shooter” is sort of fun to say out loud, but it’s never been an accurate term.)
I was going to write about something else this week, but then Project Warlock II left Steam Early Access. I’d really enjoyed the original Project Warlock, a game that is not afraid to allow you to be stupidly overpowered, so I had high hopes for its sequel.
Thankfully, it’s met my expectations. I’ve only cleared the first of PW2’s three episodes at time of writing, but so far, PW2 doesn’t fix what wasn’t broken. It gives you an arsenal of powerful tools, then gradually unlocks an upgrade system that adds more options and bonuses. You start each episode in PW2 as a competent fighter and end it as a walking apocalypse.
In retrospect, that same upgrade system is what really won me over about the first PW. One of my biggest pet peeves about modern video games is how many of them use their skill system to deliberately gate off vital parts of their combat, so it takes a couple of hours before their systems actually work as intended. Doom Eternal was particularly obnoxious about this.
In PW and PW2, your upgrades are there to add custom options to what’s already a perfectly solid arsenal. You can turn your basic double-barreled shotgun into an automatic with a drum magazine or a quad-barrel, or switch your magic staff into a frost-empowered laser that can stunlock an entire room full of enemies. It’s primarily about what kind of destruction you’d prefer to inflict.
Project Warlock ended on a down note. The title character invaded Hell on a mission to destroy evil, as one does, then abruptly decided to take the throne. PW2 picks up immediately afterward, as the corrupted Warlock sends his new demonic legions after his 3 former apprentices.
My first impression of PW2 was that it was the original game, but bigger. PW was lo-fi to the point of distraction, with a subdued color palette and a consistent feeling throughout most of the game like the ceiling of any given room was about an inch above your head. PW2 begins with you shooting your way out of a collapsing castle and continually widens its focus as you go, from a dying city to a series of alternate dimensions to outer space.
Even early in the game, you’re more than a match for almost any single enemy, as your default weapons are actually pretty good and headshots get a 150% damage multiplier. It’s easy to run around each level popping off demon skulls with your starting rifle or revolver. Then they get sick of you and send in a battalion, at which point PW2 often gets intense. It’s at its best when it’s at its most frantic, as three dozen enemies all open fire on you at once and you’re forced to pull out all the stops to stay alive.
If I’ve got one serious point of criticism, it’s that PW2 really wants you to dig through every single level for all the upgrade tokens you can find. It’s tempting to race through the game to keep your adrenaline up, but each stage is full of well-hidden power-ups, and you want to put some work into your arsenal along the way. It might work better if PW2 awarded its perk points based upon your score, or had more of them drop from minibosses, rather than replicating the old-school Doom secret hunts.
I’m also not entirely cool with the “secret cameos” in PW2, where you can regularly find the hidden corpses of protagonists from other indie shooters like Prodeus and Dusk. It’s like PW2 is implicitly saying its action is so intense that all the other shooter heroes are already dead, which can’t help but remind me of the weird bravado of ‘90s magazine ads.
Those are fairly minor points, however. I’ve got a strong bias here, but Project Warlock II is a well-honed, intense example of its formula. It is a game about giving you multiple satisfying ways to shred demons into stew meat, and it delivers. I have no idea how fun it would be for someone who did not grow up on Doom and its various clones/successors, but it gave me everything I wanted from it.
[Project Warlock II, developed by Buckshot Software and published by RetroVibe, is now available for PC via Steam for $16.99. This column was written using a Steam copy of the game purchased by Hard Drive.]
