![]() ![]() Prodeus has a robust albeit user-unfriendly level editor built into the PC version, with a big community of creators that have been playing the game for the last couple of years via Steam Early Access. Welcome to splash damage hell, lunch meat. It’s the toughest challenge in the default campaign, as an ersatz boss rush against the forces of Order, and almost everything after it is a step down.Įven the final boss is a relative pushover compared to Hexarchy, because he challenges you in a small room, and you’ve got at least two different grenade launchers. The real climax of the game comes early, on the stage Hexarchy. By the last couple of stages, every second wave is primarily comprised of tiny explosive monsters, visibly just there to inflate your kill count. Chaos and Order field most of the same enemy types Chaos throws more cannon fodder at you, whereas Order has fewer but tougher monsters in each wave. There’s one all-time great level where you fight your way onto and back off a space station, and there are a few more where the stages distort around you as you progress.Įven so, Prodeus‘ 10-hour base campaign runs out of steam before the end. It’s not until the endgame that things get more interesting. For the first 75% of the single-player campaign, you’re fighting through a procession of dark industrial environments. The stage design does take a while to take off. ![]() Prodeus‘s version of the super shotgun has four barrels, you can alt-fire to hit something with all four shells at once, and doing so turns the target into a modern art project. You can track your passage through each level by the gore you’ve left behind, especially once you’ve unlocked some of the more destructive weapons. The first couple of times I killed a monster in a confined space, I thought I heard another enemy’s footsteps afterward, but it was actually the sound of the last demon’s corpse bits bouncing off the walls.Įven better, demons’ bodies disappear in Prodeus, but bloodstains don’t. Every enemy in Prodeus takes location damage, can be dismembered, has multiple death animations, and will splatter if hit hard enough. Most importantly, Prodeus has some of the most satisfying kills I’ve ever seen in an FPS. Exploring each level reveals hidden ore samples you can exchange for upgrades, like a double-jump or the weirder guns. The soundtrack is heavy industrial the stages are nicely cluttered and vertical and every weapon has a useful alt-fire mode. Prodeus sets itself apart from Doom in a lot of little ways. If you showed a hardcore shooter fan Prodeus footage and told them it was a new Brutal Doom, they’d believe you. The primary enemies are close matches with Doom‘s rank-and-file demons (Fiends are Imps, Bloaters are Cacodemons, Skull Fish are Lost Souls, etc.), your initial arsenal is similar, and it has an onscreen character portrait that gets increasingly skeletal as your health drops. This is a critical comparison, because Prodeus comes off like a particularly thorough total conversion mod for Doom. The plot is about as relevant moment-to-moment as Doom‘s. This will, happily, require you to shoot everything you see. Initially, you’re out to shoot everything you see, but then you get the chance to shut down the Order/Chaos incursion. You’re one of the last human survivors, turned into a cyborg by Prodean technology. I think researchers experimenting with alien technology have turned a human mining colony into a warfront between demons (Chaos) and aliens (Order also, the titular Prodeus). The story of Prodeus is nearly irrelevant. Prodeus Review: That’s One Doomed Space Marine For everyone else, it’s going to depend on your tolerance for speed, speed metal, and high-speed murder. If your idea of a good time in an FPS is circle-strafing at Mach 10 while you hot-swap between a dozen guns to turn an army of demons into angry paint, then Prodeus was made for you. That being said, Prodeus is an ideal example of the subgenre. ![]() I don’t care for the term "boomer shooter." Actual Boomers, in my experience, play ultra-realistic military action games, ideally set in World War II. By that metric, Prodeusis a version of Doom that we could only imagine existing in the ’90s. ![]() There’s a difference between how you remember a genre, he said, and how playing it actually felt. The 2020s resurgence of "boomer shooters" continues with Prodeus, one of the best examples of the subgenre, and one of the best games in it, period.Ī few years ago, while discussing a couple of retro-styled strategy games, a friend made an interesting distinction. ![]()
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