Yet while both games start as tributes, they quickly evolve into their own experiences, playing with FPS convention in clever and creative ways. Like Prodeus, both games were based on classic shooters, the former on Quakeand the latter on Hexen. It took me a while to figure out precisely why, but it ultimately comes down to identity. Prodeus is undoubtedly a quality product, but I don’t get quite the same thrill from playing it as I did from Dusk or Amid Evil. It’s a game you jump straight into and enjoy, with minimal onboarding or tutoring required. It also has an absolutely rocking chaingun that spools up like a jet turbine and is similarly effective at ripping apart biological matter. It’s got it all: good shooting, well-designed enemy encounters, levels that grow increasingly varied and ambitious as you progress through the campaign. But there are points where the gore is so thick that it literally gets in the way of the game, obscuring targets and the environment.Īside from occasionally blinding you in blood, Prodeus is a rock-solid FPS. I won’t say the game is too violent, because, well, I have problems. Enemies also have a tenuous relationship with their limbs, falling apart as you shoot them in some impressively layered sprite work. Blood gushes from enemies in crimson fountains that would flood a football pitch. There’s a line on the game’s Steam page that reads “Get ready to paint the walls red”, and whoever wrote that wasn’t exaggerating. Indeed, as I mentioned in the intro, Prodeus is phenomenally violent. Nonetheless, it phuts enemies to death in a sufficiently gratifying manner, and it isn’t long before you’ve picked up a nice weighty shotgun and a pair of twin machine guns that can turn enemies into flesh confetti. The first weapon you pick up is a silenced pistol, an intriguing choice in a game where stealth is impossible. Those strange goings-on turn out to be “hordes of furious monsters” and the only thing standing between you and certain death are your fists, your wits, and a large amount of ammunition. The premise is classic in both form and function you’re a nondescript space-marine dispatched to investigate strange happenings at some sci-fi facility. It immediately grabs your attention, and if for some reason it doesn’t, the gunplay certainly will. Like Amid Evil, Prodeus offers a clever synthesis of old and new tech, but in such a way that results in a completely different style. Lights flicker, explosion flare, blood from burst demons glistens on the faceplate of your helmet. The result is an alluring combination of dense, crunchy pixels and dynamic, high-contrast environments. Prodeus takes this style, then carefully infuses it with modern lighting and shading techniques. Prodeus is essentially a modern take on 2.5D shooters like Doomor Duke Nukem, which combined 3D environments with 2D, sprite-based models for features like enemies and in-game objects. It is slightly lacking in terms of originality, but we’ll get to that soon enough.įor now, let’s discuss the first thing you’ll probably notice about Prodeus – its distinctive aesthetic. Even in its semi-finished state, Prodeus ranks among the best of these so-called ‘boomer-shooters’, with fantastic-feeling weapons and a substantive campaign featuring lots of well-designed levels. Prodeus follows the trend of other recent, nineties-style shooters such as Dusk and Amid Evil, which eschew graphical realism and scripted set-pieces in favour of mazey levels, fast-paced gunplay, and pre-millennium visual styles.
READ MORE: Video game songs that had no right to bang as hard as they did.For what it’s worth, Prodeus doesn’t feature vampires either, although being an Early Access game, who’s to say that it won’t?
PRODEUS FPS SIMULATOR
It is not to be confused with Proteus, a lovely musical walking simulator from 2013 that doesn’t have any blood or vampires whatsoever. Prodeus is a stylish, gleefully violent retro-FPS with more blood in it than a hospital for vampires. This week, Rick enjoys a crimson shower in bloody retro-shooter Prodeus. Unfinished Business is NME’s weekly column about the weird and wonderful world of Early Access games.
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