I was disappointed by Prodeus. They’ve got a good foundation in terms of gameplay, the map design is unbelievably good, and the aesthetic is genre leading - but the enemies all just stand in one place and the gunplay just doesn’t feel as good as other boomer shooters. It doesn’t matter how amazing the former is if you haven’t nailed the latter.
I’d be keen to see them keep working on those areas but I think they’re more interested in making it a platform for modding, which is cool but kind of pointless if the game itself isn’t tight.
I disagree regarding the map design being “unbelievably good” (a lot of it was “okay” to “good” with very few standouts) but yeah.
It reminds me a lot of when Bloodstained and Timespinner came out. Both are unapologetic love letters to Symphony of the Night. Except…
Bloodstained felt just as clunky and awkward as SOTN (I should know since I replayed SOTN in anticipation) with a lot of the same “good for the 90s…” design choices and mechanics.
Whereas Timespinner straight up stole the menu. But also modernized the gameplay and filed off a lot of rough edges.
End result is that Bloodstained played like SOTN and was carried by nostalgia and influencers. Whereas Timespinner played like what we remembered SOTN playing like… but didn’t have Iga.
Same here. Games like Dusk, Project Warlock, and so forth all play like what we remember DOOM and Quake playing like. Prodeus… played like DOOM without the nostalgia factor.
You make a great point there, Prodeus is funny in that respect because it’s heavily, heavily inspired by Brutal Doom (like deliberately going for the pixelated sprites + HD level geometry dichotomy) but they didn’t really take any of the lessons from what that guy did to make the Doom enemies smarter and more fun to fight.
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