Even the original DOOM had more striking visuals and unique sights, making it easier to remember locations that you had visited. This is especially true for the levels, mostly simple corridors of metal with red lights, and it quickly becomes difficult to make the difference between the insides of one generic sci-fi base and the next. However, while the art direction works wonders with the moment-to-moment fun in combat, it doesn’t really hold up as a whole. Just watch the video accompanying this article, and tell me that you don’t want to play this game. To strike the point further home, composer Andrew Hulshult signs another masterful soundtrack of industrial metal, brimming with latent violence until it blasts its impactful energy into your willing body. You are inside a nightmare, and your name is ultraviolence. To reinforce your bloodthirsty immersion, the game’s foreboding atmosphere is dark and red. Yeah, this is what I expected from DOOM Eternal, so I am now glad to find it in Prodeus instead. In any case, the gunfights are sublime, and since the game is not stingy with enemies (waiting for you or teleporting in), you can quickly find yourself pumped with adrenaline, in a mix of frenzy and pleasure. The Early Access sports 9 weapons with 8 more to come, but there is one thing that I sincerely missed: a kick or another quick-melee attack button. This is like DOOM 2’s super shotgun, except that it can fire 4 rounds at once whatever you were aiming at is now pulverized into chunks of meat. Another exciting alt-fire was the Quad Shotgun. The equivalent to the lightning gun has an alt-fire that is basically a railgun. Or the grenade launcher’s alt-fire is a sticky grenade to give you enough time to get away before the blast. And the plasma gun’s alt-fire is a remote beacon to make sure all plasma shots find their target, even at an angle. As long as you pick off enemies one by one, the base shotgun can also prove useful at a distance if you use the incendiary alt-fire that requires to charge a shot. Still, there is a need to use the right tool for the job, as the weapons have been carefully balanced (ammol pool, reloading, accuracy, power, etc) to each have a specific use. From the sounds, the particle effects, the dismembering, the pools of blood that spray from enemies that were hit, and the sheer destructive power, it’s all there to make combat incredibly satisfying. This is the closest I’ve seen to the ultimate standard that is Brutal DOOM, and this is not a timid endorsement. Prodeus’ weapons kick some serious ass, and unleashing hell on your enemies instantly feels amazing and exciting. Especially considering that the more you play and encounter novelties, the more you realize that Prodeus is simply using a solid foundation to propose something new and yet familiar. There are reasons why DOOM’s formula worked so well then and now, and there is nothing wrong in taking strong inspiration from it. Is this a bad thing to lean so close to DOOM? Absolutely not. And then the weapons also share some similarities to id software’s classic weapons. Visually, it even sports a resemblance to DOOM (2016)’s red levels like Forge. This is especially obvious when facing the equivalents to DOOM’s Shotgun Guy, Imp, Pink Demon, and Cacodemon. Playing Prodeus for the first time feels like familiar territory: in an alternate reality, this game could be named DOOM 3 without raising too many eyebrows. You only get a pass if you mean “Boomer Shooter” as in “Things that go Boom”, as these games are indeed a lot more explosive than the narrative-driven and console-driven games that followed. Of course, this is porous, as many gen X parents complained about violence while other gen X played the games too, but the point that I am trying to make is that calling these games “Boomer Shooters” while implying that they are for baby-boomers (currently at the age of retirement) is disingenuous and false. At that time, the configuration was roughly as follows: Millennials played the FPS games developed by gen X while boomers complained that they were too violent and tried to ban them. Three generations marked the second half of the XXth century: numerous babies born after the end of WWII (baby boomers), their children (gen X), and then those born in the 80s and 90s (millennials). Briefly before we start, I will comment on the sudden trend of calling these neo retro FPS games “Boomer Shooters”. If you thought that the golden age of the revival of old-school first-person shooters was already over with Dusk, Amid Evil, and Ion Maiden, then hang on tight as a new wave is coming! And it looks like we can expect new quality titles as well, as Prodeus is another wonderful offering joining the aforementioned titles in the pantheon of worthy successors to the best FPS from the middle of the 90s.
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