Prodeus (PC) - Review
by Paul Broussard , posted on 22 October 2022 / 4,129 Views
Like the average Dallas Cowboys fan, the games industry loves to revel in past successes. Remasters and remakes are becoming increasingly popular in this day and age, but the crème de la crème is arguably the spiritual successor; an attempt to emulate old beloved titles with a new setting and characters. Sometimes this plays out for the better (A Hat in Time), sometimes for the worse (Mighty No. 9), and with Prodeus we can now firmly add somewhere in the middle.
Prodeus is a love letter to the movement shooters of the 90s like Doom and Quake. The story is pretty simple, as it tends to be in these affairs: demons exist and you would strongly prefer they didn’t. The main character is a soldier who has no real personality outside of being very angry and wanting to kill demons, so I chose to add some context to the story by imagining he’s Doomguy’s nephew working his first demon-killing internship and hoping to get some experience to move up in the world of exterminating hellspawn.
The core interactive loop of Prodeus involves trying to help Doomguy’s nephew get noticed by his bosses by... you guessed it, killing a bunch of demons. The gameplay is unsurprisingly very reminiscent of old Doom and Quake titles, with a heavy emphasis on constant movement to avoid damage rather than hiding behind cover. Movement feels pretty good and responsive, although one recommendation I would strongly make before starting is enabling auto sprint. There’s really no reason you would ever not want to be traveling full speed and it just saves the annoyance of always having to press down on the left stick.
Actual combat does get a bit samey, however. While the guns mostly feel good to use (even if the introduction of them is a bit slow for my liking), the weapons themselves don’t differentiate enough to feel like they specialize very well. Despite having eleven different weapons, I only found myself consistently using three - a super shotgun for up-close encounters, dual wielded rifles for mid-range, and a rocket launcher when I desperately wanted something dead. Ammo is rather scarce in the first few levels but becomes fairly plentiful afterwards, which means you’ll rarely be switching guns out of a need to preserve resources, unless your aim is particularly bad.
Compounding this is the fact that there are no weapons that are particularly effective against certain kinds of enemies. For instance, there are no shield-breaking weapons, nor guns designed primarily for inflicting some sort of stagger. There's also nothing like Doom Eternal's animation-cancelling by weapon swapping to incentivize switching between guns. While these sorts of mechanics certainly aren't a necessity, I think something like them would have gone a long way towards encouraging full use of the tools you’re handed and given the weapons more of an identity besides just their damage values.
This might partially be the fault of enemy variety, which is a sticking point as well. There’s a heavy reliance on generic cannon fodder enemies to fill space, to the point where encounters are fairly unchallenging, even on higher difficulties. Perhaps nothing embodies the issue with enemy variety than an attempt to mix things up about halfway through, where the game introduces a set of “new” enemies who are exactly the same as old enemies except they’re colored differently and have more health. The rather minimal enemy variety might explain why the weapons feel relatively interchangeable as well; if you don’t have enough enemies to fill a number of roles, it’s hard to make weapons feel particularly suited to tackling certain types.
Another issue is the way Prodeus' respawn system works. While on your quest to single-handedly keep the gun industry on this random asteroid afloat, you’ll frequently come across “Nexus Points,” which you’ll revive at if you die. However, these points function like the Vital Chambers in BioShock, which is to say that you get all of your health back while enemies stay exactly as they were. This largely trivializes difficulty even on the highest settings, as there are very few encounters that you can’t just respawn-scum your way through. Granted, the score system will penalize you for it, but for people who are uninterested in leaderboards and are instead simply looking to play through the game normally, the difficulty curve is severely skewed.
All this makes the relatively short six hour runtime somehow feel too long for the amount of content here. By the end, I was starting to get fairly bored, lulled into a near sleep by the repeated haze of bullets and limbs flying around. And, if there’s one thing that a game seeking to capture the spirit of Doom or Quake should never be, it's boring.
On the flip side, the level design is actually quite interesting, in a way that shooters with much bigger budgets often aren’t. Missions usually revolve around some kind of theme, be it navigating through a series of turbines, finding ways to raise water levels, or taking steps to open a portal to… who knows where, honestly. It adds some nice context to proceedings and keeps levels from feeling like we’re just going through the motions repeatedly, although it does stand in rather stark contrast with how minimal the story is. I know narrative is never a huge deal in these games, but I found myself thinking how the levels could have been even more interesting if I had just a little bit of background information.
Which I suppose is as good an excuse as any to talk about progression. The world map is a relatively linear path of missions with an occasional split that allows you to pick between a couple of levels; not too dissimilar to something you might find in a Mario game. Sometimes missions will be restricted behind finding a certain number of a specific collectible, although these are usually pretty easy to find so it’s rarely an impediment to progress.
One of the big selling points of Prodeus is its aesthetic, which seeks to mimic the designs of both sprite-based shooters like the original Doom and Quake, while also bringing in elements from early 2000s shooters like Doom 3. The way it works is that the environments are fully 3D, but the game defaults to having the character, weapon, and enemies depicted as 2D sprites. While I like each art style separately, I’m not sure combining them is a winning formula - the framerate difference between the sprites and everything else feels especially off-putting. Thankfully, Prodeus provides an option to have characters be rendered as 3D models as well, so you can take your pick.
A couple of non-optional aesthetic elements that are a little more disappointing are the HUD and music. The HUD is very crowded and takes up way too much of the screen, both with unnecessary information (including a rather unnecessary render of the protagonist’s face, which I presume is a callback to the original Doom) and with text displays that are much bigger than they need to be. Music is kind of a downer as well; given the titles Prodeus is obviously seeking to emulate, I was expecting a set of energetic, fast-paced songs to help fuel the high octane, trigger happy carnage that ensues. Unfortunately we get some very understated, bland tracks that fail to really capture the momentum of the gameplay.
Despite how down I’ve been at points in this review, I certainly can’t claim Prodeus is a bad game. It just left me thoroughly underwhelmed. Perhaps this encapsulates the underlying issue with the desire to create a game whose primary ambition is to recreate the feeling of playing older titles. Movement shooters have gone on to do bigger and better things since those 90s titles, and while Prodeus’ core shooting loop is fun for a bit, there just isn’t enough there to carry a full release. The best spiritual successors have something unique that set them apart from the titles they seek to emulate, and there just isn’t much in Prodeus that could elevate it beyond just being a less interesting version of a 25-year-old game.
VGChartz Verdict
5
Acceptable
This review is based on a digital copy of Prodeus for the PC
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I got that game yesterday, and I'm enjoying it a lot.
I'm still genuinely surprised by this response, given the reception I'd seen elsewhere. From a distance, it seemed like an easy shoe-in for any DOOM fan (modern ones included), if not just to enjoy a boomer shooter's typical ebb-n-flow. I'll still download it on Game Pass and give it a fair shot.
I prefer Prodeus over Doom 2016.
Hot damn!
I mean, people like what they like and dislike what they dislike. For me it's mostly movement flow which I find a bit too slow for Doom.
I follow. Sorry if my last response wasn't that clear. I meant it in the vein of "that's quite impressive!"
