Prodeus

How odd for a game to start so strong yet fizzle out before even hitting the midway mark. I feel like I’ve been duped. But backing a Kickstarter is very much buying the pig in the bag, as they say.

The preview build that was put out a couple of years ago covered the best parts of the game’s contents, which leads me to believe that perhaps – at the time – this was all they had accomplished from the time of the Kickstarter to entering Early Access on Steam. Why the game seems to go through a design and philosophy shift after these initial levels I don’t know – perhaps it was monetary reasons, perhaps the design team went through changes, or perhaps they just didn’t know what else to do.

But somewhere along the line the game’s focus seems to have shifted from being a Quake-like into a Serious Sam-clone, and with that comes nothing of value. Hordes of enemies, tonnes of effects on screen, constantly having to duck and weave to dodge literally everything all at once, and pressing the backwards key considerably more than the forward key at times. It’s not what I had hoped for sadly.

And in the end, the game is stupidly easy even on the hardest difficulty, including the later tougher levels where you’ll probably die numerous times – simply because of a respawn system not too dissimilar from the one found in Bioshock. You can simply whittle down the enemy hordes at your own leisure, one life at a time, because you’re not reloading a checkpoint, you’re just respawning. But I think the developers know this, because there’s not even an achievement for beating the game on the hardest difficulty, because, again: it’s not much of an accomplishment.

I’d give Prodeus half-a-thumbs up if I could. It’s not bad. It’s just dull.