All throughout the game you're getting small incremental upgrades to your staff, so it's hard to pinpoint when exactly it becomes so absurdly overpowered that it breaks the game. Your variety of useful ranged attacks is just a better choice. Getting into melee distance and waiting through the slow animations comes across as a worthless gamble that will lead to inevitably tanking damage. Corvus' attack speed is slow and the collision detection is less than ideal. At the start of the game, using the staff at all seems suicidal. For instance, attacking while running forward does a spinning swipe for slightly more damage. You basically just have a handful of canned attacks. Your attacks with the staff are motivated by the state of your movement, however, it's far from nuanced and has zero combo potential. There's also a lightning shield, which damages any enemy that comes near you. Also useful is the meteor spell, which homes in on nearby enemies. On the other hand, you can spend Blue Mana on the Tome of Power, which will upgrade all of your attacks to do more damage and even mutate their utility somewhat. You also have defensive spells that use a separate pool of Blue Mana, but many of these are useless. The only thing I don't like is that switching between weapons takes way too long. I found all of these attacks decently fun to use, and I like how the storm bow in particular introduces zoning attacks into classic FPS gameplay. This includes a rapid fire staff, an explosive bow and arrow (rocket launcher), and a storm bow that does damage over time in a small area around where the arrow strikes. On top of that you have some weapons that don't use Green Mana but instead require their own ammo. You start with a weak fireball that is nonetheless effective against early monsters, a shotgun-style spread shot, a flame wall, a fragmentary blast, and a spirit bomb that has to be charged up. Your arsenal of weapons is unique in that about half of them are magic spells that all draw from the same pool of Green Mana. The combat in Heretic 2 fares a lot better than the platforming, owing to Raven Software's long line of experience in the field. There are a lot of platforming challenges in Heretic 2, and a lot of my time was spend missing jumps and clumsily tumbling off of platforms. Both seem to have a pre-set trajectory that you can't really influence, which feels like garbage. If you tap the jump key he does a hop, but if you hold it he does a somersault leap that goes a bit further and higher. Corvus' movement is digital and twitchy with no room for fine, precision navigating. Those don't hold up particularly well in the first place, but that style of rigid physics mixed with WASD-style run and gunning it makes for a sour experience. The platforming is clearly inspired by the old Tomb Raider games. Unfortunately, it doesn't really pull any of these off particularly well. While the original game was more or less a total conversion for Doom, Heretic 2 is a third person platformer/shooter/hack & slash hybrid. You play as Corvus, the same character from the first Heretic (but not any of the Hexen games). Despite some close calls here and there, I managed to make my way through the entire game with little fuss. Saving while Corvus is on a moving platform is not advisable. There were some crashes that happened randomly in-game, and some bugs where the game would get soft-locked into 'cutscene mode' necessitating a restart. I've found that temporarily switching to software rendering would mitigate this issue. Always back up your saves multiple times. However, I had a recurring problem where loading save games would cause a crash. I don't know if it's the fan patch or what, but for some reason my version of the game was initially locked to 30 fps and it sucked.Īs far as bugs go, it's hard to say what is the fault of the game, the fan-patch, or the OS. In there, put the line "cl_maxfps 60" (or 120 or 144 or 165 depending on your desired framerate). From there, the first thing you're going to want to do is go into the game's /base/ directory and create an autoexec.cfg file. The game's HUD does not scale and becomes basically untenable at a certain point. The hi-res hack can go as high def as you want it to, but I don't recommend going any higher than 1080p even if your monitor is better than that. As far as fan-made luxuries, there's a hi-res hack and a patch ( ) that seems to be mostly oriented towards the few psychos who want to play the online deathmatch mode. The game plays surprisingly nice with Windows 10. It's a mainstream, AAA (for 1998) PC game on the Quake 2 engine made by a known and well-regarded studio that somehow became all but forgotten over time. It doesn't have a cult following or a fan-made source port. It's the only game in the Heretic/Hexen series that isn't on any digital storefront.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |