Like a demon conjured by new blood on the altar, Wrath: Doom Eternal first appeared at the height of the retro shooter renaissance. It’s developed in a revamped Quake engine, with levels designed by mod contributors like Arcane Dimensions, and when it launches in 2019 it looks set to conquer everything in its path. Its early access showcases stunning weapons, splashy enemies, a tricky hub world filled with secrets, and maps you’d be willing to sell your soul on.
Then it lay dormant for another five years. In 2021, developer KillPixel admitted that the project had been severely hampered by the Covid 19 pandemic. But the full game will be released in summer 2022. That’s spring 2023, then February 2024. During that time, the retro shooter genre continued to evolve, giving us Doom (Prodis), Duke Nukem (Ion Fury), and Hex (Among the Evil ). Meanwhile, Fury’s presence fades away, looking less like a spiritual successor to Quake and more like a rehash of Blockbuster.
Now, though, Fury is finished, and unlike John Romero’s White Elephant , you can see why it took so long. It’s less a first-person shooter than an ode to 3D level design, a dimension-hopping adventure of epic proportions and variety that twists the Quake engine to frankly obscene positions. Sadly, this is both a criticism and a compliment, as the shooting itself gets a bit lost in the effort to deliver the most magnificent shooting range available.
This has nothing to do with Wrath’s fundamentals, which are carefully crafted. The premise is typical FPS fare. You are a lone warrior, simply known as the Outlander, traveling through a forsaken realm trying to clear out the infestation of catacombs and monuments with the blade and bullets of a shepherd of wayward souls. There are three episodes in total, taking place in three different worlds, each containing five levels. From these levels, you must retrieve five magical runes and combine them to unlock a portal to the world’s boss.
The first few hours of Fury promise to be joyful FPS mayhem. Your starting weapon is a large knife strapped to your right forearm, capable of a charged attack that propels you forward with a vicious push that doubles as a double jump. Before long you’re picking up a pistol that’s as powerful as most shotguns, and a shotgun sounds like you’re closing the door on your opponent’s miserable life. Later weapons include the Fang Launcher and the Crystalizer, whose charged alternative firepower can mineralize even the toughest enemies, leaving them shattered with a single pistol shot.
Training your Cannon Fodder’s Wrath is also very soft. When you shoot a slow-moving zombie with your first shot, they lose an arm, and then when you hit them a second time, they explode into a cloud of guts. Terrifying mutated undead warriors who continue to fight even after losing their heads. My favorite lowlifes are those tortured, walking gangrenous bags that throw their own balls of green oozing at you. Blasting them with two barrels causes them to burst like six-foot-tall blisters, which is exactly as disgusting and satisfying as it sounds.
As fun as all this is, it’s something that hasn’t been done in a thousand other shooters. What sets Wrath apart is its level design. Each of its fifteen maps is a masterpiece of 3D world-building, a soaring, twisting, tunneling, looping, twisting work of art. Since each center offers some flexibility in the order in which you tackle the challenges, I can’t say for sure which one you’ll encounter first.it will perhaps The Undercrofts is a sprawling cemetery filled with snowy graveyards and underground tombs that took me 48 minutes to complete. But it could also be The Quagmire, which plunges you into the world’s most complex levels of sewers and forces you to climb to a cliffside castle. It might even be the garden, a clever spiral that keeps bringing you back to its central greenhouse center like the world’s deadliest hedge maze.
It’s not just the scale of these maps that’s surprising (although in some, like The Burrow, it’s hard to focus on anything else), but the loving detail that’s been poured into them. The way each room is shaped and contoured, the way its paths meander and overlap, the way KillPixel sculpts the rough polygons of the Quake engine into elegant curves and crenellations. I particularly enjoyed the space of the second episode, where Fury’s massive architecture and bloody action are combined with a mysterious desert theme that makes you feel like Conan is carving his way through some ancient, forgotten kingdom.
I cannot stress enough how much I appreciate and admire the craftsmanship that goes into these spaces. The level of talent, imagination and generosity shown was astonishing. They’re also fun to explore, filled with secrets and unlockable chests that offer bonus items you can deploy in combat, like a heart that drains health from slain enemies and a heart that deflects projectiles energy shield. But this is where I put the other shoe down. There’s a difference between great level design and great shooter design, and while Fury’s approach to geometry is brilliant, it fails to consistently translate the former into the latter.
It took me a while to figure out why I wasn’t enjoying Fury as much as I should have been. At first, I thought the problem lay with Wrath’s save system, which combines uncommon one-time checkpoints (called “shrines”) to replenish your health with collectible quick-save items (called “shrines”). “Soul Tether”), which you can consume at will. I’ve been skeptical of the system since Fury first entered Early Access. But now that I’ve played the full game, I can confidently say that I hate it.
For starters, limiting saves like this means dying will cost you a ton of progress, which can make Wrath’s already large levels feel like they’ll never end. But the bigger problem is that this system means I’m constantly thinking about saving, rather than having a good time turning my enemies into mincemeat. Should I save it here? I think this as I turn every corner. What if there’s a huge fight in the next room and I lose some health, or an ambush kills me before I have time to react? What if there’s a temple ahead and I actually wasted the save? It started to affect the way I fought, making me unwilling to jump into it, try out weapons or take the risk of trial combat.
Then, about three levels into the game, I discovered an option to save infinitely. I’ve never checked a box so carefully in my life and it definitely improved the experience. Now I’m free to jump into combat and enjoy the challenge of the combat itself instead of worrying about resource management. But it didn’t solve the problem immediately like I expected. Eventually, I realized that Fury’s save system was just a symptom of a wider problem, which is that Fury doesn’t always know how to build exciting combat encounters into its vast levels.
This is a hard one to explain, but ultimately it comes down to flow. In a shooter like this, I want to be surrounded by the roar of my enemies, weaving, ducking, and leaping to avoid their projectiles. Furious combat can be like this, but is usually more staggered and progressive. You either move forward in fits and starts, shooting two or three enemies at a time, or you peek around corners and snipe enemies from afar.
I don’t mind the former so much. In fact, Fury is really fun in this mode, often deploying two of my favorite enemies to keep you on your toes. The Widow is a screaming witch with teeth extending all the way to her navel who rushes at you from around the back corner. Fighting her with close-range shotgun blasts or timed blade thrusts is a lot of fun. And then there’s the Prowler, a spider-like creature that can become invisible as it scuttles around a room, each room offering a quick game of hide-and-seek that always ends in a satisfying The chaos ends.
Peeking around the corners, however, are the actual pipes between the spokes. There was an enemy, called “The Wretched,” whom I grew to despise. Imagine if a doomsday imp fired a fireball attack every half second, then imagine you had to watch a little parasite from the map every ten seconds. They’re not particularly difficult to kill, but Fury scatters them all over the place, turning much of the game into a miserable marksman challenge where you just try not to lose too much health while clearing them out.
Some levels are better at pacing than others. The Shadow Pantheon is the most boring, a winding corridor of seemingly infinite sprawl with little verticality, few noteworthy encounters, and no memorable moments. In contrast, the scope of the Priory was best managed. It’s a huge level, but it divides it into clearly defined sections, building into interesting combat encounters in each area. First there’s the exploration of the complex’s surroundings, then the brutal battles within its intricate inhabited areas. Then there’s a grueling battle through the watchtower to open the gate, culminating in a big twist that introduces new weapons and a new movement system.
My favorite level, though, is The Twilight Archives, because it’s the level where Wrath most feels like a spiritual successor to Quake. It’s a classic three-pronged affair, where you venture along three routes throwing three switches to unlock runes in a central hub. It’s the shortest level in the game (although 25 minutes is still a lot) and the easiest level, taking place entirely indoors in a nondescript brown maze. But it’s filled with fun traps, well-choreographed combat encounters, and clever gimmicks surrounding stealth platforming. marvelous.
Wrath: Doom Eternal can be a frustrating, exhausting experience. But with levels like The Priory and The Twilight Archives, it’s as exciting as any retro shooter. Even though some of these levels left me tired by the end, I would always jump straight into the next portal, just because I knew I’d see the wonders there. There’s something diabolical about making a pact with this game. It never quite worked out the way I hoped it would, but the promise was too good to resist.
3D Realms provided a copy of Wrath: Aeon of Ruin for review.
