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Approx. 01/07/99: Requiem Demo Review
(You can get the demo from the 3D0 site. It is 32 meg.)
Update - 6/6/00:
I bought and played Requiem full many months back. Despite various glitches and flaws, I found it to be a fun, interesting game, particularly with the more entertaining angelic powers such as Resurrection and Possession. This review is a good taster of the full game, though the game is definitely much better overall than what is shown in the demo.
Introduction:
Requiem. A massively under-hyped FPS game if there ever was one - on the net at least.
Despite the lack of information, previews or promotions, I was quite interested to see what
this game was all about - particularly because the arcane "good vs. evil" style and
religious overtones appealed to me (BTW, I am *strictly* agnostic - I just think religion
has very strong aesthetics). So, I checked out the demo...and here is my review of it. Done
in a different style to my other articles: First I'll point out the strongest impressions
it left on me, good and bad. Secondly I will give a report on the main areas of an FPS
game and how this demo fares. Finally, I'll point to potential improvments and a conclusion.
All of this conveniently interspersed with screenshots for your viewing pleasure. Got all
that??? Good, lets go...
Strongest impressions - good:
1. Explosions:
My God I loved the explosions. They reminded me a lot of explosions in sci-fi films, where
a space ship disintegrates into a glowing fireball - Requiem explosions look just like that.
They swirl, fade away and smoke nicely too, great stuff.
2. Turn to salt power:
This was exceptionally cool. Although it's hard to use, and is really just another weapon,
it's very powerful and the effect is superb - enemy are caught mid-movment, turn grey, then
dissolve into particles and a puff of smoke. It just looks so cool when they freeze (see
screenshots).
3. Human enemies:
I'm not a big fan of human enemies, but these were good. They look good, with decent and
varied animations (the "getting knocked over" animation is cool) detailed skins, and the armoured soldiers are very impressive. Even
better, they do amusing things, have a variety of weapons, and are fun to fight (see below).
4. Robot enemies:
You don't get to see much of them, and I only got a close up view by accidentally running into them by going
back through the levels, but they look great from what I have seen, nice meaty and powerful.
5. Combat:
I found the combat against the soldiers surprisingly entertaining - although the AI isn't
that clever, they do fight well, but not overwhelmingly so. In particular, they strafe and
fire round corners, run out of the way, jump and climb ladders, and throw grenades. The best
moment in the demo came when a bunch of soldiers had me trapped at the top of a small
ladder. First one cunningly threw a grenade up...then another soldier climbed the ladder and
died in the blast, excellent stuff =).
6. Some sound effects:
In particular, enemy footsteps, and shooting the heavy soldiers. Haven't noticed enemy
footsteps in other games, but I certainly noticed it here - you make footsteps, they make
footsteps. Rather useful, enough said. Shooting heavy soldiers (and robots) was a nice touch - the sound
changes to a metallic sound as you drill into their armour.
7. Pentecost power:
Again, really just another weapon, but another very stylish one. In particular, the effect
of the lightning ball, the way it rips chunks out of the scenery as it passes, the ability
to charge it up for instant gibbage, and my favourite bit, the way you glow with holy light
when it's fully charged.
8. Fluids:
The water looks rather nice and effective. Unfortunately it's not gloomy underwater, and
it doesn't ripple like Half Life's water.
9. Interface:
Mmmmmm, the interface is very stylish. I wouldn't say it's particularly clear to use, but
it's got a gothic theme that I really like.
10. Blowing limbs and heads off:
Well, it seems to happen entirely at random, but you can blow arms and heads off with some
weapons, as well as normal gibbage. A nice touch to be sure.
Strongest impressions - bad:
1. Errr, I have all the weapons???
This struck me as bizarre - you start the demo with all the weapons. Although they do come
in very handy for the fighting, this spoils the sense of progression and discovery you get
from finding new weapons.
2. Weapons models:
Ugh. Apart from the Tri Shotgun, these are at best primitively
adequate, at worst ugly and cobbled together. Specifically, the weapons look
blocky, they look as if bits have been added at random, and the texturing is blurry.
The small pistol was one of the worst looking weapons I have ever seen.
3. Head bobbing:
O0o0oO0o0o....head spinning....must lie down. This made me vaguely dizzy after playing the
demo - the constant and IMHO excessive head bobbing. As far as I can see there is no point
to this, and it makes movement seem weird and jolty. At the very least it needs a setting
control a la Unreal.
4. Textures and NPC skins:
I found the textures to be a bit blurry and in need of some crisping up. They were okay, but
just seemed rather primitive - and there were a lot of plain walls. Some of the later hi-tech textures were good though. The
NPC skins were equally primitive, often quite blurry and illmade.
5. Graphical glitches:
Some noticable glitches included: clipping problems with NPC's limbs meeting their body, and
the monsters getting stuck in each other and walls, shadows that were not only completely unrelated to
light sources but also did bizzare things when the owner of the shadow died, noticable
gaps between soldiers' limbs and bodies, random texturing on gibs including head textures
smeared across whole gibs, lights that disappeared when you were right next to them, spinning armour/weapons with very dodging polygon shading...
6. Ammo/health boxes:
Try as hard as I can, I just cannot think of a good reason why these are utterly enormous
and arcade like. Think "Quake size", and that is about the size of it. Not realistic, not
cool, no point.
7. Lack of decals:
You have a decent arsenal of firepower and the opportunity to blow enemy into all sorts of
bits, but none of this destruction leaves it's mark on the scenery - very disappointing, it
makes the weapon effects less impressive.
8. Soldiers going into "shock" easily:
When you shoot soldiers close up, they get knocked down for a while and bounce back up - which is cool.
The problem is, it makes it very easy with single soldiers just to charge next to them and shoot, and they go into
too much shock to shoot back, and just get pummeled into the ground. Kinda spoils things.
9. Complexity of using powers:
With 4 different menus for powers, and various keys to use to "bind" and select them, the
holy powers seemed too complex to use in the middle of a fight. I'm sure eventually you
could set up a decent set of keys, but at the moment there is too much arseing around.
10. Little use for powers:
Having lots of powers is a fine idea. The problem in this demo is that they are completely
superfluous - I did use the "Salt" and "Pentecost" powers because they are cool, but that's
all. The "offensive" powers just replicate weapons, while the other more tactical powers
have little use in combat or indeed elsewhere - it would be very easy to set up some
situations where powers were *necessary*, but it just didn't happen.
11. Enemy coming from behind:
At first this was very cool: "Oh, the bastards have outflanked me!", I thought. Then they
kept coming - out of areas I had very much cleaned out. Then I saw them just appear out of
thin air - not even teleporting in or coming out of doors, rather just suddenly standing
there. Uncool and illogical.
12. Natty little things that kill you:
I can accept dying if I get crushed by a piston. I can't accept dying if I am just standing
next to it and suddenly die, or if I jump onto a normal barrel and then suddenly die.
General aspects:
Technical:
The demo ran and installed fine. No problems on my PII266 / 96 meg ram / Voodoo2. The only
few glitches I found (other than graphical) were: I could not take screenshots at 800x600,
and some icons remained on screen at the wrong time.
Interface:
See above. Great style, fairly easy to use. All normal settings could be changed with ease -
however, the brightness control did not seem to work. One great feature was the ability to
save key configurations from the menu. There was a "console", but that didn't seem to do
anything.
Controls:
Aside from having to use vast numbers of spell controls, the controls were fine. The
one noticable control problem was using the Sniper Rifle: to fire this, you hold the key to
zoom in, then release it to fire - then you can fire again within a few seconds before it
zooms out. This felt very unintuitive, and furthermore meant that if you zoomed in to check
for enemy, you automatically fired and wasted a shot.
Physics/feel:
Apart from the head bob, this was fine. The feel of moving and jumping did feel a bit airy
but not too bad - though sometimes it was easy to get stuck on things, which was annoying.
You could jump very high, easily onto a human size crate. There was
plenty of air control which made ladders easy to use. Kickback was noticable - there was
huge amounts of kickback from some enemy weapons, equally your shots sent them skidding
along the floor. No kickback from explosions which was bizarre. The only other major
problem was grenades: they didn't make any effort to obey the laws of physics, bouncing
very little and in strange directions, giving them limited use.
Graphics/textures:
Okay, but needs some crisping up and more details. Some areas had a washed out effect, some wall
textures were bland. In other areas the textures were better. The textures
had some similar styles as Half Life, but they were noticably more blurry - and didn't do the architecture many favours. The
sky was very poor, consisting of large static and blurry stars. Liquid
effects could have been more fluid and had fogging, though liquid surface was nice.
Architecture:
Some areas were impressive, some areas were quite plain and less impressive. There
was a consistently good use of angles and pseudo-curves, and the architecture was generally good with few
obvious flaws, but there were few spectacular areas (but some sections *were*
fairly spectacular), and in some sections of the maps the scenery seemed rather repetitive.
There were quite a few "small scale" details (desks, computers, consoles). Overall there
was little really wrong with the architecture or designs, it just needed to be more
consistently inspiring and detailed.
Lighting:
This was good, especially some aspects like properly sourced lighting and good subtle use
of coloured lighting. Dynamic lighting from weapons was fine too. However, the lighting
was rather uniform in places, and a better use of contrast would have made it more dramatic.
Also some (not all) lights themselves were rather basic and primitive.
Effects:
See above. Explosions were excellent, so were power effects. Effects in the levels were
okay - the power core was the main one, there weren't any fancy lighting effects otherwise (apart from the neat ending scene).
The blood and gibs were rather poor - although the blood made it easy to see damage, it was
far too bright and cheesy looking. The gibs were bugged as mentioned above. Darker blood
and more organic gibs would have been better. Another annoyance was that it was hard to tell
how much damage you were taking - the very minor screen flashes and homogeneous pain sounds
gave little indication, meaning it was easy to die without realising it. The shadows were a good idea, and looked cool sometimes, but were buggy and sourced wrong.
Sounds:
Fine - fairly normal sounds for most actions, with a few rather special sounds as mentioned above, and
some nice ambient sounds: a random thumping sound that added atmosphere, and a humming sound
that was blatantly stolen from Quake! Speech was clearly understood, but there was. I felt some action
sounds could have done with more bass and power - also the getting out of water sound annoyed me.
Theme:
The levels were based around a power station and fitted this theme perfectly well, though
some areas did seem a bit arbitrary (not much of a problem ), though there was plenty
of industrial machinery. A small underground section with demons fitted in fine due to it's
"lurking underground" feel.
Level Design:
Hmmmm, the actual designs and layout were fine, but I found them ill-used. The main problem
was, even when there were plenty of cool and impressive structures, very little seemed to
happen with them - they were just there to look good while you did stuff in their shadow.
Two examples are the silos and helicopter scene in the screenies shown below, and the huge
bridge filled cavern near the end of the demo. Both of these were impressive but underused,
and there were plenty of other situations with underused layouts and noticably little 3D
action. Also, the scenery and machinery itself was rarely used to progress.
Exploration:
Well, it's a new game so it felt quite exploratory. In the demo itself there was a usually
(but not always) a single path used to progress, but plenty of side areas to explore which
was good. However, as above, the level design could have lead to more exploration if it had
been better used.
Weapons:
See above. Apart from the crude looks, I also found their visual effects to be disappointing
(explosions aside) - specifically the lack of decals and clear damage effects. Aside from
that they were effective and useful, very much standard weapons (with no secondary fire nor reloading) but worthy ones. I
particularly liked the very powerful Tri Shotgun, though all the other weapons had their use
too - The snipers rifle would be cool if it's control wasn't b0rked, same for the
grenade launcher and it's b0rked physics. One weird aspect is that you can't take weapons off fallen troops (apart from one situation).
Powers:
See above. There was a good selection and variety, but they didn't seem to have any real use
in the demo apart from something to play with. If there were situations with a specific use
they would be more interesting - though still hampered by menus, etc etc.
Enemies/NPCs:
See above. The soldiers were just cool. Aside from that the main enemies were small demon
monsters. I was undecided on the demons - a merrily bouncing mouth on two legs is normally
the sort of thing I'd adore, but they did seem a bit cartoony - the skins were fairly vivid,
but perhaps were too distinct from the scenery. Given that you are fighting a fallen angel,
I expected the demons to be truly demonic and terrifying, but they weren't. Additionally
you faced a larger demon, giant insects, weird fish (all okay), and a couple of robots -
these seemed very cool but you didn't see them often. The NPC's had poor blurry
clothes, but were a nice touch (the masked workers especially). They reacted to (and complained about) gunfights
which was good, but no interaction otherwise.
Gameplay:
See above. The gameplay against the soldiers (and robots) was a lot of fun - though the
reappearing enemy behind you detracted from it. Combat against the demons was okay - it was
fun to get like 8 after you, but they weren't that exciting to face. The gameplay situations
were okay, but could have been a lot better - there was too much facing enemies at
doorways to rooms, and too little 3D fighting and too little use of the best scenery. The
difficulty level was about right, I feel - it was a challenge with the soldiers but a reasonable one.
Story/Mission:
The story for the mission, well you just have to plant a bomb at the back-up power core in
the power station - that's about it, make your way through the levels, not much more
involving than that. However, there were a couple of interactions, the first one proved rather
amusing =). Overall I felt the story could have had a stronger effect on the levels. One detail that disappointed me was that there was no penalty for killing innocents - you get a warning,
but you don't get struck down by the holy wrath of God or anything exciting like that.
Immersiveness/atmosphere:
This disappointed me - there was little of the gothic atmosphere promised in the story and
interface. Granted it's only a power station, but I would have liked it to be darker and
scarier - especially the monster "cellar". For example, look at the background at the final scene - that's what I would have preferred.
I just didn't find this demo gripped me as much as I'd hoped, though it did "grow" on me.
Potential improvements:
This demo clearly needs some improvements and tweaks in areas that are obviously flawed. The
main improvements I would suggest would be the following:
1. Either retexture, or better, remake all the weapons to look cleaner and more precise.
2. Fix the obvious and annoying graphical glitches.
3. Add a head bob setting control or remove it altogether.
4. Limit the number of soldiers that reappear behind you.
5. Fix the grenade physics and the sniper rifle controls.
6. Reduce the ammo/health boxes sizes by at least half.
7. Add some explosion and blood decals.
8. Improve the NPC and monster skins.
9. Place enemy to make better use of 3D level designs and structures.
Aside from these I can also think of some major improvements, such as the monsters,
atmosphere, texture quality, and powers, but are perhaps too major and too subjective.
Conclusion:
I conclude...! Errr, I don't really know what I conclude. To be honest, this demo
disappointed me at first - a lot of it seemed crude, glitchy or unpolished. But, the more I played it,
the more I enjoyed the combats and appreciated the possiblities, the enviroments did get
more impressive at the end, and there were some touches and effects I really liked. I still
feel there is a LOT to be fixed about Requiem, but it's quite likely I will try the game.
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