Anything like Doom?

Large levels with backtracking and lots of rooms and tunnels of different shapes and sizes. Hordes of monsters that have been placed intelligently, stay dead, and so on.

Was Unreal like that? My knowledge of these games becomes kind of spotty after Quake.

 

Doom 2.

 

Wolfenstein 3D?

 

Through the haze of nostalgia, the original Dark Forces and maybe its sequel come to mind, if you aren't burnt out on Star Wars stuff in general. I think they may be available on Steam now, so you don't have to run it in DOS.

It's been some fifteen years, but I remember thinking that the levels were superior to Doom's. There's some more advanced resource management stuff and I remember feeling that there were good reasons to use all the guns available depending on the situation.

Anyway, this is the video I used to make sure I was thinking of the right game, if you want to check it out.

P.S.: The second one actually rewarded you with XP for finding secret locations, which you could spend to upgrade force powers. You could also choose between dark and light force powers.

And they still called it a FPS rather than trying to market it as a RPG-shooter or any other bullshit that companies try today.

P.P.S.: I think it was a lot better with a joystick, partly because you could look up and down and lean.

P.P.P.S.: Actually, I don't know if that's the best video. Guy seems to be playing in easy. I guess it's good in the sense that it shows him getting lost. Anyway, you might want to watch a later level, though don't spoil the enemies and environments for yourself too much.

 

Heretic if you still haven't played it. Hexen too, which is a sequel to Heretic, but slightly different.

 

The first thing I thought when watching that video, Where is the blood? Later I read that there is indeed no blood in the game. Disappointing, but I'll have to try it nonetheless, especially if you say it has better level design than Doom.

I'm playing Blood now. It's annoyingly difficult, even on the easiest difficulty level. I don't think I can get through the second level.

 

I have played Hexen and Heretic, but not very recently and perhaps not very far. I'm more interested in something with guns though.

 

Unreal didn't have hordes of enemies. By that time the high polygon count (and high polygon point was more important than the joys of wiping out hordes of low poly enemies) meant that you could never have more than about 4 enemies on screen at the same time. OTOH some of Unreal's enemies (Skarj I think they were called) had about the best AI I've seen in any FPS.
Level varied from corridors to large open ones. Hawkbluff in particular was an awesome level.
Once you entered a new level you could not backtrack to a an old one.

 

I was gonna recommend Shadow Warrior and Duke Nukem 3D, but since Blood is giving you trouble, and it uses the same game engine, your mileage may wary.

Then there's Rise Of The Triad, which has lots of interesting guns, and mostly human enemies, but the game is basically a slightly upgraded version of Wolfenstein 3D, so you may be in for a bit of a shock there.

Then there's Strife. It uses the Doom engine, has guns, has HUGE maps and lots of backtracking. The thing is, it's trying to be more than just another Doom clone, but if you're fine with that, you won't be disappointed.

 

Sounds like Blood to me. On highest difficulty, but then you won't have enough ammo to kill Ep1 boss.
Then again if Doom placement was intelligent to you, then Blood will rape you hard in all orifices.

Unreal is like that at times, but it misses "hordes" part.

Hexen 1 has respawns.

Hexen 2 misses hordes too.

 

Some more modern, not that great, but still not too bad doomsque tits:

Red Faction (the first one).
Chaser.

Ps. Or, some not so well know "eastern" production as - Hellforces, Stalin Subway, Ubersoldier or Vivisector (large maps, but more in the Serious Sam style).

 

Strife is pretty cool, though it's a Doom with a decent amount of storyfaggotry.

Wolfenstein 3d or Spear of Destiny. Spear has the difficulty bar set pretty high.

You may also try replaying Doom 1/2 with Brutal Doom mod (there is a topic about it somewhere on the forum).

 

Duke Nukem 3D. It also has bunch of awesome mods/maps, check out BDB The Gate, Duke it Out in DC, Nuclear Winter, Caribbean Vacation, It Lives (<-- this one is awesome)
Blood just has lame gamedesign, each new level and episode you will encounter those annoying cultists.
Also try new wads for Dooms and maybe even Skulltag multiplayer with All out War 2, it has big maps, mechs, a lot of classes and weapons, at least two servers with many players.

I wouldn't recommend Strife for a quick game, some enemies are annoying as fuck: spiders that move on ceiling then drop down on you, block your movement AND for some reason deal a lot of damage, considering that they are low tier enemies. And then there are turrets on ceilings, FUCK THEM. High rate of fire, high accuracy, knock-backs. They sure went over the top with 3 "look up you bastard" enemies with different patterns of moving/attacking. It's still very interesting game tho.

 

Painkiller.

 

Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem 3D, basically any FPS made before Half-Life ruined the genre by popularizing realistic shooters.

Also, I've heard the Serious Sam games are fun, but I've never played them.

 

Serious Sam games should fit the description fairly well, AND they're on sale at http://www.indieroyale.com/ right now, too - the First and Second encounter ones are what is meant by that, mind. Unfortunately it looks like these are the "old" SSes and not the "HD" re-releases, which look slightly better and are bugfixed etc.

 

No hand-placed monsters, just spawn points. Un-Doom-style levels too, with every new (small) area that opens up closing access to the previous one, as well as the next one, until you've killed a certain number of monsters. I hated the game.

 

Well, given that they are low level enemies who can still rape you (more than high level foes barring bosses, demibosses and hellhounds, actually) and force you to act tactically I'd consider them a great, -worthy success.

Maybe it's because they have to close on you first and they are fragile and have no ranged attack, meaning they usually won't.

Good enemies should be lethal, low level ones should just require more carelessness before they can demonstrate this.

Therefore, for example cultists in Blood are good enemies, because while easily killed (and kinda retarded) they can murder your ass before you say FFFFUUU- if you let your guard down, while spider queens in the same game are absolutely shit enemies since they are just retarded damage sponges spewing forth a lot of nuisance enemies who usually die to splash damage as soon as they appear - meaning you just spend a lot of ammo slapping almost passive damage sponge about with 'sploshuns, and a bit more to cull its spawn once in a while.

Bottomtophurt detected.


Also, to clarify:

I didn't mean just your physiological orifices, but the countless new ones you will earn in the process as well.

 

Chasm: the Rift.

 

A decent game, underrated actually. Short and brings little new to the table apart from locational damage, though.

 

It had a revolutionary engine before the age of popular gfx acceleration. During e.g. an explosion a portion of your picture would receive a lower resolution while your framerate was consistent!

Also, the levels were fun, and the design of some of them made them quite hard.

 

Yes, it was really nice and looked much better than Quake, despite similar requirements (although Chasm was a bit late), but while the engine was fully 3D, it supported only limited camera pitch and the levels were fully planar and with very limited height range which made them even less 3D than obviously 2.5D Doom, let alone fake multi-planarity of Build Engine games realized through portals, let alone actual 3D like Quake and later FPS games.

 

Yes, they are low level enemies who can rape you faster than high level enemies. Which means that there is no "from weakest to strongest" system, cultists make all other monsters pointless. Every location has same difficulty, and since Monolith put them on every level throughout the game, the whole game has same difficulty. Also, they fucking cheat coz they don't have to reload their shotguns. If they catch YOU during reloading... it's F9.

"Tactical acting" is not always fun... and there is no tactics in Blood, nice try.

You should play Strife again and refresh your memories.

 

I don't get this.

Seriously, I just... don't.

For one thing, Blood isn't that hard to play. Interface difficulties are its biggest problem nowadays, not gameplay or balance.

It's all a question of priority. Which enemies do you kill first. A lot of the Blood enemies have to close distance with you to do any damage (zombies, hellhounds, spiders and those fucking hands, for example) so use that to your advantage. And if you think the shotgun cultists are a bother, wait 'till you meet the ones wielding Tesla Guns. Or the red-robed ones, those will keep you raging for quite a while.

Almost all the weapons have an alternate fire mode, the one on the Flare Gun is actually very powerful in killing weak things.

And finally... the add-on pack for Blood 2 has Caleb reliving his worst nightmare... which was fighting Cultists.

 

I forgot to answer this initially. Respawns are really not a big deal in Hexen. Only the ettins respawn, at a very slow rate, usually one at a time, and only if you're just sitting there doing nothing. They're more like a mechanism to keep the level from becoming completely empty (and again only if you sit there) than actual respawning. The only other respawns I remember are the bishops while fighting the Heresiarch, but that's part of what makes the fight so much fun.