Incline Dusk, by New Blood Interactive: a frenetic FPS inspired by olDoom and Quake (2017)

[<3sRichardSimmons]

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I made a New Year's resolution that I wasn't going to buy any new games until trying all of the untouched ones in my Steam/GoG library. Well, I broke that resolution today (hey, made it to February, better than usual) and bought this because I've been itching for a shooter and I've already played all the ones I own to death. I just finished e1m6 and so far it's... very, very good. I'm honestly baffled at the amount of negative comments in this thread because it's easily the best shooter I've played from the last 15 years. If the episodes continue to improve upon one another (as seems to be the general consensus), I think this could end up a solid 9/10 for me.

That's not to say it's perfect though.
The Bad:
-So far it's way too easy. I picked the middle difficulty option ("I Can Handle It"), and so far I have not died. Worse, I have never fallen below 50% health/morale. That's bad balance/game journo difficulty.
-Directly related to the previous point, secrets give you way too much of a leg up. I found one in the second mission that gave me the assault rifle very early and it's basically been an "I Win" button up until now. I'm only finding about half the secrets on average so far, so I can't even imagine how OP I would be if I was actively searching for them.
-Enemy Variety is lacking thus far. Hopefully this changes as the game progresses.
-Weapon Variety is also leaving something to be desired (although the general gunfeel is pretty good). All of the guns so far are very utilitarian in that they have a "correct" encounter scenario in which they should be used. It doesn't leave a lot of room for experimentation or play. I don't see this changing, since I've already found 6/9 weapons.

But:

The Good:

+Gameplay. There's a really satisfying balance between exploration and combat. Movement speed feels great. Gunfeel is nice.
+Level Design is pretty good. A nice variety of wide open arenas and claustrophobic mazes. Not quite on Doom/Quake (to say nothing of Thief) levels, but heads and shoulders above what has become the standard in recent years.
+Secrets are well hidden, but always feel fair, at least as far as the ones I've found. Even though they will make you OP as fuck, there's no bullshit Wolfenstein3D style secrets. Each one has a tell, even though it may not be obvious.
+ Music. I'm not really into metal (at all), but it's obviously stylistically suited to a game like this. And as far as my exposure to metal goes, this seems very good.


I also really don't get the hate on the graphics. Sure, they're not great, but they're fine. If you value eyecandy so highly there are plenty of very pretty and very shit shooters out there. Go play one of them.

 

[ADL]

Any word on the sequel yet? Amid Evil didn't scratch the itch for me.

 

[Jaedar]

-So far it's way too easy. I picked the middle difficulty option ("I Can Handle It"), and so far I have not died. Worse, I have never fallen below 50% health/morale. That's bad balance/game journo difficulty.

The game will get harder as you progress. It also scales upwards quite quickly as you increase the difficulty level. The biggest difference is that melee enemies get like 2-3x extra movement speed, and so do enemy projectiles.

After playing through the game twice, and finding *most* of the secrets I find the 4th difficulty slightly too easy but the hardest one is too hard.

Also if you think secrets are too op I recommend switching to invader mode since it means you don't get to keep weapons/ammo between levels. Makes finding dual weapons a rare treat instead of something you always have.

 

[Ivan]

Any word on the sequel yet? Amid Evil didn't scratch the itch for me.

I doubt David's cooking his own meal. I think he's all hands on deck helping with Gloomwood

 

[Jenkem]

yeah he is listed as a co-developer on the steam page for GLOOMWOOD and also did stuff for Dread X Collections 1 and 2.

 

[Momock]

-So far it's way too easy. I picked the middle difficulty option ("I Can Handle It"), and so far I have not died. Worse, I have never fallen below 50% health/morale. That's bad balance/game journo difficulty.

You should play in the penultimate difficulty level by default in most games. And in this case also activate the reset of weapons entering a new level (I don't remember the name), they're designed to be done this way (some levels are trivialised if you use some weapons, you should use only the ones each level gives you. They give plenty of them + ammunition, so don't worry).

 

[HumanTotemPole]

Just finished Dusk, good clean fun. Had put it off till I completed the Build holy trinity, Shadow Warrior finally got finished about a month ago.

Nice simple retro FPS with a good bhop, good weapons and audiovisual design appealing to early 3d perverts like me. Props for the soundtrack too, metal and FPSes pair like red wine with red meat. Levels didn’t hugely drop off in quality as it progressed either. There’s maybe some merit to the argument that ep3 has too many gimmick levels but I found that the change of pace kept things fresh. Always nice to have a perspective warping level or two. Relatively stiff combat challenge in the penultimate level too. Would recommend. Miss being able to move in these games the way you can here - slaloming through levels at 200mph.

 

[Eyestabber]

Nice simple retro FPS with a good bhop, good weapons and audiovisual design appealing to early 3d perverts like me. Props for the soundtrack too, metal and FPSes pair like red wine with red meat.

Try Amid Evil next.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/673130/AMID_EVIL/

 

[Parsifarka]

So finally I got around playing this, the first shooter in which I actively avoided finding secret levels so I could be done with it and go back to Blood and Painkiller. I had high expectations given all the praise I had read about it for years now, so I was met with a huge disappointment at finding a game that is simply mediocre: not bad, but certainly not good either.
DUSK features exquisite player movement, blood-pumping music, spooky sound effects, joyous gore and some really cool gimmicks, but everything else about it ranges from barely decent to lame: a limited arsenal of unimaginative weapons, one of the worst most non-threatening casts of enemies I've ever seen, incompetent enemy placement, awful enemy mixing, redundant corridor-based levels combined with dead-simple circle-strafing plains and that permanent coat of "retro" hideousness.

It's true that E1 is the weakest, but E3 still has its fair share of junk with two or three levels all about the repetitive act of waiting with a charged sword for dumb enemies to come around the corner, and more instances of enemies patiently waiting at both sides of a door for you to tediously pick up than I care to remember.
I played through it in Cero Miedo and as everybody else has already said the game is clearly designed with the idea of a fresh start in each map to keep things mildly interesting for a few minutes, but even then the biggest challenge for me was the absurd mismatch between the slowness of the kool kidz' attack animations and the insane acceleration of their projectiles in the short range, I could never get used to that awkwardness even though they are absolutely harmless in the mid-long range—the other significant magic-ball shooters, the flying enemies introduced in E3, were even more idiotic as they consistently got stuck in the ceiling of every room because of their inability to lower their flight and cross through doorways, forcing me to repeatedly step into a room, shoot, and walk back while in the open spaces their height of flight and the speed of their projectiles meant I could circlestrafe the arena twice before they hit the place they shot at, I have rarely seen such a useless foe in any shooter, they can only get challenging to kill (not to avoid) because their transparency is a bad match for the eye-raping skyboxes.

On the other hand, the few corridors with invisible enemies pushing over objects and the level where the creepypasta screamers are introduced are the only time I thought the game did anything interesting with its repetitive, overused dark cave systems and the sword made sense. And that's not mentioning how cool it is to flood an entire medieval town (only to fight the horrible bullet-spongy fishes), summon a tornado to break a new path or even turn upside down a whole level to "fall" towards previously inaccessible areas — these plus Escher Labs were by far my favorite levels and make me think that this fellow Szymasnki does actually have some talent and could make a good FPS should he team up with someone actually competent at designing one. But DUSK is not that game.

I must make a special mention for the penultimate level, probably the worst arena I've ever seen where the vomit inducing visuals brilliantly add to the difficulty of the game by making enemies and their hyper-fast/almost-hitscan projectiles barely visible if at all (thinking it was a good idea to use these enemies in this environment is the best evidence for how utterly clueless the guy making the game is). Luckily I found that secret teleporter to the next level, I don't think I would have been able to put up with that shit otherwise, and this is coming from someone who loves Serious Sam games as they actually have well thought out encounters (or used to, haven't had the chance to play the fourth yet).
The next level ends the game by having what would have been the most interesting boss fight by far (actually, the only interesting one), fighting some sort of Q3A bot. This is an excellent idea for a boss, but it gets squandered because the game is lame and we can't have nice things, so instead of a proper Q3/UT-style arena all we get is a lousy circle to, you know, circle-strafe yet again.

I don't hate it and I would have been much more positive about it had it been a free game from a noob developer asking for feedback, but being the overhyped commercial project it is I cannot but state my bewilderment at the reception this has gotten. If this is the standard of quality for the current wave of "retro shooters" I'll just keep replaying the old ones and downloading new top notch free levels and conversions for them. Getting that strong cargo cult vibe with this one.

 

[Drop Duck]

If this is the standard of quality for the current wave of "retro shooters" I'll just keep replaying the old ones and downloading new top notch free levels and conversions for them. Getting that strong cargo cult vibe with this one.

There are good retro shooters, Dusk is not one of them.

 

[Star Citizen]

Couldn't get into Dusk at all. The movement was way too off my liking, the visuals n art style and enemy roster didn't resonate with me either and the level design very underwhelming thus far, but to be fair I didn't really give it much of a chance and intend to finish it at some point, movement is something I'm really picky about in games fast or slow. Also get choppy framerates at times which is always great when you're playing something that looks like dog shit, worse looking than any early 3D FPS games both artistically and technologically.

 

[Riskbreaker]

You ever got to the second episode? It improved my opinion of the game a fair bit altho even the first one grew on me with time - my initial impression was that its level design felt like something outta some lost 90s Quake TC, and not in a good way.

 

[Momock]

Dusk isn't a good "retro-FPS" because it's simply the best FPS ever made. Not the same category.

 

[Curratum]

Dusk is allright. Amid Evil is far more inspired and original, even if not as blitzy and Quaky.

 

[Momock]

I don't know, I dropped Amid Evil very quickly. Boring weapons, enemies, level design, arenas,... and vomitive visuals. No thanks.

 

[Viata]

They both sucks, though.

 

[Riskbreaker]

Both your mums do.

My sizeable COCK that is.

 

[Star Citizen]

You ever got to the second episode? It improved my opinion of the game a fair bit altho even the first one grew on me with time - my initial impression was that its level design felt like something outta some lost 90s Quake TC, and not in a good way.

Nee, I hear it gets good at some point hence why Imma give it a chance.

 

[Lemming42]

Never quite fully warmed up to DUSK although I think it gets much more interesting in the second and third episodes. Amid Evil seemed like shit at first but it clicked with me later on. Both are definitely worth playing anyway just to see what the archetypal throwback FPS is these days - by which I mean something that seems to style itself off Quake, Half-Life, Doom and Blood, but often ends up feeling like Serious Sam with worse encounter design.

Ion Fury is the only one of these throwback shooters I've fully enjoyed so far. And Prodeus, all five seconds of it.

 

[LESS T_T]

https://steamcommunity.com/games/519860/announcements/detail/3372647018500460874

DUSK HD
Prepare Your Butts

We've been teasing this for awhile but it's finally time to show it off....

DUSK HD

Complete remakes of all the weapon and enemy models in DUSK.

Available for FREE and coming SOON™ as part of the Steam Workshop update.

You didn't ask for this?!

Well you're welcome.

 

[Wunderbar]

Crossbow still looks like shit.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Todd horrors are dope

 

[Baron Dupek]

Dusk 2 coming

I don't give a shit that's gimmick accunt

 

[Jasede]

I really turned around on Dusk. I liked it when it came out and now that so-called boomer shooters are a dime a dozen I think it's one of the weakest entries.

 

[orcinator]

I really turned around on Dusk. I liked it when it came out and now that so-called boomer shooters are a dime a dozen I think it's one of the weakest entries.

I kinda appreciate it more since the other boomie shooties are very mediocre.
Besides OVERLOAD which nobody played.