- Joined
- Jun 27, 2014
Against all odds, I thought I had escaped the shitty game mines for a bit, and I was briefly blessed with the ability to write about good games for a change, and while I was writing up another actually good game review, reality decided to pay me a visit and demand recompense when I logged into Steam and a friend showed me that a particularly awful title that I had been dreading had actually been released. Dreading because I knew that I would not be able to resist tearing this one to pieces for long - and there was every possibility that we'd dip deep into that valley that Smash MAGA was in, where it was this digusting combination of being both utterly mean-spirited and a completely miserable experience overall, nearly as bad to review as it was to play.
I hesitated at this point, suspecting that only suffering lay over this threshold.
...Thankfully, my Kiwis, every once in a while I luck out, and the very things that doomed Smash MAGA to being one of the most awful things I sat through in a review for this website conspired to make today's entry, Terfenstein 3D, absolutely hilarious. It is exactly the kind of bad I was hoping Smash MAGA would be, and then more. It is just as mean-spirited, it is just as technologically inept, it is just as glitch-prone, but everything else about the game conspires to make what is, unequivocally, one of the funniest fucking things I've reviewed in years.
It's the rare kind of bad that left me laughing like an idiot for the entire time I was playing it, and now I get to share the experience with all of you.
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you took a Wolfenstein-style FPS game, but had it made by someone who doesn't know a single thing about game design, interface design, graphic design, or tact? Someone who not only can barely fucking make a game, but has an axe to grind so vociferous that it bleeds into the entire project? Well, you do now, and your game is Terfenstein 3D. Leading right out, I notice that there's no story, no instructions, no difficulty selection, and only basic options.
When I get into the game, the mouse sensitivity is set ridiculously high, to the point where I have to nearly halve it, and it's at this point we run into my favorite set of problems the game has. For one, there's no ability to save or load games. You have to play through this thing in one go. Second, going into the pause menu, for any reason, closes the game, because the game is beyond incompetently designed. So we're not even out of the first room, and I've had to restart the damned thing four times because the mouse sensitivity was all corked up, and the game kept making me restart in order to fine tune it.
In the business, this is what we call "foreshadowing."
The game borrows heavily from Wolfenstein 3D, replacing the XX Chromosomes for the Swastika, and JK Rowling for Adolf, but also including a number of things from Doom, such as explosive barrels. The game leads off with you escaping your cell, and then you're out and about. Weirdly, the first few rooms have no enemies whatsoever, so it's mostly a chance to get used to the controls. You start with a pistol and your melee weapon: a rock. There's also a ton of trash cans and industrial equipment around with no real coherence.
The first enemy you encounter are basically the equivalent of Wolf3D's light guards, they reliably go down in 2 bullets and they drop 4 bullets when they die. For some reason, the dev went absolutely mental with the violence in this game. Gore splatters the walls whenever you land a shot on an enemy near them, and the individual enemies all have a ton of different death animations depending on how you kill them. You can gib them with explosive barrels, tear them to shreds with the shotgun at close range; the dev clearly put tons of times into making sure you could commit unspeakable violence against them in as many ways as humanly possible. Close range shots can decapitate, and kills make the floors look the the aftermath of a particle accelerator hit from F.E.A.R.
You know what the game doesn't have, though?
Automatic weapon swapping when ammo runs out.
Or a map screen of any kind.
Or competently designed or placed pickups.
You may wonder what I mean by that last one: In the entire span of me playing this game (and I got to level 5 or so before it crashed on me again), the only health items I found were Health Bonus items, that give 1% health. At no point, not even in the secret areas I found, did I ever see a single larger health item. Just tons of these in random hallways. I have to give it to the devs on this one: every FPS game since the dawn of the genre had some way to restore large amounts of health. Wolfenstein 3D had four different healing items. Blake Stone, pictured in the screenshot on the right, had five, and that wasn't even counting the ones from the vending machines. But Terfenstein? Nah man, play this like you're playing E4M1 from Ultimate Doom.
Similarly, I never encountered a large ammo pickup, despite there being multiple ammo types in the game. Not even in Secrets, did I find any. And, speaking of Secrets....
The majority of the time I encountered a Secret, this is what it was: an empty goddamn hallway with a one-way door on the other side that wouldn't open, except from the other side, and absolutely nothing of value or substance inside. When I did open it from the other side, the reward was a hallway between two places I'd already been or a door that led absolutely nowhere with nothing inside. The majority of these are not marked, so we're back to Wolfenstein 3D wall-humping. Only you move ludicrously slowly, and the Secrets almost always lack anything of value.
One fascinating design decision, and by "fascinating," I mean "utterly inept on every level," is that the game will include doors that literally cannot open and have absolutely nothing behind them. They're just there for decoration, apparently, and they look exactly like every other door in the zone, including and especially the ones that require colored keys to open. So you can run through room after room, clicking "use" on dozens of doors that can't actually open, looking for the doors you need to open, which have no external demarcation whatsoever. And speaking of the doors....
The game is so obsessed with re-creating a game experience like Operation Body Count that it carries over the door glitch! I don't even know how this fucking happens, let alone how something like this gets past playtesting, but here we are. It happens all the time, and it only effects you - never the enemies. Bullets that hit an open doorway will sometimes hit air instead of anything in said doorway. The game likes to throw absolutely gigantic hordes of enemies at you, which presents a problem as they don't drop a heck of a lot of ammo and all of them have alternate melee attacks if they get close.
On top of the light guards, the game has attack dogs, who, like the light guards, can be gibbed or decapitated or dismembered in countless ways. There are also the cleric enemies, who use the power of Christ to throw holy bolts at you and function as this game's equivalent of an Imp from Doom, and can also be violently murdered with multiple different animations. One might call this "excessive," but it's very clear that this was absolutely where the dev behind this game spent a lot of time, because time sure as heck was not spent on level or encounter design.
One of the worst enemies is the Elite Guards, who are broadly the equivalent of the SS Guards in Wolfenstein 3D. They have Shotguns, which on top of making them hit very hard, also means that they throw you around with every every hit. This recoiling appears to be largely random, and on several occasions, getting shot by one launched me out of cover and towards the Soldier that shot me. They drop shotgun ammo, which is nice, because the Shotgun is a decent weapon in this game, but in every conceivable way, they're a worse enemy design than their Nazi counterpart. SS Guards in Wolfenstein 3D were using SMGs, and if you could get to cover, you could minimize damage. The Elite Guards blow their load in a single shot, which means getting tagged by one hurts like hell in a game where health pickups are few and far between.
If the game has any redeeming features, it's that it blatantly steals the subsystem from the SNES port of Doom: namely, if you die, you return to the start of the level with everything you had - infinite lives, to make up for the fact that you can't save. Despite the game not being terribly difficult per se, it is really easy to die in, because of how rare health pickups are and how huge the enemy count is. The pistol is woefully unsuited to anything heavier than Light Guards and Attack Dogs, and while the Shotgun can hole-punch packs, you go through ammo for it fast. The other weapons you get include a chaingun (which renders the pistol irrelevant immediately), and a bazooka. Unfortunately, the one time I got to level 5 and started testing them, the game crashed because I accidentally paused again.
As I understand it, the last boss is JK Rowling, and I will need to do a run later to try to reach her when time allows, because that sounds uproarious.
The actual moment-to-moment gunplay is all right, for something that is designed to feel like Wolfenstein 3D, but the visual presentation is shit and to demonstrate this I've chosen to once more compare it to a game that is now about 30 years old and currently going for the exact same price on Steam and GOG. But if you thought that I was done harping about this game's technical problems, you thought wrong, kiddo, because there's still more. The game is too dark in general and the visuals are exceptionally drab, with everything looking like a warehouse. I get that comparing it to Blake Stone probably isn't fair, because that game had a budget, and a developer team of more than one person, but I'm going to keep doing it because it highlights this game's issues.
Wall clipping, a problem neither Wolfenstein, Doom, or Blake Stone had, is a present issue, and if you head down a curved hallway, it will invariably happen on both sides, like the game is struggling to make it show correctly. You can clip right through larger props, which just makes the game look and feel even more like a slipshod mess.
Everything about this game transcends ineptitude. It is a completely incompetent game that comes from the same embittered mindset that brought you broken pieces of fail like Ethnic Cleansing, yet manages to screw up so hard that it instead simply becomes hilarious. Between the game constantly breaking down, the fact that infinitely more time was clearly spent on the gore than basically anything else, the few things it does right are nearly enough to be competent, but everything else is so hilarious broken that I can't help but end up with a smile on my face.
I hesitated at this point, suspecting that only suffering lay over this threshold.
...Thankfully, my Kiwis, every once in a while I luck out, and the very things that doomed Smash MAGA to being one of the most awful things I sat through in a review for this website conspired to make today's entry, Terfenstein 3D, absolutely hilarious. It is exactly the kind of bad I was hoping Smash MAGA would be, and then more. It is just as mean-spirited, it is just as technologically inept, it is just as glitch-prone, but everything else about the game conspires to make what is, unequivocally, one of the funniest fucking things I've reviewed in years.
It's the rare kind of bad that left me laughing like an idiot for the entire time I was playing it, and now I get to share the experience with all of you.
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you took a Wolfenstein-style FPS game, but had it made by someone who doesn't know a single thing about game design, interface design, graphic design, or tact? Someone who not only can barely fucking make a game, but has an axe to grind so vociferous that it bleeds into the entire project? Well, you do now, and your game is Terfenstein 3D. Leading right out, I notice that there's no story, no instructions, no difficulty selection, and only basic options.
When I get into the game, the mouse sensitivity is set ridiculously high, to the point where I have to nearly halve it, and it's at this point we run into my favorite set of problems the game has. For one, there's no ability to save or load games. You have to play through this thing in one go. Second, going into the pause menu, for any reason, closes the game, because the game is beyond incompetently designed. So we're not even out of the first room, and I've had to restart the damned thing four times because the mouse sensitivity was all corked up, and the game kept making me restart in order to fine tune it.
In the business, this is what we call "foreshadowing."
The game borrows heavily from Wolfenstein 3D, replacing the XX Chromosomes for the Swastika, and JK Rowling for Adolf, but also including a number of things from Doom, such as explosive barrels. The game leads off with you escaping your cell, and then you're out and about. Weirdly, the first few rooms have no enemies whatsoever, so it's mostly a chance to get used to the controls. You start with a pistol and your melee weapon: a rock. There's also a ton of trash cans and industrial equipment around with no real coherence.
The first enemy you encounter are basically the equivalent of Wolf3D's light guards, they reliably go down in 2 bullets and they drop 4 bullets when they die. For some reason, the dev went absolutely mental with the violence in this game. Gore splatters the walls whenever you land a shot on an enemy near them, and the individual enemies all have a ton of different death animations depending on how you kill them. You can gib them with explosive barrels, tear them to shreds with the shotgun at close range; the dev clearly put tons of times into making sure you could commit unspeakable violence against them in as many ways as humanly possible. Close range shots can decapitate, and kills make the floors look the the aftermath of a particle accelerator hit from F.E.A.R.
You know what the game doesn't have, though?
Automatic weapon swapping when ammo runs out.
Or a map screen of any kind.
Or competently designed or placed pickups.
You may wonder what I mean by that last one: In the entire span of me playing this game (and I got to level 5 or so before it crashed on me again), the only health items I found were Health Bonus items, that give 1% health. At no point, not even in the secret areas I found, did I ever see a single larger health item. Just tons of these in random hallways. I have to give it to the devs on this one: every FPS game since the dawn of the genre had some way to restore large amounts of health. Wolfenstein 3D had four different healing items. Blake Stone, pictured in the screenshot on the right, had five, and that wasn't even counting the ones from the vending machines. But Terfenstein? Nah man, play this like you're playing E4M1 from Ultimate Doom.
Similarly, I never encountered a large ammo pickup, despite there being multiple ammo types in the game. Not even in Secrets, did I find any. And, speaking of Secrets....
The majority of the time I encountered a Secret, this is what it was: an empty goddamn hallway with a one-way door on the other side that wouldn't open, except from the other side, and absolutely nothing of value or substance inside. When I did open it from the other side, the reward was a hallway between two places I'd already been or a door that led absolutely nowhere with nothing inside. The majority of these are not marked, so we're back to Wolfenstein 3D wall-humping. Only you move ludicrously slowly, and the Secrets almost always lack anything of value.
One fascinating design decision, and by "fascinating," I mean "utterly inept on every level," is that the game will include doors that literally cannot open and have absolutely nothing behind them. They're just there for decoration, apparently, and they look exactly like every other door in the zone, including and especially the ones that require colored keys to open. So you can run through room after room, clicking "use" on dozens of doors that can't actually open, looking for the doors you need to open, which have no external demarcation whatsoever. And speaking of the doors....
The game is so obsessed with re-creating a game experience like Operation Body Count that it carries over the door glitch! I don't even know how this fucking happens, let alone how something like this gets past playtesting, but here we are. It happens all the time, and it only effects you - never the enemies. Bullets that hit an open doorway will sometimes hit air instead of anything in said doorway. The game likes to throw absolutely gigantic hordes of enemies at you, which presents a problem as they don't drop a heck of a lot of ammo and all of them have alternate melee attacks if they get close.
On top of the light guards, the game has attack dogs, who, like the light guards, can be gibbed or decapitated or dismembered in countless ways. There are also the cleric enemies, who use the power of Christ to throw holy bolts at you and function as this game's equivalent of an Imp from Doom, and can also be violently murdered with multiple different animations. One might call this "excessive," but it's very clear that this was absolutely where the dev behind this game spent a lot of time, because time sure as heck was not spent on level or encounter design.
One of the worst enemies is the Elite Guards, who are broadly the equivalent of the SS Guards in Wolfenstein 3D. They have Shotguns, which on top of making them hit very hard, also means that they throw you around with every every hit. This recoiling appears to be largely random, and on several occasions, getting shot by one launched me out of cover and towards the Soldier that shot me. They drop shotgun ammo, which is nice, because the Shotgun is a decent weapon in this game, but in every conceivable way, they're a worse enemy design than their Nazi counterpart. SS Guards in Wolfenstein 3D were using SMGs, and if you could get to cover, you could minimize damage. The Elite Guards blow their load in a single shot, which means getting tagged by one hurts like hell in a game where health pickups are few and far between.
If the game has any redeeming features, it's that it blatantly steals the subsystem from the SNES port of Doom: namely, if you die, you return to the start of the level with everything you had - infinite lives, to make up for the fact that you can't save. Despite the game not being terribly difficult per se, it is really easy to die in, because of how rare health pickups are and how huge the enemy count is. The pistol is woefully unsuited to anything heavier than Light Guards and Attack Dogs, and while the Shotgun can hole-punch packs, you go through ammo for it fast. The other weapons you get include a chaingun (which renders the pistol irrelevant immediately), and a bazooka. Unfortunately, the one time I got to level 5 and started testing them, the game crashed because I accidentally paused again.
As I understand it, the last boss is JK Rowling, and I will need to do a run later to try to reach her when time allows, because that sounds uproarious.
The actual moment-to-moment gunplay is all right, for something that is designed to feel like Wolfenstein 3D, but the visual presentation is shit and to demonstrate this I've chosen to once more compare it to a game that is now about 30 years old and currently going for the exact same price on Steam and GOG. But if you thought that I was done harping about this game's technical problems, you thought wrong, kiddo, because there's still more. The game is too dark in general and the visuals are exceptionally drab, with everything looking like a warehouse. I get that comparing it to Blake Stone probably isn't fair, because that game had a budget, and a developer team of more than one person, but I'm going to keep doing it because it highlights this game's issues.
Wall clipping, a problem neither Wolfenstein, Doom, or Blake Stone had, is a present issue, and if you head down a curved hallway, it will invariably happen on both sides, like the game is struggling to make it show correctly. You can clip right through larger props, which just makes the game look and feel even more like a slipshod mess.
Everything about this game transcends ineptitude. It is a completely incompetent game that comes from the same embittered mindset that brought you broken pieces of fail like Ethnic Cleansing, yet manages to screw up so hard that it instead simply becomes hilarious. Between the game constantly breaking down, the fact that infinitely more time was clearly spent on the gore than basically anything else, the few things it does right are nearly enough to be competent, but everything else is so hilarious broken that I can't help but end up with a smile on my face.
