Hoo boy.
I thought that during my secondary playthrough, I would not have anything new to say about the gameplay or game design. Needless to say, I thought like an idiot, because not only did I find more technical issues, but more gameplay problems. Let's get right into it.
Through an absolutely
excessive amount of wall-humping, I found a few more secrets in the levels. Most did not have anything of value or note in them. However, several of the new ones I found had the Chainsaw in them. The chainsaw is the most powerful weapon in terms of DPS in this game; minor enemies die instantly to it and tougher ones go down in a few seconds. However, it's a melee weapon with all that implies, and
Terfenstein's damage algorithm is similar to
Wolfenstein 3D's - namely, you can go down in only a few shots at close range.
There is a major problem with every weapon in this game that isn't a melee weapon or Rocket Launcher: Their accuracy is atrocious. they scatter hard - at least a 10 degree divergence, from my tests - but with most of Terfenstein's combat being close, you don't notice this much. What does become very apparent as you play is that about half the arsenal becomes completely irrelevant very,
very quickly. The Pistol is utterly useless against anything more than Light Guards or Attack Dogs, and transcends into actually useless when giant hordes of enemies start to appear. The Shotgun is very useful in the early game and can down packs of lighter enemies, but stops being useful when the numbers bulk up, and the Rock is never useful. Before I get into a far bigger issue this game has, I want you to take note of the item on the left in the above screenshot.
That is a large health item. They
do exist. They are so fucking
rare however, that it borders on parody. Despite finding over 70% of the secrets in the first 6 levels before I got a phone call, accidentally hit the escape button, and the game closed out because I accessed the pause menu after an hour and a half of gameplay, I only found two. Each one brings you 100 Health.
All of which leads me to the game's next big problem the game has: Starting in level 4, the game goes and does this shit:
Does anyone remember how, in some of the
Wolfenstein 3D levels, sound propagation wasn't done correctly, so one bullet would alert every fucking guard in the level? It was more of an issue with the Nocturnal Missions. and usually wasn't a huge deal because of
Wolfenstein 3D's sprite limit. Well, bereft of such a limit, the levels from level 4 onwards turn into fucking
Slaughter Maps. I used the age-old Wolfenstein tactic of doorfighting and this fucking room still cost me over 260 bullets. There are fucking over sixty enemies in that one room - I fucking
counted. And while there's a good number of Dogs and Clerics, the majority of the enemies in this room are
fucking hitscanners - Light Guards and Elite Guards.
For those Kiwis who are too young to have played early-gen FPS games, and also those who, like
@CatParty, were never really into video games, hitscanning attacks mean that when they shoot, the game draws an invisible line between them and you, and then, if you're still on that line during the next stage of the animation, you get hit. Your own guns work basically the same way, but it's way more of a problem when enemies do it to you, because you effectively cannot dodge their fire - you need to put cover between you and them, or jink with perfect timing so they hit less often, which may or may not happen because their attacks have divergence - a small percentile offset that means that their shots don't always go completely straight.
TL;DR: You can't dodge enemy fire in this game, and the sheer number of them starting at level 4 mean you're
going to get shot. This is the exact second the shotgun stopped being useful: when the enemies appeared in such numbers that you can't even thin their packs effectively with it.
Thankfully, I held onto that large health from earlier. The thing is, this sets the fucking tone for the rest of the game. You no longer have spaced out, even-flowing encounters, you have fights with entire fucking platoons of guards - just these giant fucking arena fights where the AI bum rushes you. Did I mention that all of the enemies have alternate melee attacks? Because they do. It's a simple range check like the
Doom Demon melee attack, but means that if you get close, they will punch your shit in.
And most of the fucking time, the only health you can find are small groups of 1% health bonus items.
I couldn't get an image of one while alive, but do you see that purple-clad enemy? That is a fucking
Chaingunner. There's only one in this level, but they will become more and more common going forwards, and they are the worst fucking thing in this game. Bear in mind everything I said above, about the enemy encounters, about the distribution of health items (or in this case, the lack thereof). Now throw in an enemy that fires continually when it fires, takes about 2-3 times more damage than an Elite Guard, and always appears alongside gigantic packs of regular enemies, and you might see the fucking problem: the ammo and health pickups are scattered around and you literally never get enough for either.
This game goes from being laughably easy to fucking
Plutonia in like 3 levels, it's fucking ridiculous. No one fucking playtested this and it shows.
All of the later maps are like this. Just gigantic swarms of enemies rushing in from all angles.
Thankfully, there is the Rocket Launcher. It's a good weapon and works just like
Doom's Rocket Launcher. It's not enough to make this game less of a slog, but it is enough to make the encounters slightly less shit, and ammo is everywhere.
However, the first secret you find it in, pictured above, led me to a really ridiculous discovery, and because I'm the sort of sped who picks up on these sort of things, I'm going to share it with you. The above quote in blood is
Norweigan. This makes sense when you realize that the player character is a blatant author self-insert and lives in Oslo, but the text above reads "Nobody is Free Until Everybody is Free."
I then realized that from the sounds of it, the enemies were speaking Swedish. For the uninitiated,
Sweden decided to go "Yeah, no" to Troonery early in 2020, openly questioning the veracity of their research and in the process, earning the ire of the likes of this game's developer forevermore.
