- Joined
- Jun 2, 2020
Have you ever awoken one day and thought to yourself, “Golly gee willickers, I sure do want to reduce anime girls to their constituent components!”?
If you have, then first I’d suggest getting some help. Barring that, consider The Citadel – a first person shooter about a mute robot girl with a staggering amount of ordinance and no pants to store it all in setting off on a gore-slicked path to (what else?) kill a god.
Released in August 2020, The Citadel draws inspiration from 90’s shooter titles for its mechanics and 90’s anime films for its visuals. Playing as an android known only as The Martyr, you are tasked with killing 7 Angels and their sleeping God. There’s a story here that tries to make itself important, but like classic Doom, you’re probably not going to give much of a shit between barreling through the stages and turning your foes into meat confetti.
Much of the game’s fame and/or infamy comes from its art style. It is unapologetic – the main artist claims he drew much of his inspiration from H.R. Geiger, Ghost in the Shell, and the concept of man/machine integration in general. In its calm moments, you get these intriguing, not-quite seamless fusions of meat and metal through the lens of Japanese visual sensibilities. When it starts leaning into the “blood, gore, guts, veins in your teeth” SuperTurboUltraViolence of a classic shooter, then…
… Well. Blood and booba, wires and wenches, whatever you want to call it. It’s right up there with old OAVs showing bomb victims getting peeled like potatoes in the blast wave, just with a bit more iron in the middle. Like some sort of reverse techno-Twinkie.
In between all of this, however, is some solid gameplay. I’ve seen The Citadel described as “more of a tactical shooter than a boomer shooter”, and while I’m not intimately familiar with the difference, I understand the general idea, I think.
At least at first, you won’t quite be zipping around like Flynn Taggart or John Quake, instead peeking around corners to magdump your seven-shot handgun before ducking back to reload one round at a time between volleys of return fire. Yes, reloads are very much a factor, with a small number of your arsenal being loaded singly instead of by magazines. In addition, you have a stamina and hunger meter along side your health – stamina is spent on sprinting, jumping, and kicking, while hunger serves as a slowly draining cap for both health and stamina.
To muddle things further, most projectiles also have travel time and drop you need to compensate for on both ends. Sure, this means leading your shots a little against distant foes, but also gives you the opportunity to dodge a lot of incoming fire. With a blistering HP cap of 24 points (if you keep the Martyr fed), you’ll come to appreciate it, as well as armor that blocks 100% of incoming damage.
On the technical side, the game is mostly competent. I only had it crash a small number of times, one one of which while recording this project. There’s a bit of jank and rough edges with the controls and how some of the visuals are processed, but rarely did I feel like these were a serious detriment to the overall experience. Your own mileage may vary, of course.
Anyway, the point is this game left enough of a good impression that I decided to make some manner of playthrough/review thread. However, I lack the keen analytical skills of our resident turboautist @Jaimas, which means what probably should be a much shorter affair is going to crash headlong into my own stupidity. And since he tends to spend his effort on unmitigated garbage (because it’s easier to lampoon), someone has to try. Unfortunately, that’s me.
Now, I’ll let you in on a little something: I’m not exactly a connoisseur of shootan geams. I didn’t play much of the old guard classics like Doom, Duke Nukem, Marathon, or any of what might now be lumped in with “boomshoot”. I didn’t even touch Half-Life until nearly the 2010s, and my own most-played shootmans are stuff like Left 4 Dead, the System Shock remake, and Nightmare Reaper. Hell, the only version of Doom 3 I ever played was the Xbox one.
So, for better or worse, I didn’t know a whole lot about this game’s genre forebears going in. What baggage I have in shooters is tied up in stuff like Bioshock and the older Halo titles. Make of that what you will.
After a brief loading screen, we get flashbanged from on high. It seems God not only hates a quitter, but an oversleeper as well.
Stepping forward brings us to difficulty selection. The left path is Easy Mode, requiring nothing but walking; the right path is Normal Mode, needing a simple double jump to clear; Hard Mode is at the top, requiring you to double jump off of the starting platform for the extra height.
I am not enough of a journalist to play on Easy, nor enough of a psycho for Hard. Normal it is!
Two important things One important and one less-important thing; 95% of stage exits are dropping down some hole in the floor, and the Martyr is not equipped with high-yield ballistics.
Donning her spiritual armor, the Martyr is given a weapon and her mission. Occupying slot 1, using the Forgiver is a sign that something has gone very wrong and you are out of better options.
If you must pack an emergency weapon, the Meta-Magnum pistol is that better option, though not by much.
After a long drop and a title card…
… It’s go time.
Well, sort of. We’re still technically in tutorial territory, but if you die in Canada, you die in real life.
Just up the ramp are the first enemies. They don’t take much punishment, which is good for several reasons.
One of those reasons I mentioned earlier: the Meta-Magnum reloads one round at a time, and if you empty it out you need to re-cock the chamber with the first round. You’d think it’s a pain in the ass to deal with, and it is, but you get used to it before long. Or get mag-fed guns and never look back, whichever works.
Slain foes drop money and sometimes ammo, while consumables to restore health, stamina, and hunger are peppered about the levels.
After a small shootout, it’s time to learn about doors. That lamp-looking thing is a switch.
Naturally, in the adjoining yard are a bunch of Tturrets shooting blue glowy shit at us. There are no prizes for shooting them right now, so I waste my time on it anyway.
In the next room, a fucking tank is just sitting here, waiting to ambush the Martyr.
Shooting it is also a terrible idea, so I do it anyway for a laugh and run the fuck away to the exit, ending the tutorial.
The Martyr is unceremoniously dumped into the unnamed intermission zone.
This is one of the few safe areas, with a little game info and the only NPCs not trying to murder the shit out of you.
This lanky boi is Lysander, who helps spell out the window dressing: shit’s fucked, kill a god, make us whole, the usual.
He leaves us some supplies and fucks right off, introducing our soon-to-be best buddy, Tycho.
Tycho is the store, and shows up in nearly every level. Sometimes he’s well hidden, other times he’s just tucked in a corner somewhere obvious.
Depending on your progress, Tycho will sell guns and ammo, different levels of armor, consumables, and even upgrades to a few weapons. Clearing an act will update his stock when you return to the Intermission room, so you can even get a preview of what’s on offer if you’re short of cash.
The pillars surrounding him, currently blocked by debris, allow you to replay each act after you’ve unlocked it. Mostly just there if you miss the secret level, but I suppose you can use them to grind if you’re desperate.
But, that’s not important for now. Can’t kill a god from inside the Divine Break Room, after all.
Okay, now it’s go time.
To my understanding, Cultists are the Imp stand-ins for Citadel. They fire slow-moving projectiles that give you plenty of time to dodge, though their hammers will collide with your own bullets as well. Bad luck with shot trajectory can mean they take more ammo than you need to put down.
You’re also given a few grenades and some packs of enemies to use them on. Grenades can be cooked, but obviously you want to throw it before it goes off in your hand.
Also, not every drop shaft is a level exit. Don’t let your guard down.
Meet the Auto Rifle, a dependable number with a 50-round magazine that renders the Meta-Magnum all but useless. Ammo for this drops like penny candy, so you are rarely at risk of running dry beyond the early parts of E1M1, maybe M2.
Oh yes, we’ll get along fine.
Other than Tycho, you can spend your hard-earned cash at vending machines for consumables. All of them sell their contents for 100 a pop; this one has rations.
Or, you can just be a cheapass and kick the machine, breaking it for a free drop.
Brown-robed foes, apparently called Sufferers, are jihadibots. Deal enough damage to them and they explode, simple stuff.
You can shoot their heads off and they won’t detonate, but the corpse remains and can still be set off afterwards by damage. Mostly a nuisance, but can be useful on occasion as a meat-based IED.
Charge up a staircase, gun down a few more unfortunates…
… and we’re home free. If you’re not secret hunting or hauling shit back and forth to Tycho, levels in The Citadel are short – few of my recordings took longer than 10 minutes, and maybe one or two any longer than 15. 5 to 10 is the average.
E1M2 opens with a bit more trouble. You’re given another Auto Rifle and a couple of mags, but the nearby rooftops are littered with Grunts packing the same.
There’s a lot of duck-and-shoot for now, since without armor the Martyr is about as resilient as her foes, which is to say: not very.
Pushing forward gets you face-to-hood with a pack of Cultists, too.
Climbing up to one of the rooftops gets you a clear line of sight on several enemies…
… as well as this ledge jutting out above the starting area. The game loves putting stuff behind where you started.
It also loves its instakill pits. I will complain about this, at length, later.
Let’s try that again.
Up here is the Whalegun, an anti-materiel rifle that lives in slot 8. This is one of the few guns you might need to buy ammo for, as drops for it are few and far between.
Soon enough, we run into one of these Bulldozer-looking motherfuckers. That’s a Flamer, one of the toughest non-tank enemies. I hurl about 3 or 4 grenades at its feet as I kite it out the door to save rifle ammo; otherwise, I could have dumped every round I have and still not killed the damn thing.
There’s a nearby chokepoint with grenade-hurling foes and two Grunts dug in with machine guns, but it’s nothing a little tacticool action can’t solve.
There are a few ways to get back to the earlier rooftops and pick up the goodies scattered around before the end of the map. Doing so maxes out my rifle ammo in the process from all the Grunt corpses up there.
The last room has some token resistance, with the quartet of Turrets being the most troublesome.
But unlike gravity, it’s nothing the Martyr can’t handle.
If you have, then first I’d suggest getting some help. Barring that, consider The Citadel – a first person shooter about a mute robot girl with a staggering amount of ordinance and no pants to store it all in setting off on a gore-slicked path to (what else?) kill a god.
Released in August 2020, The Citadel draws inspiration from 90’s shooter titles for its mechanics and 90’s anime films for its visuals. Playing as an android known only as The Martyr, you are tasked with killing 7 Angels and their sleeping God. There’s a story here that tries to make itself important, but like classic Doom, you’re probably not going to give much of a shit between barreling through the stages and turning your foes into meat confetti.
Much of the game’s fame and/or infamy comes from its art style. It is unapologetic – the main artist claims he drew much of his inspiration from H.R. Geiger, Ghost in the Shell, and the concept of man/machine integration in general. In its calm moments, you get these intriguing, not-quite seamless fusions of meat and metal through the lens of Japanese visual sensibilities. When it starts leaning into the “blood, gore, guts, veins in your teeth” SuperTurboUltraViolence of a classic shooter, then…
… Well. Blood and booba, wires and wenches, whatever you want to call it. It’s right up there with old OAVs showing bomb victims getting peeled like potatoes in the blast wave, just with a bit more iron in the middle. Like some sort of reverse techno-Twinkie.
In between all of this, however, is some solid gameplay. I’ve seen The Citadel described as “more of a tactical shooter than a boomer shooter”, and while I’m not intimately familiar with the difference, I understand the general idea, I think.
At least at first, you won’t quite be zipping around like Flynn Taggart or John Quake, instead peeking around corners to magdump your seven-shot handgun before ducking back to reload one round at a time between volleys of return fire. Yes, reloads are very much a factor, with a small number of your arsenal being loaded singly instead of by magazines. In addition, you have a stamina and hunger meter along side your health – stamina is spent on sprinting, jumping, and kicking, while hunger serves as a slowly draining cap for both health and stamina.
To muddle things further, most projectiles also have travel time and drop you need to compensate for on both ends. Sure, this means leading your shots a little against distant foes, but also gives you the opportunity to dodge a lot of incoming fire. With a blistering HP cap of 24 points (if you keep the Martyr fed), you’ll come to appreciate it, as well as armor that blocks 100% of incoming damage.
On the technical side, the game is mostly competent. I only had it crash a small number of times, one one of which while recording this project. There’s a bit of jank and rough edges with the controls and how some of the visuals are processed, but rarely did I feel like these were a serious detriment to the overall experience. Your own mileage may vary, of course.
Anyway, the point is this game left enough of a good impression that I decided to make some manner of playthrough/review thread. However, I lack the keen analytical skills of our resident turboautist @Jaimas, which means what probably should be a much shorter affair is going to crash headlong into my own stupidity. And since he tends to spend his effort on unmitigated garbage (because it’s easier to lampoon), someone has to try. Unfortunately, that’s me.
Now, I’ll let you in on a little something: I’m not exactly a connoisseur of shootan geams. I didn’t play much of the old guard classics like Doom, Duke Nukem, Marathon, or any of what might now be lumped in with “boomshoot”. I didn’t even touch Half-Life until nearly the 2010s, and my own most-played shootmans are stuff like Left 4 Dead, the System Shock remake, and Nightmare Reaper. Hell, the only version of Doom 3 I ever played was the Xbox one.
So, for better or worse, I didn’t know a whole lot about this game’s genre forebears going in. What baggage I have in shooters is tied up in stuff like Bioshock and the older Halo titles. Make of that what you will.
After a brief loading screen, we get flashbanged from on high. It seems God not only hates a quitter, but an oversleeper as well.
Stepping forward brings us to difficulty selection. The left path is Easy Mode, requiring nothing but walking; the right path is Normal Mode, needing a simple double jump to clear; Hard Mode is at the top, requiring you to double jump off of the starting platform for the extra height.
I am not enough of a journalist to play on Easy, nor enough of a psycho for Hard. Normal it is!
Donning her spiritual armor, the Martyr is given a weapon and her mission. Occupying slot 1, using the Forgiver is a sign that something has gone very wrong and you are out of better options.
If you must pack an emergency weapon, the Meta-Magnum pistol is that better option, though not by much.
After a long drop and a title card…
… It’s go time.
Well, sort of. We’re still technically in tutorial territory, but if you die in Canada, you die in real life.
Just up the ramp are the first enemies. They don’t take much punishment, which is good for several reasons.
One of those reasons I mentioned earlier: the Meta-Magnum reloads one round at a time, and if you empty it out you need to re-cock the chamber with the first round. You’d think it’s a pain in the ass to deal with, and it is, but you get used to it before long. Or get mag-fed guns and never look back, whichever works.
Slain foes drop money and sometimes ammo, while consumables to restore health, stamina, and hunger are peppered about the levels.
After a small shootout, it’s time to learn about doors. That lamp-looking thing is a switch.
Naturally, in the adjoining yard are a bunch of Tturrets shooting blue glowy shit at us. There are no prizes for shooting them right now, so I waste my time on it anyway.
In the next room, a fucking tank is just sitting here, waiting to ambush the Martyr.
Shooting it is also a terrible idea, so I do it anyway for a laugh and run the fuck away to the exit, ending the tutorial.
The Martyr is unceremoniously dumped into the unnamed intermission zone.
This is one of the few safe areas, with a little game info and the only NPCs not trying to murder the shit out of you.
This lanky boi is Lysander, who helps spell out the window dressing: shit’s fucked, kill a god, make us whole, the usual.
He leaves us some supplies and fucks right off, introducing our soon-to-be best buddy, Tycho.
Tycho is the store, and shows up in nearly every level. Sometimes he’s well hidden, other times he’s just tucked in a corner somewhere obvious.
Depending on your progress, Tycho will sell guns and ammo, different levels of armor, consumables, and even upgrades to a few weapons. Clearing an act will update his stock when you return to the Intermission room, so you can even get a preview of what’s on offer if you’re short of cash.
The pillars surrounding him, currently blocked by debris, allow you to replay each act after you’ve unlocked it. Mostly just there if you miss the secret level, but I suppose you can use them to grind if you’re desperate.
But, that’s not important for now. Can’t kill a god from inside the Divine Break Room, after all.
Okay, now it’s go time.
To my understanding, Cultists are the Imp stand-ins for Citadel. They fire slow-moving projectiles that give you plenty of time to dodge, though their hammers will collide with your own bullets as well. Bad luck with shot trajectory can mean they take more ammo than you need to put down.
You’re also given a few grenades and some packs of enemies to use them on. Grenades can be cooked, but obviously you want to throw it before it goes off in your hand.
Also, not every drop shaft is a level exit. Don’t let your guard down.
Meet the Auto Rifle, a dependable number with a 50-round magazine that renders the Meta-Magnum all but useless. Ammo for this drops like penny candy, so you are rarely at risk of running dry beyond the early parts of E1M1, maybe M2.
Oh yes, we’ll get along fine.
Other than Tycho, you can spend your hard-earned cash at vending machines for consumables. All of them sell their contents for 100 a pop; this one has rations.
Or, you can just be a cheapass and kick the machine, breaking it for a free drop.
Brown-robed foes, apparently called Sufferers, are jihadibots. Deal enough damage to them and they explode, simple stuff.
You can shoot their heads off and they won’t detonate, but the corpse remains and can still be set off afterwards by damage. Mostly a nuisance, but can be useful on occasion as a meat-based IED.
Charge up a staircase, gun down a few more unfortunates…
… and we’re home free. If you’re not secret hunting or hauling shit back and forth to Tycho, levels in The Citadel are short – few of my recordings took longer than 10 minutes, and maybe one or two any longer than 15. 5 to 10 is the average.
E1M2 opens with a bit more trouble. You’re given another Auto Rifle and a couple of mags, but the nearby rooftops are littered with Grunts packing the same.
There’s a lot of duck-and-shoot for now, since without armor the Martyr is about as resilient as her foes, which is to say: not very.
Pushing forward gets you face-to-hood with a pack of Cultists, too.
Climbing up to one of the rooftops gets you a clear line of sight on several enemies…
… as well as this ledge jutting out above the starting area. The game loves putting stuff behind where you started.
It also loves its instakill pits. I will complain about this, at length, later.
Let’s try that again.
Up here is the Whalegun, an anti-materiel rifle that lives in slot 8. This is one of the few guns you might need to buy ammo for, as drops for it are few and far between.
Soon enough, we run into one of these Bulldozer-looking motherfuckers. That’s a Flamer, one of the toughest non-tank enemies. I hurl about 3 or 4 grenades at its feet as I kite it out the door to save rifle ammo; otherwise, I could have dumped every round I have and still not killed the damn thing.
There’s a nearby chokepoint with grenade-hurling foes and two Grunts dug in with machine guns, but it’s nothing a little tacticool action can’t solve.
There are a few ways to get back to the earlier rooftops and pick up the goodies scattered around before the end of the map. Doing so maxes out my rifle ammo in the process from all the Grunt corpses up there.
The last room has some token resistance, with the quartet of Turrets being the most troublesome.
But unlike gravity, it’s nothing the Martyr can’t handle.
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