Project Warlock, All Aboard the Nostalgia Train

Hairy Warlock and The Chamber is Loaded

Boomer shooters are nothing new, pun intended. While the bulk of the nostalgia tickling titles either fall into Doomers or Quakers, there's a lack of Wolfen-types and overall terminology that would make my life easier trying to describe these games. Throwback shooters aim their sights at the vulnerable nostalgic spots on older gamers and do medium damage to our bank accounts. There's the universally accepted breach in periodic accuracy when it comes to adding modern features to "old-school" games. Things like FOV sliders, aspect ratios, high resolutions, and mouse-look make their way into these retro themed titles with little protest. I for one prefer these new quality of life features over being stuck in 4:3 keyboard-only hell. With the development of higher graphic fidelity comes the question of style. 

Take for example modern films, many are shot on the new digital medium, though some filmmakers choose traditional filmstock as a stylistic choice over the more its more conventional counterpart. The frames-per-second have mostly gone unchanged also, where we gamers happily lap up 100+fps in our fps games, but the film industry rarely ventures past the 24 frames that modern technology could easily surpass. This is for good reason, 60 fps just looks wrong. Similarly with videogames, there's artistic choices to be made in the growing fps genre and it's offshoots. Project Warlock might have gameplay and visual elements that adhere to modern sensibilities, but it's been filmed on a vintage 1992 pixel-stock that harkens back to the very birth of fps games. Let's play Project Warlock, Comrades. 

You're a Warlock, Harry

His name is a mystery, his origins unknown, his goal; to become more powerful, a goal that binds both player and character because surviving will require said gain in power. Perk points and upgrades facilitate this scaling throughout this multi-episode adventure and up to the final confrontation. Contrast this by fps characters who's names end in "Nukem" or "guy" that have some objectively good mission statement that could be a Patreon pitch. The plot of Project Warlock is more fitting the character arc of an anime villain, that's a complement. It's like Warlock Dude showed up for the same reasons that we did, to shoot, loot and push the envelope into the mailbox of madness. We're along for the ride that will have us blasting the way through five twisted and corrupted hell-scapes. I may have misread the story text, but each episode seems like a doomed version of reality that is undergoing it's own apocalypse, reminiscent of Bitterman's original journey in Quake 1. Hopping through the different dimensions that's only shared trait it's own corrupting evil that ends in a boss fight. Real lead-bait premise

You Only Live Once, on the Hardest Difficulty

People bash my hobby and tell me to get a life, so I shoot them...a smile! Project Warlock has an old-school life system that, depending on difficulty, will leave you sweating bullets instead of shooting them. Casual mode is the "unlimited credits" arcade hack, while hard and normal difficulties will mean a total loss of progress when those final lives are spent, granted you can find additional lives throughout the game. Very hard mode limits the player to only one life through the entire game, so naturally I didn't try it. Usually 'hard' is the one step-closer to madness that can spice up your life, so I chose it for my first playthrough, almost the perfect difficulty until the final boss. I won't give any plot spoilers, but the final boss of Project Warlock ate up more lives than all the previous chapters combined. I was seriously contemplating the horrific prospect of replaying the entire game due to a single boss and thankfully pulled out a victory at the last minute, heroic, I know. It's not to say that the boss was tough for the typical reason, no. It simply boiled down to an ammo shortage, I guess even a one-man-army can be disabled by a faulty supply-train. Jokes aside, restricted ammo was a very cheap way add difficulty to the final boss, so for that reason alone, I recommend the "normal" setting, at least for your first playthrough. 

The Real Holy Trinity: Guns, Magic and Perks

Upon choosing the difficulty and cleaning out the first stage it's time to check out the Workshop, the safe haven and war-room of Project Warlock. It's got three upgrade kiosks and the teleporter. This is where the magic happens. Player base stats and perks can be upgraded after leveling up, a process that involves collecting the loot hidden all throughout the levels. Base stats like health, mana and strength can be upgraded, this will help meet the requirements of the various perks in the game. The perks are pretty useful and relevant to the fps gameplay. Game changers like boosting ammo or health pickups are essential, there's even a ghost mode that let me walk through enemies, essential to keep from being cornered in tight corridors. Late game things start looking insane, my health had gone from a measly 100pts to about 240, helpful for when enemies started carrying railguns. Early on I thought I'd tough it out and forego the upgrades, that idea didn't last long. 

Another thing that will tip the tides in Warlocks favor is magic itself, yeah, I forgot too. It can be easy to overlook the more subdued ways of the spell-book in lieu of loud shooty-bois. I only played through the game once, so I don't think I gave magic a fair shake. It maybe truly over-powered later on, but it shares upgrade points with guns, so you'd end up with a favorite child, just like my parents. Later I might do a magic focused build for the sake of experiment, after all It's the dark arts that can have us shooting TNT like a rocket launcher or summoning a wave of ice to freeze even the toughest enemies. A quad barreled shotgun can be a great way to...break the ice, so to speak. Leaving scores of enemies in itty bitty defrosting ice-cubes instead of viscera, don't put those in your drink, Comrade. 

Did I mention the quad-shotgun? The guns in Project Warlock really make this game shine, it was about halfway into the first episode that I noticed something interesting. The humble pistol, when upgraded, was blowing enemies into sky-high flying gibs that could have served as signal flares to other bored gamers as if to say "come look, look at what I've discovered!". The shotgun hammered the point home, this game is brutal. If the philosophical idea shared amongst energy drink sipping intellectuals such as myself is correct, there's an argument to be made that there are no great fps games without great shotguns. An underperforming scattergun could turn a whole game mediocre, or at least that's how the thesis goes. Project Warlock is a case study in shotgun power; I don't want it to turn this into "project shotgun" but the absolute gratification of sound and effect down-range is absolutely mind blowing. All of this is before upgrading the double shotgun into it's previously mentioned quad-counterpart. Every gun can be turned into an absolute beast in this game, and you'll need it. 

Come with me and you'll see, a World of Pure Damnation

The fourth kiosk in Warlocks Workshop operates the teleporter, select the episode and level that hasn't been cleaned out and just walk in. From a story perspective, Warlock dude's progression from one level to another is deliberate. Maybe a small detail, but he's going out of his way to clear out the infested locales and confront the beastly bosses that bookend each Episode. Five is the magic number in Project Warlock, so there's five episodes, each with four levels and one bossfight. The four levels are broken up into stages, sometimes just one, sometimes several. Warlock can return to the workshop either by finishing an entire level, which may involve several stages, or by sacrificing a one-life penalty. I never found the need to retreat because I spent my upgrade points consistently. On top of that, there's the fact that every stage is pretty short, so it makes for these bite-sized little fps snacks that gamers crave.

There's a joke about schizophrenic episodes I'm sure...

I'm not going to outline each episode of Project Warlock because discovering them is part of the fun. So the one that really stood out to me as the best, even as to overshadow the others, is chapter two. First, if you haven't seen John Carpenters The Thing, then go watch it. It's Handicks top horror pick of all time, 2nd favourite 80's movie. Fanboy-ism aside, Episode two is my absolute favorite of the bunch. Don't get me wrong, the others are solid and stand on their own thematically, but damn...they even remade the kennel. The final boss for episode two is the type of nightmare fuel that would have both Carpenter and Lovecraft nodding in approval, this is a true homage to a film that must be decades older than the lead dev. The monster designs don't end at chapter two though, every episode has unique enemies that I didn't see recycled until final the chapter. 

Leaving so Soon?

I need to address the fifth and final episode of the game. This is the weakest of the five episodes simply because it recycles a lot of the environments and enemies from the previous four chapters. It's not bad, but it's not fresh either, kind of like leftovers. What is bad is the frustrating insta-death pits of lava that are introduced in the final chapter, it's a completely new obstacle that helps boost the difficulty of the already over-populated maps featuring the all-star lineup of Project Warlocks finest. Granted, this maybe because hard is supposed to be actually hard. If I were to point out one glaring flaw in this game, it'd be the final boss that I wrote about earlier. Like all the bosses, it takes place in it's own fairly open environment that clearly has some respawning pickups, but not nearly enough to cover the lead-tax of killing the most bullet resistant monster in the game, that's saying a lot considering there is an actual tank to dispatch prior to this. I just can't accept a lack of ammo as a design choice in an fps game, especially one that doesn't feature an unlimited ammo weapon like the pistol in Dusk. I could have tried the axe or knife on him, but that would lead to a health shortage pretty quick. Several lives later and the game is done. Pretty damn action packed with a twist ending, all in an eight hour work-day. 

Final thoughts. 

I could complain more about the final boss, but it wasn't impossible because I beat it. Overall I had a blast gunning my way through Project Warlock, the pace and steaming hot action of this true first person shooter game changed my own internal fps tier list. It's so damn good and it's yet another first-title from small startup development team. If Project warlock forecasts anything, its that there's an angry wizard coming to shoot us all, that, and that indie developers are providing a healthy stream of fps action to keep us all entertained regardless of what triple-a developers do to the industry. Now if you don't mind, this carbonated Comrade needs to rest his trigger finger. Stay frosty, Wizards!