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Jimmy

Flash thoughts on Hexen: Deathkings' design

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Flash thoughts on Heretic

Flash thoughts on Hexen

 

Warning!: Surprisingly enough, this is only my opinion. Don't get your cloaca all up in a twist.

 

Only touching on the single-player maps in this set. I don't think I've played Hexen deathmatch... ever. And I'm not gonna start now!

 

HUB 1 - BLIGHT

 

* Ruined Village - Sets the scene quite nicely. Lots of monsters. Teases you with a secret portal. 7/10
* Blight (hub) - Oh boy do we love Slaughtaurs already. The map layout is interesting, but I wish it was more open, like you could just go around that circular perimeter without having to open the big gold doors. The portals can be tackled in any order, so... 5/10
* Badlands - Wastelands if it got a trim. Has some nice inside structures, but actually feels really insubstantial compared to the others in this hub. Has a weird tiny lift that takes you up to a tiny alcove where the planet is. Really suffers quite a bit from the lack of openness. 3/10
* Brackenwood - God. Fucking. Wyverns. The Fighter's worst nightmare. The puzzle is straightforward enough but the switch to the planet is kind of easy to miss. Once you hit that, get outta here. 3/10
* Catacomb - Caaaaaaaaaaaaves. God you can just get lost for days in this place. Hate. Fuck that puzzle to get the planet. Don't give me MORE shit to collect!! 1/10
* Sump - Biblically dire. An almost entirely symmetrical layout, with just way too many stalkers and slaughtaurs roaming around. It gets old. It gets OLD. Then that undulating sludge maze. God forsook this long ago. 0/10
* Pyre (secret) - This map just kind of... exists? It's four rooms with annoying timed doors connecting them. At least it gives you Quietus. Pity accessing it requires humping some random-ass wall in Blight. 4/10

 

HUB 2 - CONSTABLE'S GATE

 

* Constable's Gate (hub) - A Heresiarch boss right out of the... gate. A rather confusing layout composed of tightly-confined corridors, sewer gates, and teleporters. Introduces the hub's puzzle elements well enough, but still not great. 4/10
* Market Place - A sort of Industrial Zone-ish town map, although not nearly as sprawling - not too many points of interest here, I think you only have to grab a skull and a key and you're done. Looks nice. 5/10
* Ordeal - Pretty interesting. A compact enough layout that getting around is only hampered by the abundance of traps. Actually good fun. 8/10
* Locus Requiescat - A graveyard full of dead developers. Eric's Tomb is funny. It didn't actually kill me...? The map itself looks nice, but those sections around the outside where you're jumping over the rocky ledges to get to the crucial switches can get lost. 5/10
* Treasury - You like corridors? We got corridors. Yeesh, I lost my way several times in this. Hardly a finale map. Doesn't even really look like anything. 2/10
* Armory (secret) - Someone just made Guardian of Steel again. Weird, noisy and confusing. For some reason class flags weren't applied to the weapon pickups, so there's like fifteen pickups on this map that you can't use. Weird slightly-bugged messages when you hit the switches. Pretty dreadful in all honesty. 1/10

 

HUB 3 - NAVE

 

* Nave - Busy. Really visually busy. Dozens of monsters loitering and silent-teleporting around the place and they will not stop populating. A large pain in the ass to navigate. 2/10
* Chantry - Another out-of-nowhere Heresiarch. This map's cool, though. That fountain that splits apart and melts into lava is really cool. 6/10
* Dark Watch - Really tight, very monster-dense, and a bit of a hassle to get from place to place. It's okay, could just be so much better. 5/10
* Cloaca - An optional map? That's alright, I guess. It's pretty dark and cramped, though. Not much to see here. 5/10
* Abattoir - Dark and cramped again. Mandatory progression hidden behind walls. Feh. 3/10
* Dark Citadel (boss) - It's... it's just a circle. You made a circle, guys! Monumental letdown. 1/10
* Ice Hold (secret) - Crater full of Wendigos. Guardian of Ice-esque trap rooms. Not great. 3/10

 

Closing thoughts:

 

* Hub 1, minus its intro map, sucks butt. Drags on for fucking ever. The maps are much harder, meaner with their traps and pitfalls, and by jove they're long and windy.
* Hub 2 is mercifully short if you know where to go. Thankful that there were only 3 Yorick Skulls to get instead of 4. It might be the strongest hub here because apart from a few maps that can be awkward to navigate, there's no artificial lengthening of the campaign here as such. You grab some items and put them in the right place, that's it.
* Hub 3 is longer than 2 - I think. Certainly feels that way with the relic puzzle, the clock gear puzzle and the (optional) book puzzle to solve! You probably won't get lost too many times, though, it's pretty generous with its hints on where to go next.
* None of the secret levels are really worth visiting, perhaps aside from Hub 1's which gives you Quietus a tiny bit early. Hub 2's and 3's are surprisingly easy to get to, while Hub 1's "route" to get to the secret is just... what the fuck.

 

Navigation is a bigger pain in this set than regular Hexen. The trapezoid shape for the structure housing the Ethereal Travel portals has been done away with in this set, instead having the portals bookended by simple metal pillars, meaning the portals can be accessed from either side. The hefty downside to this means every Ethereal Travel portal looks the exact same, and you miss out on having the portal structure's outer texture hint at your destination, which was always helpful in Hexen's hubs.

 

The maps feel larger and more sprawling. Hexen had a few like this, namely Wastelands, but a lot of the larger maps in Deathkings are all packed tightly into Hub 1. A really poor move considering players can get bored rigid within the first few maps, looking for switch upon switch upon gem upon gem upon flame mask upon flame mask.

 

However, puzzles are more consistent here than in the regular Hexen campaign. The hubs all introduce the puzzle elements, key locks, etc. pretty much right away. There's less switch-hunting proportionately, I think. Sequences of multiple compulsory switches use the two bull switches with their "mid" animation to denote there are still more switches to find, which is a nice alternative to seeing "3 more to go..." - even if you're not told how many more are to go.

 

Dark Citadel is a laughably pathetic "final boss" map. Perhaps the biggest letdown of all the IWADs' concluding maps. And the intermission texts make the titular "Dark Citadel" sound so huge and threatening! The map is a big circle with nine non-threatening waves of monsters to kill. A boring slog. Korax doesn't even show up! You had a final boss that could interact with the map itself and you didn't include him, guys!!

 

Overall, play this if you dare. It's more Hexen. It has some good parts and some real stinkers. But then so did the original.

 

Overall: 4/10

Edited by Jimmy

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This review is interesting. However it does need a correction:

 

3 hours ago, Jimmy said:

Dark Citadel is a laughably pathetic "final boss". Perhaps the biggest letdown of all the IWADs' concluding maps. And  the intermission texts make the titular "Dark Citadel" sound so huge and threatening! The map is a big circle with nine non-threatening waves of monsters to kill. A boring slog. Korax doesn't even show up! You had a final boss that could interact with the map itself and you didn't include him, guys!!

 

Actually there is no boss named "Dark Citadel". Its the name of a place. The name of the expansion is "Deathkings of the Dark Citadel". The Deathkings are the boss enemies. They are those class bosses which u also fight in vanilla Hexen's hub 5. And u fight them here in the last map of the expansion pack as well.

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For what it's worth, the fact that the Wyverns and Heresiarchs get thrown at you out of nowhere instead of being predictable arena end fights was always one of my favorite things about Deathkings. I don't like the set quite as much as Hexen itself, but it's a solid expansion.

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I still maintain that Deathkings is, if not still the best, at least in the top tier of Hexen map sets, for the exact reason of "It's more Hexen" (except, I would argue, better since it's distilled into a shorter and more "expert mode" campaign, though it has its rough patches).  I don't think Hexen was ever really meant to be a Doomesque game the way Heretic was and most Doomers just don't "get" it at all.  It ain't for them.  I sometimes wonder if there's some parallel universe where the folks at Raven put shapeshifts instead of classes, billed it as a successor to Shadowcaster rather than Heretic, and it found its target audience a lot better.

 

Will wholeheartedly agree that Sump and Dark Citadel should never have passed quality assurance as they are, though.  That maze segment would be annoying for any game but I think Sump could have been redeemed if they'd axed that and put something better in its place.  It had some cool parts.  If you want a take on what Dark Citadel could have been like in a better world, check out the finale of a WAD called Chuxen.  Maybe not perfect but at least an effort was made.

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I really liked Ice Hold and Bracken Wood, I'm surprised to see that you didn't. I thought they looked decent and were interesting enough. All in all I tend to agree with your points. I did find the finale to be a big letdown of a boss map, perhaps there could be an actual "Citadel" map with a big bulky fortress structure and plenty of stuff to do before we actually fight the "Deathkings", but I guess a small and bare arena style map will have to do. But I'm glad it exist because Hexen is awesome and the more, the better.

 

The only thing that I think the expansion does better is making things more complex by including more puzzles per map. It only has 3 hubs but because you have more things to do make it so it feels like the original game. 


 

Spoiler

 

I do remember getting killed in Eric's Tomb because I attacked the gargoyles in his tomb. Maybe the script is a little bit glitchy but it suppose to gib you if you injure the gargoyles inside the tomb. Maybe you straight out killed them before?


 

 

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I've played Heretic, HeXen and Death Kings of the Dark Citadel through once each, using ZDoom a long time ago, so it's been interesting going through @Jimmy's reviews here to see how they stack up to my vague memories. Heretic has infinitely more memorable visuals and visual design, it seems, as Jimmy's descriptions evoked clear memories for me of what the icy, lava and underwater environments were. HeXen on the other hand... It's a game with a lot of ideas, and a very valuable contribution to ZDoom with ACS, but it is just not very good. I think I'd like to have a go at a map for it one day, to see if I can make something I'd enjoy more from the stock resources.

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Eh, I think they kinda rushed it. But hey, it's HeXen...

 

That's all I have to say.

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The only good thing Hexen gave to this world was a bunch of nice medieval textures and sprites to use in Heretic.

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The biggest disappointment to me was that it didn't bring anything new. Some new textures, new music, a new monster type maybe, even if it's just an oldie from Heretic making a coming back, anything really. At the very least, a new victory text.

 

I mean, the comparison here isn't with Shadow of the Serpent Riders or Ultimate Doom, which were extensions made for the commercial release of the original game, since Hexen is Heretic's version of Doom II. The comparison is with Final Doom. The fact it's literally nothing more than a level pack without any new content besides the levels, and that they didn't even change the endgame sequence, it's just ugh.

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Deathkings was mostly ass, like Hexen itself. Hexen II is where it's at! It even has a decent add-on episode in Portal Of Praevus.

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Oh yeah, Hexen II was great. It even brought back the Tome of Power!

 

Heretic II... was, uh... different. I still enjoyed it though. Now if only it came out on Steam, I will gladly ditch that 5.25" ODD...

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I liked Deathkings precisely because it was just Hexen, but more, which I already consider the best game in the original trilogy (not counting Heretic 2).

 

The fact that it was more combat focused this time around than the original was also a plus, but that meant it also went a bit crazy with ugh... Slaughtaurs in some parts... making Mage playthroughs a bit tedious.

 

Hexen 2 was good too, but that Egyptian hub almost killed it for me.

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I mostly concur with Jimmy - the levels have serious design issues throughout and never get the balance between combat and puzzles right - both parts constantly get in the way of each other, the main problem being that most of Hexen's monsters are not that much fun to fight when they come in packs.

 

When I play I mostly use the easiest skill and load a mod on top that disables the respawn scripts, because they kill all the fun for sure.

 

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Yeah my main issue with Deathkings is the CONSTANT respawning monsters (including dangerous baddies like Slaughtaurs), it's tedious and really discourages exploration. Which is antithetical to the game's very design. 

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7 hours ago, Uncle 80 said:

Deathkings was mostly ass, like Hexen itself. Hexen II is where it's at! It even has a decent add-on episode in Portal Of Praevus.

Agreed. Hexen II was cool, somewhat innovative. Hexen felt like a mish-mash of stillborn, poorly executed ideas. Heretic I totally understand. Hexen's following? Nope. 

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