Awesome old school fps in the style of Quake 1. I don't really get the quite low review score.
Only downsides I see is weapon balancing is a bit weird, like the alt fire of the shotgun is so op, but the rocket launcher is way too weak. Levels are huge, maybe a bit too big sometimes. Even though they are never empty, they are always great designed, with great rewards for exploring. A bit annoying is that you unlock highest difficulty by playing through the game once "forcing" achievement hunters to play through it twice. While I really enjoyed my first run, my second run was not needed from my side, got a bit boring.

Very slight thumbs up. The game is fine. Good array of weapons, punchy combat, solid sound design, mostly good looking levels. But personally I only find it enjoyable in short bursts. The problem is pacing and variety. Whenever I boot this up I have a decent time with it but after 30 to 60 minutes my enthusiasm starts to decrease until I turn it off and maybe start it up again a week later.

Most combat scenarios play out the exact same way, enemies are kinda randomly placed or spawned in, not much thought was put into what would be interesting compositions. Doesn't hold a candle to the FPS classics of yesteryear.

But apart from that, nothing about it is particularily bad or terrible. So yeah, slightly recommended I guess if you want a non-terrible FPS.

It's good when the limited quicksaves are turned off.

While the weapons are perfect, the levels that take an hour or so to complete test my patience.

This is a lukewarm recommendation.

Unfortunate, underwhelming and poorly paced.

The comparisons to Quake and its variants can be made from dusk till dawn, but as a game standing on its own, it has far too many issues to be a compelling game in its own right.

Pacing in FPS games is a difficult balance. Levels in Doom & Quake can be in the single-digit minutes long, and more open, larger levels can go upwards of 20 minutes. However, in Wrath levels are on average around 30 minutes each, with a whopping 40-45 for the longer levels.

Almost all weapons are obtained within the first level and don't have satisfying alternate fire modes, making gunplay feel mundane and enemies do not have a satisfying reaction to the effect of gunfire (Except from the gibbing of enemies, which is incredibly satisfying).

Each level is extremely long and it's constant shooting with no sense of escalating drama or tension in either gameplay or in presentation.

I wanted to like this game a lot more than I did. I pushed through the monotony for another hour and can't bear loading it up again.

Overall we just have far better options in the new age of the boomer shooter, and this one sits firmly at the feet of the recent greats of this genre such as Prodeus, Amid Evil and Ion Fury (among others).

Multiplayer and Coop was promised and cancelled. Some mod was announced but meh

this game is hella sweet

So I've purchased this game in its early-access days way back and played through the available content then as well (chapter 1 of 3, excluding the chapter's boss) and I was generally hyped for this one to finally reach 1.0.

Now that I've played through chapter 1 again (this time including the boss) and the majority of chapter 2, I somehow – unfortunately – struggle to recommend this game. I still give a thumbs up since I don't think this is a bad game, but let me just say that I did not complete it and I'm really not sure if I actually want to finish it. I'll try to explain below.

Let's start with the things I really like and think are well done. First, the graphics and general art style work perfectly for this kind of retro-inspired shooter. The game builds up a really good atmosphere, especially when also considering the music and general ambiance in the levels.

I also think that the core gameplay is rock-solid. There's a good variety of weapons, each one serving its very specific purpose within the combat scenarios the game throws you into (i.e. melee, close combat, medium-ranged combat, and long ranged combat). These also feature some great design and each weapon has a secondary fire mode, mixing things up quite nicely. All of these serve late-game purposes as well, so there's no "obsolete" weapon (at least in my opinion).

There's also a variety of "artifacts" that can be found throughout the game. These are basically some consumables that grant special effects for a limited amount of time, e.g. getting health back upon killing enemies or double damage. There's also some more interesting stuff, but I mostly thought these are a bit "gimmicky" and not really required to proceed.

Particularly noteworthy is the melee weapon you get from the beginning of the game. This wrist blade can be used to engage in combat, obviously, and it does massive damage. Additionally, it can also be used for traversal, allowing for some mid-air jump control and in general faster movement speed (you can do some sort of lunge forward when charging up the blade). Pretty cool in my opinion!

Movement is also very well done, which comes as no surprise considering the engine the game is using (source-port of the original Quake engine). So, all good in that department as well.

Regarding enemies: As with the weapons, there's some decent variety here, and they all have a distinct role to play in the combat encounters (some will rush you and try to engage in melee, others stay back and fire at you from range, and so on). Since Wrath's levels feature an insane amount of enemies, these make for some quite intense combat scenarios.

So this all sounds pretty good right? Unfortunately, for me at least the game kind of falls apart though because of one major flaw: It's just waaaaaay too long for its own good.

Most of the levels in wrath are outright massive and often times drag on for what seems like forever. Bigger is not always better in that regard! I don't want to fight endless hordes of the same monsters in samey-looking environments for 45 to 60 minutes, it just becomes tedious. There are also rarely any "slower" parts, you are basically in combat non-stop, which just gets annoying after a while.

This one major flaw basically affects all the positive stuff I've mentioned above: Enemy variety is solid, but not when your game just goes on and on and on and just lets you fight against the same types of enemies from level 1 till level 15. Same holds true for the weapons. No matter the chapter you're in, you're always fighting the same monsters you fought in the chapter that came before using the same weapons you've used all along (for the most part). Most of all the stuff Wrath has to offer (including enemies, weapons and artifacts) basically don't change all that much after 1/3rd of the game.

I also have a problem with the structure of the game. There's a hub-world in each chapter where you can choose the order of levels however you like. Not sure why you would want that though in that kind of game. The problem here is: The levels have to work regardless of which one you choose first, meaning that each level basically starts the same... low-level enemies only until you find the better weapons, which is just boring. This is especially true if you consider starting each level with just the wrist blade (e.g. after dying and without any save-artifacts left in your inventory)

While I'm at it, I also have to mention the save-system, which I just... hate. There's three different methods of saving in this game: There's an auto-save at the beginning of each level, there's shrines to find throughout the level (which serve as save-points while also replenishing the players health), and there saving through an artifact (basically quick-saves, but limited in number since you have to find those in the levels). Funny thing is: You can actually disable this limit in the gameplay options, so I guess they knew that this system kinda sucks? Why not just allow quick-saving/quick-loading instead of whatever this is? The most annoying part for me though: Whenever the game saves, it "freezes" for like a second, which is just annoying and immersion-breaking.

So, like I said in the beginning, I don't think this is a bad game, far from it. It's actually pretty good, and the core gameplay mechanics work perfectly fine. This might also just be a "me-thing", maybe for you this whole "this game is too long" isn't that big of a deal. I just think that there are more interesting games out there within the same genre, but that's just my humble opinion. There just isn't anything super "special" about Wrath which makes it stick out from the rest.

Eh, what can I say? I'm more than halfway through the game, and I'm really bored.

This game shows real promise in the first few hours. It's sort of this "Metroid Prime meets Dark Souls" old-school FPS setup with a grimdark atmosphere combined with a platforming focus. The central mechanic of the game is the Ruination Blade which lets you do a mid-air dash using the charge attack. So at first it's a lot of fun zipping back and forth with the dash attack and collecting guns. After you get to the third stage or so, then reality starts to set in:

- All of the enemies that you're fighting are mostly the same 3-5 types, and they're all very predictable in how you approach them and what types of ammo they drop. Each of the three hub worlds have a different biome/setting, but the enemies largely do not change even though the environment drastically changes every 5 stages. They may toss a few new enemy types in here and there, but it's mostly going to be fighting those 3-5 types for the entire game.

- The level designs are really repetitive. You enter a room, grab a key, etc. and all of a sudden the game spawns a wave of enemies to fight so you hunker down behind some cover or in a corner, try to pick them off, finally clear the room, move to the next room, have a new wave spawn, rinse, repeat... The enemy placements get worse and worse as the game progresses with one of the favorite choices being enemies that spawn behind you or next to you, and it ends up feeling like the goal of the game is to spawn as many enemies as possible as frequently as possible in the worst initial placements possible. Also, the boss fights aren't really that fun.

- The weapons that you collect along the way aren't that interesting, and the ones that are interesting aren't that practical for use in combat and/or have very rare ammo drops. In general though, most of the weapons are interchangeable, and you're just using whatever weapon you have the most ammo for. The consumable items aren't that interesting either and using them is so cumbersome that you're often just better off not trying to use them at all in combat.

- The game's progression isn't that great either. You cannot revisit a hub after completing it which really cuts down on the exploration. Also, the enemy counters for the stages seem to always be broken which is frustrating if you just want to casually revisit a stage and explore some more while 100%'ing the enemy kills.

- Making things more tedious is the fact that the game has about the most ridiculous save system I've ever seen. It has not 1, not 2, but THREE types of game saves: an autosave that triggers between stages, quicksaves that are limited-quantity consumables (Soul Tethers), and checkpoints within the stages that you can only use once per file (Shrines). The three types of saves are all stored in their own category in the save menu, and it's really hard to keep track of which type of save you used last without looking at the timestamp for each of your save categories and figuring out which one is the newest.

So given that the enemy and level designs don't really change much (or at least change for the better) as the game drags on, I'm just bored. I started getting concerned about the game's repetitiveness partway through the first hub, but by the middle of the second hub I was truly bored. I decided to stick with it until the third/final hub just to see if it changed things up at all, but it's just more of the same stuff as the first hub but with more "lock you in a room and spawn enemies" nonsense.

I like old-school shooters and even find newer retro-styled shooters like Ion Fury to be OK, but this one is really a "one-trick pony" when it comes to creativity. You'll have a great time for the first few stages but then the monotony will set in and you'll find yourself wanting to play something else. I may be able to one day convince myself to finish off the rest of the game, but the 25-30 hours that I've put into it feel like an eternity - and not in a good way.

Play.

Game of the year.