Doom’s bloody fingers are all over Heretic but it’s no reskin, it is its own game. I pick up the bow and later the Dragon Claw which is basically the same as the machine gun from Doom. The levels are imaginative and involving rather than Doom’s grim drudge and while you’re only ever looking for keys for doors for exits, it tries to feel creepy and labyrinth without being annoyingly maze-like it does feel like villages and castles and they’re interesting to explore rather than just shoot through it’s more early Elder Scrolls than Doom-like. The mouse acts as both aiming and moving, causing our elf to fall off everything, and you can’t reassign keys but that’s hardly the end of the playable world. Aside from all looking vaguely the same colour, Heretic is more than playable. None of the cutscene continuity, mission marker malarkey, moral choice-making I’m gonna go check out the UseNet and find that secret level. Like how, I space-barred every single wall? If I missed the secret level. My expectation here is to be handed a gun and shoot it until I see the level stats and realise I still missed secrets. I miss this simpler, point and shoot era of course, if a game was released this basic now I’d whinge about it being shallow, but that’s because expectations have changed. I’m an elf (an elf?! I never thought I was an elf, he has a hairy mitt of a shooting arm) who’s taken it upon himself to rid the world of those Riders. There’s a couple of ‘serpent riders’ who have corrupted the kings of various worlds and filled them with their own creatures. I still don’t know why or what I’m doing. But, I’m also instantly back to that era, having simple fun blasting away at the tiny little flying imps. It’s like one of those optician tests to see if you’re colour-blind. Not just because the pixel count is in double-digits, but because there’s a lot of red and green and brown. Still a Blast? Heretic is hard to look at. Let’s go to the land of whatever and find out. Heretic and Blood are the ones I remember most fondly, being much more fun to play, much more involving than the others I have no idea why I was shooting or who I was shooting but I remember the creatures I shot, I remember the weapons I used and the magic spells I cast who forgets turning creatures into chickens? I’m guessing Heretic hasn’t aged well it was built on the Doom Engine so it’s going to be basic but it was overseen by Romero and developers Raven were also behind the good Elite Force and the great Jedi Knight II so maybe it’s withstood the test of time. It felt like Lord of the Rings if Sauron won. I always liked Heretic’s goth sorcery setting, all medieval villages and castles, filled with flying imps, giant floating skulls that fired tornados and those Alien-a-like rip-offs. It was glorious gamer mayhem until Steam ruined it. I’m sure there’s more games listed under ‘Doom Clone’ but back then, with shareware disks traded about and hundreds of magazine CDs filled with demos that piled up in the corner - you could never be sure what you’d played. That half-decade, starting with Wolfenstein and ending with Half-Life, was a grand golden age of familiar, similar fun – Wolf, Doom, Heretic, Rise of the Triad, Duke, Shadow Warrior, Dark Forces, Redneck Rampage, Blake Stone, the mighty Blood until Quake (and Goldeneye for the N64 crowd) they were interchangeable and all great. It was part of such a great era of gaming, thanks to id. The Past I have hugely fond memories of Heretic. A Blast from the Past review If there was one Doom era shooter FBT would call his fave, it would be Blood.
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