Swords, sorcery, and traps

To wash out the terrible aftertaste of that INDIE PLATFORMER, I got something that's basically its exact opposite, so strap yourself in because we're going to weird and violent places. What I got for you today is a game of good verses evil in a in a horrible land filled with traps, witchcraft, ghosts, angry dog monsters that probably have rabies and demons! Welcome to Hexen!

Sound familiar?

Hexen is a game made on a slightly modified version of the DOOM engine, and it plays in the same FPS style as its predecessor. The basics of the plot is that evil is afoot and three heroes are rolling up to beat the shit out of it. The three heroes fall within the typical DnD party formation: A Warrior, a Cleric, and a Wizard. You choose one of the heroes to play as and they all play differently, both in terms of character statistics (Warrior obviously has the most strength, Wizard the most magic, Cleric is the middle of the road well rounded choice), and with what weapons they get over the course of the game.

The whole game feels like this picture

Hexen doesnt mess around, the levels are big enough to get lost in (you will be glad you have a map), most of the time there's over a hundred monsters per level, crushing wall traps, fireball and poison dart traps, death pits, dark rooms where a bunch of mace wielding lunatics just hang around waiting for you to walk in. And lets not forget that at the start for every level past the first one the main bad guy sticks his face through a magic mirror or something to talk smack to you, to give your likely impending murder a personal touch.

Gotta get up close and personal

Hexen originally came out on MS-DOS way back on the day before Halloween in 1995, developed by Raven Software and published by id Software. The same Raven Software that did work on Call of Duty Black Ops. God only knows how they fell so far. Whats notable is that John Romero was the head producer for Hexen, yet at no point are you told to suck it down, or that you are about to be made someones bitch. So that's good.

All that means though is that you get no warning

 If you like DOOM, or other similar games, or games with a dark fantasy theme, then Hexen is worth checking out. However, as an addition, you might want to snag ZDOOM as well to get it run, it works best with games made with the DOOM engine.

You better be

You can get Hexen here, and ZDOOM here