Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders
Destroy D Sparil, the last demon of the world
Not many pay attention to the stories that older FPS games had to tell. On one hand it was the fault of the games themselves, because they progressed the story through bits of information scattered in between levels, or, most often, they told it in one compact chunk at the beginning of the game, in the credits or in the booklet that accompanies the game only! As such, most impatient gamers would skip through this but altogether, which I must admit I did quite often back in the day!. At any rate, the story this Heretic tells is one concerning an evil force known as D'Sparil which needs to be found and killed by the protagonist. And, of course, the road to accomplishing that is sprinkled with loads of other missions and encounters and minibosses. At any rate, Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders, while showing its age, can still be played, as it is by no means a hermetic experience; it's just that it replaced shooting guns with magic, although the same mechanics apply still to the gameplay. Used to be a scary game back in the day, but today it might just be a bit too claustrophobic, though not that much of a heart stopper! Worth playing? Without a doubt!
Fantasy Doom-style game
While newer horror games either continue to keep us awake at night or start to dumb down, it's the older ones that haunted our childhood. Some games, like Duke Nukem 3D or Doom 1, though very scary, they managed to leave a good impression on us and made us appreciate the horror genre. While I am a fan of Doom, there was a game that pretty much looked like Doom, but topped it and made me forget about it for quite some time. Which one is it? you might ask. Well, it's none other than Heretic, a game that was publish by id Software. Using a modified Doom engine, Heretic was one of the first games where you had an inventory. Heretic plays and feels like any Doom-style FPS, but has a different theme and more creative monsters. But for the time being, I will only discuss about Shadow of the Serpent Riders and this will be short because there's not much to discuss about this expansion pack. This pack doesn't bring new things, other than 2 new episodes to the original game. While it's nice to have new levels to play, the pack could have contained some tweaks either in graphics, sound or gameplay. Or better yet, add some new enemies to fight or more weapons. All in all, it's not bad for an expansion pack, but it could've had more content, other than adding 2 new episodes. But don't think that this ruined the game for me. The game is still good with or without the pack!
