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7 Views· 29 August 2022

Retro Review - Heretic PC Game Review

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Heretic is a dark fantasy first-person shooter video game created by Raven Software, published by id Software, and distributed by GT Interactive in 1994. It was made available on Steam on August 3, 2007.

Using a modified Doom engine, Heretic was one of the first first-person games to feature inventory manipulation and the ability to look up and down. It also introduced multiple gib objects spawned when a character suffered a death by extreme force or heat. Previously, the character would simply crumple into a heap. The game used randomized ambient sounds and noises, such as evil laughter, chains rattling, distantly ringing bells and water dripping in addition to the background music to further enhance the atmosphere. All music in the game was composed by Kevin Schilder. An indirect sequel, Hexen, was released a year later. Heretic II was released in 1998, which served as a direct sequel continuing the story.

The gameplay of Heretic is heavily derived from Doom, with a level-based structure and an emphasis on finding the proper keys to progress. Many weapons are similar to those from Doom; the early weapons in particular are near-exact copies in functionality to those seen in Doom. Raven did however add a number of touches to Heretic that differentiated it from Doom, notably interactive environments, such as rushing water that pushes the player along, and items. In Heretic, the player can pick up many different items to use at their discretion. These items range from health potions to the "morph ovum", which transforms enemies into chickens. One of the most notable pickups that can be found is the "Tome of Power" which creates a much more powerful projectile from each weapon, some of which change the look of the projectile entirely. Heretic also features an improved version of the Doom engine, sporting the ability to look up and down within constraints, as well as fly. However, the rendering method for looking up and down merely uses a proportional pixel-shearing effect rather than any new rendering algorithm, which distorts the view considerably when looking at high-elevation angles.

As with Doom, Heretic contains different cheat codes that variously give the player invulnerability, all weapons, kill everything on a particular level. However, if the player uses the "all weapons" cheat code from Doom, a message appears warning the player against cheating and takes away all of his weapons, leaving him with only a quarterstaff. If the player uses the "god mode" cheat from Doom, the game will display a message saying "Trying to cheat, eh? Now you die!" and kills the player.

The original shareware release was the first game to come bundled with support for online multiplayer through the nascient DWANGO service.

(Heretic)

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