The retro shooter Prodeus offers a short, crisp campaign, multiplayer, a powerful editor and lots of community content for little money.
I don”t know when it last felt so good to mow down entire legions of space zombies with an overpowered minigun. I have no idea when the last time was that I so deliberately provoked a visit from the police because I just can”t stop myself from turning the speakers up to full blast while playing and depriving the neighbours of sleep.
I also don”t know when I last searched so meticulously for secrets in a shooter, because secret doors and switches usually leave me completely cold in this genre. All I know is that Prodeus is the best damn shooter I”ve played since Doom 2016.
Table of Contents
You are superior
Prodeus offers you a superior arsenal for which you don”t have enough number keys on the keyboard! After the obligatory starter pistol and shotgun, you carry your first assault rifle, Akimbo, and mow down rooms full of enemies with ease. The plasma gun lets you mark enemies, whereupon your fired projectiles always find their target unerringly, even around the corner if necessary. If you wish, you can empty all four barrels of the super shotgun into the next best intermediate boss at the same time, and the launchers that are unavoidable in the genre are also available in the flavours rocket and grenade.
The weapons feel bang on, as they”re all off-the-charts powerful and benefit from the game”s fantastic sound design. I”m not just talking about the extremely juicy gunshot sounds – even mundane reloading sounds unspeakably satisfying.
You do visible, massive damage, send limbs flying and flood the in-game maps with oceans of blood. It”s totally over the top, and the game”s pixelated retro look makes it feel quite cartoony. It”s a homage to shooters of days gone by, there”s no realism here and that”s exactly why the game is so fun.
In Prodeus you kill countless cool monsters, almost all of which have their counterparts in Doom. It is a power fantasy. This is accompanied by a dynamic killer soundtrack that picks up speed whenever the game is in full swing. The music in the game is really forbidden good!
Fantastic game flow
You”ll complete an average campaign level in ten to fifteen minutes. The maps are short and sweet, offer plenty of cannon fodder and are never so convoluted that you spend hours frantically searching for switches and keycards. In fact, you can easily play through the entire campaign in about five hours without worrying about any secrets, but at the end of the game you are only 50 percent complete.
If you take the trouble to scour all the maps for secret passages and hidden goodies, you will stumble across valuable ore again and again, which you can exchange for additional weapons and power-ups that you would otherwise miss out on.
Basically, Prodeus is designed so that you can play through it without the bonus guns and gimmicks like double jumps, but with these extras it”s just that much more fun. Above all, it”s great that thorough exploration of the maps is rewarded in this way. If you want to find and unlock everything, the game time will be extended quite a bit.
Only the very sudden and unspectacular end of the campaign disappointed me. Ultimately, Prodeus is an indie title with a tiny budget and an even tinier development team. But I”d rather have five hours of really cool action (and tons of community content for free) than 20 hours of soporific middle class.
There is a very fine map editor in the game, with which the community has already created tons of brilliant levels. From E1M1 from Doom to the intro of Doom 2016 to Princess Peach”s castle from Mario 64, I have already played some very cool or at least surprising maps from the editor. They are downloaded in seconds and can be conveniently found, filtered, sorted and launched directly in the game. If you have friends at hand, you can play the campaign and custom maps in co-op or take each other apart in modes like Deathmatch and CTF.
More like too easy
Prodeus is quite easy on the upper and medium difficulty levels. Only on Very Hard and Ultra Hard does a certain challenge arise, because enemies here dish out and take noticeably more, but the number and type of your enemies does not change depending on the difficulty level.
A controversial feature in the community are the so-called Nexus Points. These are checkpoints at which you are revived if you die in a level. You can do this an infinite number of times, and all defeated enemies remain dead. In other words, you can die as often as you like and have no disadvantages worth mentioning except for deductions in the score. Maximum points are only awarded if you complete a map without dying.
Despite this, it takes the challenge out of the game when you can otherwise die infinitely with impunity. You don”t have to use the nexus points, of course, and have the option to restart the level when you die, but that”s a self-imposed hurdle. There is also no free saving, your progress is only saved automatically when you enter the world map after finishing a level.
Pixels must be
Prodeus deliberately goes for a very pixelated look and aesthetically orientates itself strongly on the very old, classic shooters of long ago. At the same time, however, the game uses modern particle, light and shadow effects and thus combines the retro look with some modern elements.
I really like this mixture; the game looks edgy, a bit dirty and very “chunky”. If you don”t like that, the pixel graphics can be minimised, at least partially. With its modest system requirements, Prodeus will run at very high resolutions even on a potato PC, making the environments sharper and less pixelated.
In addition, you can display the enemies in the game as smoothly animated 3D models instead of having them displayed as rather rough, two-dimensional sprites by default. The weapons in the game alone are always displayed as pixelated sprites with very few animation frames. In the future, it is planned to include an option that will also display weapons in 3D, if you value this.
Generally, all assets already exist in 3D, but are actively rendered into sprites by the game. You have to like the retro look, otherwise you won”t be happy with Prodeus and miss out on one of the best shooters of recent years.
Editor”s verdict
What decade did I wake up in today? A really crude shooter for a small price, without miserably long stretches or annoying in-game purchases, with a built-in browser for multiplayer, with a map editor and a ton of really awesome user levels from games like Doom, Quake and even Mario? And this at a time when every other title in the genre is squeezing every last cent out of players for skins, maps and some DLC shit! Where publishers of other games have long since dispensed with editors or deny creators of community content all rights to their creations from the outset and claim them for themselves.
Yes, the campaign ends a touch too suddenly and unspectacularly. The Nexus Points ruin any challenge unless you decide not to use them or complete all levels without a single death. The pixelated art style polarises and here some will ignore a good shooter simply because the visuals don”t appeal to them. But for me, Prodeus offers all the things that made me fall in love with the genre a long time ago. If all my friends weren”t rotting away in old people”s homes and graveyards, I”d have packed my computer for an extensive LAN party already!
