The heyday of shooters for PC happened right around the late 90s’ with Duke Nukem and Quake taking center stage, featuring mature themes (Duke Nukem infamously had strippers that would show their assets if you tipped them) and loads of blood and gore.
Recently, developers have found themselves eager to cash-in on the nostalgia train as they all are working on remakes and remasters of titles that sold well way back when in the hope that they’ll seek well with a modern coat of varnish.
Then you have Prodeus, developed by Bounding Box and published by Humble Bundle, which tightly embraces the era of yesteryear while still giving the modern flavor of today.
They’ve just shown off their trailer in PC Gamer’s PC Gaming Show, and it’s an absolute gob smacker of delicious aesthetics, unhinged violence, and enough weapons for you to find a favorite means of eliminating the enemy, again and again.
The minimap alone is likely worth its own article as it tackles a splinter in the thorn of developers with surprising ease; it’s easy to figure out where you are, where enemies are, and where you ought to go; a mechanic that would be surprisingly welcome in the majority of titles that are released today.
More modern fans of the first-person shooter genre may not appreciate the dated aesthetics, however, and Bounding Box has you covered as well: there are options, the developer states, that allow users to determine precisely how dated the visuals are. You can shift from classic Doom sprites to full-scale 3d models at will, and the HUD is customizable as well.
The brutality of it echoes fantastically against similar titles that Prodeus has been crafted as a love-letter to; titles such as Quake and Unreal Tournament come to mind along with another love-letter to the former days of glory called Wrath: Aeon of Ruin.
Yet as hyped up as many have been for Wrath: Aeon of Ruin to make its full release, somehow Prodeus makes Wrath already appear obsolete with its brilliant mapping system and user options that allow for a customizable experience; however you would like to frag, as long as you frag.
We’ll have a better vantage of precisely how well Prodeus fares when it arrives in a couple of months, as the current schedule has it dropping in the Fall of 2020.
If the trailer is anything to go on, however, which showed off multiple aspects of gameplay, first-person shooter fans are in for an audacious treat in the coming months.
