Happy about: CULTIC (both chapters)

I am very happy about the rebirth of classic FPS popularity. That said, not many games that attempt to recapture the simplicity and excitement of that pre-Quake/Quake era of titles end up being worth playing. To the point, where I sometimes start to wonder – with how few actual classics there were that passed the test of time and are still beloved, perhaps the “dungeon crawling with guns” approach to FPS is too limiting?.. But then countless imaginative WADs for Doom appear and I come around something like Cultic and my doubts dissipate – no, there’s still a lot of fun and creative stuff that can be done withing the classic limitations. And while I didn’t love Cultic as much as many people seem to, especially the recently released closing Chapter Two, this is a really cool FPS.

Cultic is basically an attempt to re-imagine the Monolith Productions’ classic Blood from a modern perspective. Blood, which is still awesome, was a 1997 FPS on Build engine, that had darkly humorous setting with very unconventional weapons and high interactivity (that was typical for Build engine games). With Cultic, the mainly solo developer at Jasozz Games is recreating a lot of that, but on Unity engine. So we get the huge and multi-layered levels, lots of small interactivity, voxel visuals mixed with fully 2D sprites, unconventional weapons, dark morbid story with some sense of humour and robed cultists as the main enemies. All while really cool soundtrack is playing, switching between scary ambience and rocking combat tunes. No one is screaming “marana!” at you during the shootouts, of course, but the experience is still quite familiar.

Except, everything is bigger and crazier, with lots of modern FPS concepts sprinkled all over the place. The levels are far more expansive than they could ever be on Build engine, for example. Ion Fury: Aftershock, a really cool expansion for Ion Fury that was better than the main game itself, is built on Build engine, for example and is pushing it to its limits. But its levels are never as dense and huge as what you often get in Cultic. Now, thankfully, most of the time this size is done in a very smart way. The best classic FPS way – where you get to explore several relatively architecturally realistic locations, find keys, unlock shortcuts and all that fun exploration stuff, until eventually unlocking the main way to progress. The game is also adhering to the modern approach to classic FPS level design in almost always avoiding full points of no return and only a couple of secrets in the game’s two Chapters, Interlude and bonus maps are missable and cannot be discovered right before exiting the level.

Movement and attack mechanics are also more complex than any classic FPS used to be. There’s a dodge/dash move, an ability to slide, jump kick straight out of F.E.A.R. that change the way you think about moving around. Weapons might have more than one alt.fire mode and they can get upgraded with additional abilities. There’s a shield that some enemies have that can be picked up and used with one-handed weapons. A lot of objects on the levels can be picked up and thrown for damage. The game is not emulating the classic horizontal aim with auto-aim for shots, so you get full camera control and headshots deal additional damage (though your shots still get slightly corrected and getting headshots is easier than it would otherwise be).

And then on top of all that, Cultic attempts to one-up the variety of Blood and Duke Nukem 3D by making every level feel unique in some way and also add little unexpected scenarios within levels. So while the overall gameplay is mostly unchanged, sometimes the game focuses more on survival with limited resources, sometimes it’s a horror themed section focused on scares, sometimes it’s more about exploring, sometimes it’s an all out combat arena with lots of enemies… It’s quite an unpredictable title and for the most part, especially in the original Chapter One, things work really well and level design is top notch.

But it is far from perfect and sometimes these types of gimmicks feel like “gimmicks” with the negative connotation of the word. Chapter Two in general feels a lot less focused and more “gimmicky” in this regard and I liked it considerably less as a result. There are a few pointless “spooky nightmare” scripted moments in it that play like the worst modern examples of tightly scripted horror themed adventure games. Some of the new enemies added in Chapter Two are just terrible and are always a chore to fight. New weapons, originally added in the free Interlude map, are utterly pointless and I saw no reason to use them as soon as the old weapons returned. The boss fights are tedious and don’t know when to stop (which is opposite of Chapter One, where bosses were pointless and died in a blink of an eye). And oddly enough, the performance of the game also really suffers in Chapter Two sometimes. It still has some fantastic levels, but I doubt I will ever want to replay it, while I wouldn’t mind replaying Chapter One in the future. Or the bonus maps – the new Home for Cultmas map, that is basically reinterpretation of the first several Blood maps, but with the level of detail of Cultic, in one map, is flawed, but really fun overall.

I really liked Cultic: Chapter One, but even Interlude and Chapter Two had great moments. It isn’t as constantly exciting and fun as DUSK, which remains one of the best FPS titles I’ve ever played, but this is a fantastic new take on what Build engine-style FPS titles were attempting to do back in the 90s. But with even more details, more realistic toilet placements and interactions, crazy explosions and gibs and great modern quality of life features. I don’t think I would want more of Cultic, but I would love to see what next project this development “team” would go on to do.