Dark tombs, sacrificial altars and monstrous Were-Jaguars await should you enter its realm. Combat is generally fun and the levels, with all their blocky simplicity and lack of proper proportions, have an atypical atmosphere to them reminiscent of retro dungeon crawlers. Rough edges and nitpicking aside, Hexen II is still an enjoyable action-packed fantasy shooter. For a time, I simply assumed the game doesn’t label these items but apparently they’re shown by pressing the obscure “Info/Frags” key, default Q. You simply pick up an item and it’s stored in your inventory panel (TAB) while a message announces what you’ve grabbed. No doubt this would have been a fantastic approach to inventory management if quest items were more clearly laid out. Instead of throwing combat and puzzle items together in one pile (as was the case in Hexen: Beyond Heretic), the game stores them in separate inventory menus. One final note has to do with puzzle items. When your intuition tells you that a puzzle item might be of use, you literally have to stumble around the place until a message appears letting you know what just happened.Ī look at the inventory and character panels. This isn’t a fatal handicap, but its a resounding step backward which makes the game a tad more confusing than it should be. Like Quake, Hexen II dropped the ‘Use’ key and reduced interacting with the world to plain old bumping into things. The idea is that you’ll get stuck lots if you simply carve your way through the levels, axe first and eyes second. Written clues from books and scrolls can be helpful in giving some sense of direction, but they’re few and far in between. And some of the levels in Hexen II become capricious to the point of forcing the player to explore every obscure room and hidden passageway to advance. Puzzles are generally straightforward and involve locked doors or simple ‘find item x and use it here’ contrivances that require thorough exploration. The worlds featured in Hexen II are large and complex. Levels are attained as you kill off monsters which raise your attributes accordingly, but you have no real say in the matter, making its inclusion pretty pointless (you can monitor character stats but can never tinker with them directly). Raven threw in a role-playing element as well, but the concept is merely paper-thing. Hexen II can be played from the viewpoint of one of four available characters – a Crusader, Paladin, Necromancer or Assassin, essentially unlocking different weapons and mildly shifting gameplay styles between melee and ranged combat. Each of these four worlds is home to an evil lord that you’ll need to defeat before moving on to the next chapter, and so on until you face off with Eidelon himself. There’s a medieval theme, an Aztec theme, Egyptian and a greco-roman theme. To do this, you’ll travel through four different worlds, each with its own theme and workings. The entire game spans four chapters as part of a central quest to rid the lands of Eidolon. But in opposition to Quake’s rather monotonous levels, the areas you’ll visit in Hexen II are brimming with detail and variety – Hexen II moves from gloomy medieval halls to Egyptian pyramids, Roman temples and fiery South American altars. Hexen II is a combination of the action of Quake with the atmosphere and intelligence of Tomb Raider (the influence is more than a little subtle). ![]() Now, utilizing a modified version of the original Quake engine, Raven has struck gold once again.Īdmittedly, if you didn’t like Hexen, or don’t like puzzles and exploration, you won’t like this game. That game’s design and atmosphere gave it a look akin to a role-player but with the vicious feel of a first-person shooter. Raven’s fantasy first-person spectacle Hexen brought out the best of the Doom engine, and in an overcrowded genre managed to create a distinct look and feel.
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