Livestream 1/6/2022 – Hexen II

There has been a resurgance of what we’d call “boomer shooters” as of late. These refer to games that try and mimic what the original Quake brought to the table with wicked fast action, frantic pace and insane movement speed. Quite a few modern examples of these sort of games now exist but there were also of course many that came out back in the 90s when they got popular.

The Serpent Rider trilogy consists of Heretic, Hexen and Hexen 2. While the first 2 entries are based on the Doom engine Hexen 2 instead relied on Quake to handle the underpinnings. And playing it that becomes obvious very, very quickly. Menus are the same, the movement is near identical and the graphics are spot on. This is a Raven game however so there is a lot more creativity with the level designs versus Quake, at least in my opinion, with plenty of medieval things to wreck along the way. Plenty of Quake trademarked brown is around but there are splashes of color dotted around and you can tell they had fun designing the levels and art style.

I hadn’t really played this game much beyond a demo back in the day so it was fun to dig into it a bit especially with that revitilization currently going on for this sort of game. That said we do take a lot of modern conveniences for granted when you start getting lost by not having any waypoint system or maps. Still a fun one to play and the stream was great so check out the replay below!