The ongoing glut of indie retro boomer shooters has proved the absolute mother fuck out of the 20 year nostalgia wave theory, so now I’m just trying to think of a way to exploit it. Maybe we could broadcast a popular children’s cartoon in which every episode’s plot is resolved by a character setting themselves on fire, then wait twenty years and buy a controlling interest in every major burn ointment manufacturer… or perhaps alternatively just hack out another fucking Doom clone. Which brings me to today’s subject, Prodeus, not to be confused with Proteus, which was a walking sim from 2013. Or Parodius, which was a series of cutesy arcade shoot ’em ups. Or indeed Probus, who was a Roman emperor in the 3rd century AD who by the sounds of it was very much in favour of public transport. Prodeus is a Doom clone, and while “Doom clone” is largely an outdated term for FPS from before the genre was fully codified, I can think of no more adequate description for Prodeus, not while it’s a 2.5D first person shooter about a burly yet remarkably lightfooted soldier battling demons from hell on a space station. It’s even got the same bloody monsters. Zombie man, fireball imp, evil Christmas decoration, annoying flying skull prick, evil Christmas decoration that spits out annoying flying skull pricks…
In fact I wonder if it was originally going to be some kind of HD Doom mod, the sort of thing those eye-twitchy toothbrush chewers in the Doom modding community consistently put worrying amounts of effort into to stave off having to play another fucking game one of these days, but after the creators had some kind of sanity fart they realised it would be a lot nicer to actually be paid for all that fucking work, and here we are. How much work, Yahtzee? Well, besides the modern lighting and texturing and inevitable exaggerated dripping-off-the-ceiling gore effects, Prodeus is doing its damnedest to make 2D spritework look like 3D graphics. You know how the 2D sprites in Doom always looked like they were turning to face you because there wasn’t a different sprite for every angle you could view them from? Well, in Prodeus, there IS a different sprite for every angle, as well as every vertical angle, for every single animation frame of every single entity. Obviously this is fucking used teabags in the eye sockets mental because at that point it would be approximately ten septillion times easier just to use 3D models.
This look has been chosen for deliberate stylistic reasons. On the one hand, it’s good old fashioned showing off, like recreating the Last Supper by delicately arranging different coloured Cheerios on a parking space. Obviously it would’ve been easier just to print out a Google image search result and glue it to your spectacles but that’s not the point – the sheer amount of unnecessary effort is what makes it impressive. And there are other reasons for it – to simultaneously evoke and enhance the classic boomer shooter retro look, and as I said in my Doom retrospective review, those crunchy pixeled sprite enemies make for a greater expedience because it’s a lot easier to distinguish them from the background environment, in contrast to the murky waiting for indistinct bits of distant chest high wall to return fire as seen in the Gears of Wars of the world. “What? Sprite enemies aren’t murky and indistinct?” No, Prodeus, and… “Oh no! I’m so sorry!” No, ah… I wasn’t implying that was a bad thing, Prodeus, I was just saying “We’d better do as best we can to make them as murky and indistinct as possible anyway and all with the same colour scheme! Phew, now we’re real game designers.”
Well, not all with the same colour scheme, actually. There’s two factions of demons that fight each other whenever they meet: Team Blueberry Ice and Team Orange You Glad You’re In The Chaos Dimension. It’s all part of the ongoing plot that I’m prepared to tentatively say Prodeus has. It’s hard to be sure because it’s mostly delivered through one sentence level descriptions on the map screen that we hardly notice because we’re impatiently hopping up and down in our high chairs waiting for some more baddies to splatter like upended plates of spaghetti bolognese. And they can’t go into much detail anyway because the text on all the menu screens is really weirdly big. The title menu options are all in gigantic default Arial font, a quality I normally associate with mobile ports or games designed for masturbation-addled cretins with no attention span, but I repeat myself. It goes toward an impression I get that Prodeus wants to set itself up as the new baseline for boomer shooters to take Doom’s place. With its aggressively readable text, generic FPS setting, unintrusive plot and gore effects inspired by an episode of Double Dare ill-advisedly filmed live at an illicit organ harvesting facility, they’re certainly shooting for broad appeal.
On top of that, there’s fully integrated mod support and a level editor to lure over all the aforementioned frothy-mouthed domestic animal buggering Doom modders and unite all of boomer shooterdom under one universal, slighty weird-smelling canopy. In fact the mod support is so frontloaded it takes quite a bit of clicking through menus to even find the fucking default campaign, which sits atop a dropdown list of campaigns with no greater emphasis than any one of the thorns atop Satan’s favourite buggering device. Not that it’s an afterthought, the level design on display in the default campaign is fucking stellar. Despite doing the retro boomer shooter thing where every level is a keyhunt corridor maze laid out like a Lego vomit fountain, I never once felt lost, confused or frustrated. The next step was always clear, either thanks to intuitive room layout or to the game continually spawning in more gribblies in front of the door you’re supposed to go through next, because navigating shooter games is like being an American senator; you know you’re doing the right thing when you keep getting blockaded by cunts.
The guns are the usual parade – pistol, shotgun, rapid pistol, bigger shotgun, grenade launcher, rocket launcher, bunch of wibbly wobbly exotic guns that shoot a range of Photoshop lighting effects – and they’re mostly fine, the super shotgun’s not quite got the impact I like, sounds more like smacking a desk with a metal ruler than a baby monster truck catastrophically burping up its own lower intestine. All in all Prodeus absolutely scratches the boomer shooter itch, but that thought prompts the question: how much scratching does this fucking itch need? We’re long past the point of needing to call the eczema clinic and probably about to hit bone. The real question is, is Prodeus a Doom clone that eclipses its primary influence, the way Shakespeare eclipsed Chaucer, the way Hemingway eclipsed a great big bucket of whiskey. Well, it falls short in one area: while Doom didn’t animate every sprite from every imaginable angle like a mad zoetrope artist in solitary confinement, you could instantly tell each monster apart even at huge distance. What’s that? Three pixels. What colour are they? Hot pink? It’s a pinkie demon, get the chainsaw out. With Prodeus it’s more like, what’s that? It’s a shadowy thing with glowy bits. Basic shadowy thing with glowy bits or the chaingun-wielding shadowy thing with glowy bits? Hang on, wait three seconds. How dead are you now? Very. It was the second one.
