Recommended on sale.

Herald of Havoc isn't long or difficult, but it IS fun. It's a Quakelike that understands that you want to shoot hordes of enemies with awesome weapons while exploring a variety of locations, and it provides. It has a great variety of weapons and a decent variety of enemies, gives you enough ammo that you don't have to be stingy while not giving you enough to use only one weapon, and is happy to scale from small encounters with weaker weapons to whole groups of squishy enemies that you can annihilate with more powerful guns, or tougher enemies that justify busting out the heavier weapons.

Plus it has nice QoL: enemies flash black when they are killed so you know you can stop shooting them even if they're still moving, as it's just their death animation. It autosaves at sensible points and loading back in after a death is very quick.

And by far the most interesting choice is for it to reset you to starting weapons (sword and/or blaster) at the start of every level. In Doom & Friends the levels were always designed to be theoretically beatable this way in case you finished the previous level with 1 HP left, but here, HoH puts you back at 100 health and default resources every time. And it WORKS. Really well! It lets the levels be tailored to the weapons you get, letting you blast shotguns down tight corridors, fire chainguns at range, or pull out the lightning gun on a horde. It also lets it do ridiculous things like giving you infinite ammo on a few levels to let you really go all-out against huge and incredibly strong enemy groups, so that it really feels like an epic showdown. Extra credit for the final boss design, which locks you into specific weapons and has attack patterns that make it more than just "shoot it until it dies".

And it's honestly nice that the supposedly-unfair Havoc difficulty level isn't really -that- unfair. It spawns more, nastier enemies earlier on, but it doesn't do stuff like make them react instantly or take out your whole healthbar in one shot like other games in the genre might. It ramps up the challenge to significant but still approachable levels.

My only real complaint is that I managed to go through the whole game without learning about the special attacks of some weapons, triggered with the middle mouse button. Some of them are incredibly useful and were invaluable on my Havoc playthrough.

Recommended on sale. Herald of Havoc isn't long or difficult, but it IS fun. It's a Quakelike that understands that you want to shoot hordes of enemies with awesome weapons while exploring a variety of locations, and it provides. It has a great variety of weapons and a decent variety of enemies, gives you enough ammo that you don't have to be stingy while not giving you enough to use only one weapon, and is happy to scale from small encounters with weaker weapons to whole groups of squishy enemies that you can annihilate with more powerful guns, or tougher enemies that justify busting out the heavier weapons. Plus it has nice QoL: enemies flash black when they are killed so you know you can stop shooting them even if they're still moving, as it's just their death animation. It autosaves at sensible points and loading back in after a death is very quick. And by far the most interesting choice is for it to reset you to starting weapons (sword and/or blaster) at the start of every level. In Doom & Friends the levels were always designed to be theoretically beatable this way in case you finished the previous level with 1 HP left, but here, HoH puts you back at 100 health and default resources every time. And it WORKS. Really well! It lets the levels be tailored to the weapons you get, letting you blast shotguns down tight corridors, fire chainguns at range, or pull out the lightning gun on a horde. It also lets it do ridiculous things like giving you infinite ammo on a few levels to let you really go all-out against huge and incredibly strong enemy groups, so that it really feels like an epic showdown. Extra credit for the final boss design, which locks you into specific weapons and has attack patterns that make it more than just "shoot it until it dies". And it's honestly nice that the supposedly-unfair Havoc difficulty level isn't really -that- unfair. It spawns more, nastier enemies earlier on, but it doesn't do stuff like make them react instantly or take out your whole healthbar in one shot like other games in the genre might. It ramps up the challenge to significant but still approachable levels. My only real complaint is that I managed to go through the whole game without learning about the special attacks of some weapons, triggered with the middle mouse button. Some of them are incredibly useful and were invaluable on my Havoc playthrough.