Project Warlock 2 (Early Access)

Powah Dunk | November 23, 2022 | Preview | No Comments

Project Warlock was a title that really surprised me as to just how good it was when I covered the original for its Nintendo Switch release, so when I heard that a sequel was coming I just had to get involved from the get-go on that one, so to be honest with you dear reader I’ve had Project Warlock 2 since it dropped some months ago on Steam Early Access and while I had initially started to write it up, I stopped because changes were coming and I’m glad I held off.

While the combat in Project Warlock 2 was outstanding, hit detection was spot on, the levels of gore and the sheer amount of enemies were insane and the weapons (Rifle, Sword, Cannon, Shotgun & Magic) all felt so very right, there was something that didn’t sit well with me initially with this title.

When the game first launched the balancing was a little off in my opinion, towards the latter half of Episode 1 your ammo became painfully scarce, enemies took a weird amount of damage and it resulted in a few restarts but nothing that a few tweaks couldn’t fix. Guns could be upgraded with a such example being a quad-barrelled shotgun, so yeah it looked good on paper but I wasn’t really enjoying it.

While the first level had set pieces plenty and was well paced, soon the game started to get almost labyrinthian in scale and I found myself lost and frankly bored for far too much of the game, a weird contrast where the original was a tightly packed and visceral experience.

Recently the developer went back to the drawing board, took out an entire level and split the current roster of 6 levels into 12 levels, tweaked them, and frankly changed the entire game into what I would have expected as the sequel of Project Warlock. The levels still have a surprising amount of depth to them but not once did I find myself wandering around trying to get a hint at where I should be going next.

The smaller levels also help the combat pace, there isn’t too much of a chance to catch a breather and the game is all the better for it, fighting off the sprite-based monsters such as skeletons with shotguns, succubi and little Cacodemons with punchy combat and a fun arsenal offers an unmistakable boomer shooter experience, you can tell with this title why John Romero has gone to such lengths to endorse the series.

While initially, I wasn’t too impressed on my first playthrough of the game’s first episode, now I’m absolutely enamored with the game, it’s funny how tweaking level flow and splitting them up has had such a positive effect on a title I was so highly anticipating, it runs brilliantly with only a slight amount of slowdown when things got hectic and with another 2 playable characters to come, 2 more chapters to come there isn’t a better time to get stuck in with this title and help shape the future of it because all of these changes were only possible with player feedback, only possible within the Early Access model.