Impaler Review

The fact that the industry has kept bombarding us with new titles, remakes, reboots, sequels or simply new intellectual properties for the last decade; Along with pushing the threshold of multimedia development that the creation of any video game incurs, it doesn’t mean that the occasional “retro” game of older technology does not appear from time to time.

There is a whole quadrant of independent developers in force, who seek to capture those characteristics that, however simple and underdeveloped they may seem to the eye of the gamer born after 2000; they retain a very specific nostalgic value for those of older age.

It’s like that particular pleasure in activities like listening to “long plays” directly from a monophonic horn player. Or read a book on paper.

They are things that carry with them a very specific pleasure aimed at those who value ancient transductions and the simplicity that brought us to where we are today.

Nevertheless…

There is a slightly acrobatic and surgical difference between the different video games that for one reason or another earn their place in the retro-gaming museum; and others who simply and simply seek to fit in and make a chapter in an already written will.

It is more, or less the case that we have with the proposal that we review today.

Impaler…

Far from standing on its own and motivating a future player of any age to continue playing it, it rather gives us good reasons to play Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Eradicator or Wolfenstein again.

It is a game that definitely manages to remind us of very characteristic aspects of the first iterations that have been seen throughout history as far as first-person shooters are concerned.

However, perhaps on this specific occasion, it was not the best of ideas to want to create a new intellectual property from scratch, where the point of mysticism remains in such a far-fetched and specific place.

A retro game, but at the same time not so retro…

It should be noted that Impaler is a completely autonomous intellectual property.

It’s not a relaunch or redesign of any old shooter per se; but rather, it takes all the features and makes its own mythology with the intentional and relatively limited toolkit.

Our main character has a regular collection of firearms of different types. From precise combat at a distance to crowd control and close combat.

The particularity in terms of gameplay comes in the form of a weapon that, honoring the title, eliminate enemies by creating pillars or sharp stakes from the ground to “impale” the target.

This has been the “particular” weapon that is supposed to separate the game from others of the time that work with technology.

The problem is that after this, there is not much to appreciate…

The heart of the game lies in an elimination zone in which different types of enemies with different designs and attacks keep appearing.

A rectangular room with the occasional column where destructible architectural pieces appear sporadically, columns, or walls that are supposed to symbolize a challenge.

More than a change of tone to the coloration of the map or changes to the type of 8-bit music clearly inspired by the creations of “Bobby Prince”; the number of surprises the game can unleash on players is, to be generous, limited.

Between one game and another we are collecting the standard currency of the game that allows us to buy improvements for our character and new weapons. Which, initially, suggests that there will be some awesome scaling in terms of the game’s difficulty.

The only drawback with a game of this type trying to scale the difficulty is that it stays in a simplicity quadrant which, given the way the present day FPS enthusiast has evolved, can make the difference in levels of difficulty. difficulty is negligible.

But seeing it for what it is…

25 years ago, Impaler would have been the game that raised your grandmother’s blood pressure; creating as a consequence that they force you to go to church weekly…

Today, it is limited to being a kind of demonstration of the limited and rudimentary technologies on which some of the most iconic games in history were created and, above all, of the beginnings of the shooting games that are today. so immensely popular.

This review was made thanks to the code provided by Apptivus.