Game:

Heretic (1994)

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Heretic is a first-person shooter developed by Raven Software and originally released on the 23rd of December 1994. Built using the Doom engine (licensed by id Software, who also served as "executive producers" on this title), Heretic improved upon the original engine in numerous ways, such as adding flight, sectors that can push actors within it in specified directions, an inventory system, ambient sounds, multiple actors to spawn from a single actor upon dying, translucency, looking up and down and pushable objects, among other things.

The game originally came with three episodes, much like the original Doom. The similarities to Doom are such that some label the game as simply a re-skin of Doom. Certainly, from an armoury point of view, I can't deny that many of the weapons and items in Heretic are very close copies of their counterparts in Doom. However, when you have such an incredible and influential game as your base, it's also hard not to enjoy Heretic to at least some sort of degree, as the killer and infectiously addictive game play is still there!

The first episode (like Doom) was released as shareware back in the day, meaning that it was freely available for anyone to download and play (and still is). The City of the Damned begins our journey through the Heretic world (later called 'Parthoris' in Heretic II), and is mostly set in medieval villages, castles and other such locales. As is to be expected, not all of the game's content is included here. After the increasingly difficult Doom WADs I've been playing as of late (such as The Plutonia Experiment and No Rest for the Living) this episode is also quite easy, even at the (almost) hardest difficulty setting!

Once again, I am using GZDoom as my source port of choice. One of the great features of ZDoom and it's derivatives is that they run not only most of the Doom games, but also Heretic, Hexen, Chex Quest and Strife too (though the last game mentioned is, to put it more accurately, emulated because the source code to the game was never released).

More information on Heretic can be found here: http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Heretic

In this first part, we look at the first two levels of the game - The Docks and The Dungeons! Here, we are introduced to the following things:

Weapon wise we have the Staff (equivalent to Doom's Fist), the Gauntlets of the Necromancer (Chainsaw), the Elven Wand (Pistol), the Ethereal Crossbow (Shotgun), and the Dragon Claw (Chaingun). These are the only weapons to be found in this episode too.

In the enemy department we have the Gargoyle, the Golem and the Undead Warrior!

Storyline to follow in the next video.

Heretic was created by Raven Software, Inc. and published by id Software, Inc. Copyright ©1994 by Raven Software, Inc. and id Software, Inc. Heretic, the Heretic logo and the Heretic likeness are trademarks of Raven Software, Inc. and id Software, Inc.

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