Prodeus is a goddamn awesome, kickass, retro-styled FPS time of it. With its clear and classic DOOM inspiration, it merges classic first-person shooter tropes in with very modern sensibilities.
Developed by indie team Bounding Box Software, it launched in September 2022 and is available on all consoles and PC. Its a hell yes from us, then, as this is a lot of great escapist fun.
There are Monsters and Stuff in Prodeus
Players take control of a corrupted agent called Prodeus, who is a mysterious creator of the gaming world. The name is likely a reference to Proteus of Greek mythology, a deity of elusive sea change.
As a corrupted agent, you most go off and destroy your creator.
That’s the plot! Nice and simple, straight into the gameplay, and all with plenty of nods to Doom (1993), Quake (1996), and even Nintendo’s classic Metroid Prime (2002). And you likely know what that means. BOOM! Ratta tatt! Explosions! Monsters! Carnage! A strange feeling of stress relief.
Yes, so this is the game in action with its awesome 2.5D pixel heavy graphics.
Key to any game like this is with intensity. Prodeus delivers plenty big time on that, the stages are just brilliantly designed and very full on. Swarms of monsters, moments of quiet, and some very impressive weapons.
Crucially, the game throws new and unique guns at you continuously. There’s no stalemate situation of getting bored with a small arsenal, as some of the creations are deliberately ludicrous.
That sense of escapism is there whilst playing and it is immersive. You’re dragged in as this corrupted agent on a monstrous world where weird things come at you from every angle.
It looks amazing. All wrapped around the type of pulse-pounding soundtrack you’d expect from composer Andrew Hulshult.
There’s around seven hours or so of carnage on offer here, so it’s a meaty indie game offering. Its shorter length (compared to AAA titles) does make it more accessible, especially with a wide range of difficulty settings.
Anyone wanting a challenge can ramp up the difficulty and, by cripes, it gets tough. So, we stuck it on easy and be damned with the consequences! It was a lot of fun.
Yet getting into the main campaign is one of the more bizarrely laborious undertakings in modern gaming, with a maze of options to click through before getting started. It would’ve been welcome to have a “Start Campaign” button and launch into the action from there. A minor niggle, yes, but it does make launching into the experience a bit tedious.
Anyway, around a decade ago we were very critical of the FPS genre. The market was oversaturated with them and many were dull, lazy derivatives of older classics.
Then we got iD software’s astonishing DOOM: Eternal (2020) not long after David Szymanski’s brilliant DUSK (2018). Now we feel the genre is still capable of some phenomenal titles.
As there’s also Prodeus, right up there with the best of them.
It’s flat out awesome, no other way of putting it. The FPS genre is one of the most immersive in gaming, when done properly, and this offers a wonderful escapist release.
If you’re a fan of the FPS genre then this is a no-brainer, sir or madam.
