Launching on PC late last year, Project Downfall makes its way to consoles courtesy of Red.Deer Games. It’s a single-player FPS. A ‘boomer shooter’, if you will. But as the game itself makes clear in the opening tutorial, this is not DOOM. As you’ll learn in this Project Downfall review, its a game that has a retro flavour to its visual styling, but moreover ingrained in its high score chasing gameplay mechanics.
The game begins very suddenly, and without any kind of direction. There’s no menu screen. You’re simply in your apartment, and can walk around to interact with objects. There’s no guidance whatsoever, and the game won’t begin in earnest until you leave your apartment, interacting with the world to uncover what the next objective is.
At first you may think that this is how much of the game will play out. There are interludes in which it’s not a simple case of heading along a linear path to an objective marker, shooting a bunch of goons along the way. Project Downfall does make you think about what you should be doing in its specific scenarios. And the decisions you make affect the way the story plays out.
However, the bulk of the game is the exact opposite. The actual levels that exist between this more free form play are very small arena shooters. Reminiscent of The Club, the enemies are located in exactly the same places each time you play. The objective is to eliminate them in quick succession with as much variety as possible to achieve a high score.
The game’s difficulty is intentionally high. You’re not a super solider or a space fairing demon hunter. You’re a regular dude. A regular dude who’s a bit pissed off, and takes corporation mandated drugs that give him super human strength. Oh, and also make him a bit psycho, talking with his brain like it’s an entirely separate entity. Don’t do drugs, kids.
What this means is that you’ll find yourself dying many, many times. The idea here is not to simply make it through the levels. Instead, you must repeat them several times to plot the best course of action. Not only for survival, but for murderous efficiency. If you find a route that shaves off a few seconds between enemy placements, maybe that’ll be enough to keep your combo string going.
In many of the levels that are NPCs who aren’t enemies. Killing these fellows will impact the ending you get in a similar fashion to actions taken within the free form levels. However, you may find yourself under so much pressure that it’s hard to determine friend from foe in the midst of your murderous rampage.
As you could probably guess from the artwork for the game, there are many nods to movies and other games within the game. Particularly those of one Keanu Reeves. In addition to the obvious John Wick inspiration, during the course of this Project Downfall review we found an optional level that recreates the layout of the infamous lobby scene from The Matrix, posters resembling The Terminator, a decimated corpse that looks strikingly familiar to Axl from Streets of Rage.
To boil the game down to its barest of bones, you could say its a combination of Hotline Miami with FPS mechanics and a sugar coating of pop culture references. It’s equal parts frustration and exhilaration. Methodical gameplay and nonsensical trigger bashing. Project Downfall is a weirdly positioned experience that is difficult to either love or hate at first, but ultimately you’re bound to end up strongly on one side of that fence or the other. If you’re looking for a new DOOM, this ain’t it. If you’re looking for something to test your gaming chops, you could do far worse.
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