Either the wrong items will be randomly dropped into the levels, or you’ll run into the wrong enemies, and your run is pointless from the opening moments. In other cases what the chaos will throw at you will be downright frustrating. There are “runs” in Nightmare Reaper where the random design of levels leaves you with blandly uninteresting spaces to move through. The developers of Nightmare Reape r, meanwhile, opted to cede control of the level design to chaos, and while that sounds like an excellent idea – randomness does mean unlimited levels, after all – the loss of control over the experience is ruinous to most FPSers. Because the levels were designed, the developers knew how the players would move through them, and could craft the challenges in kind, and this allowed the developers to provide a finely honed and taut action game with just the right ebbs and flows to be both thrilling and absorbing. Instead, it has been carefully pieced together, with every action set piece, secret and trap carefully woven into the experience. The major difference between the two is that Boltgun doesn’t feature randomised levels. To put it into context: while I was playing Nightmare Reaper, I was also playing Warhammer 40K: Boltgun, another “boomer shooter” that explicitly attempts to capture the heritage of early-era Doom, Hexen and Quake. Unfortunately, while it works, the problem is that this kind of game itself doesn’t really work. The developers have done what they intended with it. Related reading: If you are looking for a nostalgic rush on Switch, and already have all the Doom re-releases, there’s the Serious Sam Collection to consider.

It is indeed a roguelike (with procedurally-generated levels and a need to start from scratch with each death), and it has the violence and manic action of those early Doom games. Nightmare Reaper aims to be a blend of roguelike and nostalgic throwback to the “boomer shooter” era of Doom.

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