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Another "old-school" shooter in the new wave of games appealing to Gen Z. It's made using the Duke Nukem engine, so it should primarily be compared to other games built on the same engine. I'm not sure if it's better than the divine Blood, but it's definitely three times better than Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior. The industrial-cyberpunk setting is relevant today, although personally, I find it to be a somewhat overused idea that can easily be ruined by poor execution. However, in this case, they managed to create well-designed levels with excellent music and visuals. It's not particularly groundbreaking, but the weapons are well-made and useful at various stages against different enemies – something that Shadow Warrior failed to do, as it's primarily played with a grenade launcher and a shotgun, which I found quite annoying. And here, there are even headshots. The levels are huge, with a billion secrets, secrets within secrets, and not always an obvious path to follow. I spent a lot of time figuring out some of them, but overall, they are quite logical. There were very few instances where I was completely lost and had to wander around aimlessly for half an hour. Plus, there are quite a few maps, so it takes a relatively long time to complete. And, of course, there are a huge number of diverse references that will appeal to older gamers. The heroine (to shock everyone with how progressive it is for an old-school shooter in 2019) is a good concept, but her one-liners are mostly boring – this is a major problem for an old-school action hero. Another area where I noticed a drawback is that by the middle of the game, or even earlier, you've already found all the weapons and unlocked almost all the enemy types. Because of this, a significant portion of the game, around the halfway point, felt somewhat like filler, although the enjoyable mechanics, balance, and atmosphere helped to mitigate this. But it reminded me again of the criticized Shadow Warrior, which has only ten enemy types throughout the entire game, which you mow down with billions of bullets from the same weapons in slightly different environments. I was quite surprised when, closer to the end of the game, they suddenly introduced several new, more dangerous late-game enemy types, which added variety to the gameplay. Why they didn't bring them out earlier is unclear. It's also interesting how they "revamped" the inventory and consumable system from old build-engine games. Usually, in these games, the inventory is full of useless items that you rarely use, and Shadow Warrior excelled at this with its collection of colorful, completely unnecessary grenades with terrible effects. The developers here solved the problem simply by reducing the entire available inventory to two consumables, one of which is classically useless, and the other is a health pack, which you carry with you in a stack just in case. This turned out to be a very good solution; you could argue that it's a sign of laziness on the part of the developers, but you need to understand that an inventory with items in build-engine games has always been a cumbersome, inconvenient, useless, and unused feature, so in this case, not overloading the player with additional clutter is a good thing.

Overall, it feels like an eight out of ten, but if you evaluate it as a high-quality old-school shooter, and also considering the need for more games like this, then it's definitely a ten. I hope the trend of modern old-school shooters continues to develop, so that we can gradually bring back the best moments from that exciting boomer era and, at the same time, further develop their concept with decades of new experience in game design.