![]() The early levels are riddled with interactive objects, ranging from telephones and pool tables to fully functioning piano keyboards. Of all the retro shooters to graduate from the John Romero school of level design, this one studied the hardest.Īlthough HROT's primary inspiration is Quake, there's a fair amount of Duke Nukem in here too. You press a button marked "emergency shelter", and the whole room begins to descend into the Earth. In one example, you come to an austere governmental conference room centred with a large table and chairs. It feels natural for an oppressive Soviet dictatorship to be riddled with unseen rooms and hidden passageways, a world where paranoia is not just in the atmosphere but in the architecture itself. ![]() Inserting a key into a lock might open the door in front of you, but it might also open up the wall to the side, or just teleport you to a new location, one usually stuffed full of foes waiting to gun you down.Īs with the visual presentation, HROT elegantly blends these ideas with its setting. HROT has a particular affection for wrong-footing you with its keys and switches. Almost every level is an intricate warren of corridors filled with traps, hazards, monster closets, hidden pathways, and secrets that makes moment-to-moment exploration endlessly entertaining. HROT's 21 levels are not the largest or most conceptually ambitious I've seen in a retro shooter, but they are the truest to the FPS' origins in RPG dungeon crawling. Yet HROT's greatest strength is not its appearance, but what hides inside all its bricklike institutions. The simple geometry and relentlessly brown aesthetic also fits neatly with the brutalist architecture of the game's late Soviet setting. From its boxy buildings to its flat ashen skybox to its jittering character models that appear forged with a lump hammer, HROT looks exactly like something I would have played on my PC back in 1997 (despite it being completely age inappropriate). HROT does exactly this and does it magnificently. We've seen retro shooters built in modern engines like Unity, but none, as far as I know, in a custom engine designed specifically to look thirty years old. Of all the retro shooters released in the last five years, HROT is the most committed to recreating the look and general vibe of early 3D action games. Emerging from a bomb shelter beneath Prague's Kosmonautů Metro Station (now named Háje), you take it upon yourself to defend your glorious homeland from these invaders. In any case, anyone who wasn't killed by the fallout is now being hunted by an army of (presumably Russian, but again, it isn't explicated) soldiers. What that might be isn't explicitly stated, but given the year, the ambient chatter of Geiger counters, and the soldiers vomiting through their gasmasks as they prowl the abandoned streets, a nuclear disaster at an infamous Ukrainian power plant isn't a vast stretch of the imagination. The year is 1986, and something is seriously wrong in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. At the outset, they exist in perfect symbiosis, but the relationship becomes less stable as the game goes on. But the balancing of these two personality strands is what defines HROT's quality. This isn't the best thing about HROT, we'll get to that in a couple of paragraphs. This Slavic shooter revels in the strange, straddling the line between hyper-bleak Soviet satire and goofy memetic joke factory. "Does that pommel horse have a grenade launcher?" is one of many bizarre questions I found myself asking while playing HROT. Reviewed on: AMD Ryzen 5 3600, Nvidia RTX 2080 Super, 32 GB RAM, Windows 10.It offers a masterclass in classic FPS map design, but has a weaker arsenal than other boomer shooters, and becomes less coherent as it progresses. HROT is a retro shooter that uses nineties style 3D graphics to build an oppressive late Soviet dictatorship afflicted by an unspecified disaster.
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