Heretic

Heretic is a dark fantasy first-person shooter video game released in 1994. It was developed by Raven Software and published by id Software through GT Interactive.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) It was one of the first first-person games to feature inventory manipulation and the ability to look up and down.
 * 2) The inventory system allows the player to carry items to be used later at will. There are 10 items in the game.
 * 3) *Quartz Flask: Restores 25 of the player's health and can be used from the player's inventory at will, but only if their health is below 100%. Since it cannot go higher than the maximum, it is recommended only when one's health is at 75% or below.
 * 4) *Mystic Urn: Instantly restores a players health to the maximum (100%). Therefore, it should only be used when a player is at low health (preferably below 25%).
 * 5) *Time Bomb of the Ancients: When used, a bomb is dropped and will detonate in one second, damaging all enemies within the blast radius. The player can also be harmed by the blast as well, so make sure to keep your distance.
 * 6) *Torch: Using it provides extra illumination for 2 minutes. It is particularly helpful when ghosts are about, as it makes them slightly easier to see.
 * 7) *Tome of Power: When invoked, the Tome will increase the power of all weapons for 40 seconds.
 * 8) *Shadowsphere: Grants the player partial invisibility for 60 seconds when picked up. It also gives immunity from non-magical attacks.
 * 9) *Ring of Invulnerability: The ring will provide immunity against all attacks and hazards for 30 seconds.
 * 10) *Wings of Wrath: These wings grant the player flight for a short time.
 * 11) *Chaos Device: The device can be used from the players inventory, and will teleport them to the beginning of the level. It can come in handy if you are swamped with enemies, or about to die from a fall.
 * 12) *Morph Ovum: When used, magical eggs blast in all directions from the player, and creatures in its path is morphed in to a chicken. The effect lasts for 40 seconds. (It does not work on Iron Liches, Maulotaurs, D'Sparil, or Chaos Serpent).
 * 13) The game uses randomized ambient sounds and noises, such as evil laughter, chains rattling, distantly ringing bells, and water dripping in addition to the soundtrack to further enhance the atmosphere.
 * 14) Unlike Doom, none of the monsters are capable of hitscan attacks, meaning that none of them can snipe you from long distances for instant, unavoidable damage. That said, hitscan attacks still exist in the game; with two of the player weapons utilizing such, so they are still a hazard in deathmatches.
 * 15) Great graphics for its time.
 * 16) Because of its fantasy setting enemies consist of flying red gargoyles, golems, undead warriors, ophidians, disciples of D'Sparil, and were-dragons, each with melee and ranged attacks of varying power, and the melee-only Sabreclaws.
 * 17) There are also many magic based weapons.
 * 18) *Staff/Gauntlets of Necromancer: The staff is a weapon of last resort and should only ever be used if the player has run out of ammo for all other weapons and does not have the Gauntlets. The Gauntlets discharge an electrical attack which delivers fast repetitive damage to enemies. Unlike the Staff, the Gauntlets aren’t just a weapon for when all others fail but can in fact be used practically to take down a variety of enemies in any given situation. They are best used when an enemy has been weakened by another weapon to not only easily kill that enemy, but also conserve ammo. Although it is very useful against a single enemy, the use of the Gauntlets against a group of enemies’ demands caution and in most cases is advised against.
 * 19) *Elven Wand: This weapon fires shards at a steady rate with good accuracy at close and medium ranges and below average at long range.
 * 20) *Ethereal Crossbow: The crossbow is a ranged weapon that fires three magical bolts at a time. Against one enemy, all three bolts will hit that one enemy, dealing heavy damage. Against multiple enemies, the bolts will spread to deal a third of damage to up to three enemies per shot.
 * 21) *Dragon Claw: The claw uses its own ammo that is found in blue spheres around the maps. Thanks to its rate of fire, the Dragon Claw is an effective weapon against both weak enemies like gargoyles and stronger enemies such as Undead Warriors.
 * 22) *Hellstaff: It fires red missiles which are very fast, when powered up the area surrounding the target is covered in red rain which does more damage as it drops on the target or targets.
 * 23) *Phoenix Rod: It fires single flame orbs at a slow rate (unlike the Hellstaff which fires multiple runes at a fast rate). Each orb deals a lot of damage, including splash damage, making it very useful at taking on groups of enemies, strong and weak. About five orbs fired into a crowd of Disciple of D'Sparil or Iron Lich will severely damage, if not completely decimate the great threat.
 * 24) *Firemace: A formidable weapon that fires metal balls which cause reasonable damage each with one in ever tenth ball causing triple damage. However it really comes into its own when powered up as it creates very large metal balls which bounce around and will kill any non boss creature immediately. Bosses still take damage but not nearly enough to kill them outright.
 * 25) Good soundtrack.
 * 26) The game has an interesting dynamic in turns of attacks. There are two kinds of attacks: physical and magical. The physical attacks from weapons like the Firemace can only hurt physical enemies while going right through ethereal ones. Ethereal enemies can only be hurt by weapons that do magical attacks like the Ethereal Bow and Dragon's Claw.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) There are some difficulty spikes.
 * 2) * Episode 1 isn't much to write home about difficulty wise, until you get to the Citadel, which throws hordes of enemies at you from every direction (with lots and lots of Gargoyles sneaking up on you).
 * 3) * Episode 3 ramps things up, with at least one Iron Lich per level on the higher difficulty settings. E3M1 is widely considered the most difficult level of the base game, simply because the only new weapons you'll get in that level are the Gauntlets of the Necromancer and the Dragon Claw (there's also a Hellstaff, but it's in a secret at the very end of the level), and ammo pickups are very limited. This is on top of there being at least one Iron Lich in the stage, and two on any difficulty other than easy.
 * 4) * The two episodes added in Shadow of the Serpent Riders really crank up the difficulty. E4M1 alone has a Maulotaur and a whole posse of Iron Liches, and not a lot of weapons or ammo to go around. Later levels have at least two Maulotaurs and five Iron Liches, sometimes all nearby each other.
 * 5) Some of the enemies are really annoying to fight like the Iron Liches that shoot tornados, which will lift you up in the air and consistently do damage. This is especially annoying when you have to fight them in tight spaces.
 * 6) Sadly, there is no updated version of the game that allows it to run on modern hardware as it strictly requires an MS-DOS emulator: DOSbox. Fortunately, mods like GZDoom feature such, see here.
 * 7) The games' level design gets pretty repetitive due to the overuse of monsters behind windows and monster closets.
 * 8) *There's also the idea of using pressurized switches to unlock areas. The main problem being that these pressure plates look no different from the normal tiles of the floor since they aren't given any distinction.
 * 9) The game relies too much on backtracking due to unlocking areas as you progress further towards the end as you'll end up unlocking a secret area or an area that leads to a secret that you saw earlier without you knowing it.
 * 10) The Time Bomb is pretty useless given it's small blast radius and how little damage it does.

Reception
Heretic received mixed reviews, garnering an aggregated score of 62% on GameRankings and 78% on PC Zone. This was one of many FPS games that was considered a "Doom clone".

Videos
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