Forgive Me Father Review

Forgive Me Father offers up old school FPS action in the most literal sense, and is a lot of fun. There’s small concessions to more modern games (an upgrade tree being the biggest one), but this plays and looks like it came from the early 90’s – and for me, that is a very good thing indeed.

If you’ve played Doom or Duke Nukem 3D then you’ll have a good idea of the way Forgive Me Father plays. Rapid but smooth movement, guns that get increasingly more powerful but no need to reload any of them, a relentless precessions of enemies whose sole goal is to charge you down, and fairly linear but well designed levels that hide a secret or two.

There are two character choices to kick things off, the Priest who is a more steady but powerful type, or the Journalist who offers a more nimble approach while being a little less powerful. Once in game though, the aim is the same; blow seven shades of shit out of everything that moves before they do the same to you.

Forgive Me Father wastes no time in giving us decent weaponry, from the starting pistol to shotguns, tommy guns, and more. Switching between these is seamless, and we need to do so often as the hordes of enemies will whittle down ammo counts quickly.

Each of these can be upgraded with perk points gained at set levels of XP earned. It’s a fairly unobtrusive system though, more of a nice bonus than something to game and plan out. Every now and then the little prompt pops up to let us know we have enough for a perk point, and from within the menu we can quickly assign which upgrade we’d like.

In a nice twist, each gun has two paths to follow. Upgrade the shotgun for more damage for example, and you might miss out on the ammo variant upgrade on the other path. I really liked how the weapons not only changed in power but also appearance. The shotgun in particular had a pretty gruesome looking overhaul, whereas the tommy gun changed to more of a laser rifle due to the perk I chose, complete with a more futuristic look to it.

We can earn perk reset points which will let us undo a weapons path to start over, but these are pretty limited.

We also have access to powers unlocked as we play. These range from extra healing to invulnerability for a brief time, and are powered by – you guessed it – killing everything.

As we defeat enemies, we tally up a count in the corner of the screen. The immediate effect of this is that as it approaches 100 the screen colour washes out, the music dulls a little, and we’re more powerful for a time. Using the powers depletes this number, so it’s a trade off between effects depending on the action in the moment.

Aside from them all baying for our blood, there’s a decent variety in enemies to fight, from rank and file skeletons and zombies, to hulking beasts that fire energy balls, or Left 4 Dead-style witches that when disturbed will just hound us down and take a hell of a punishment to defeat. No matter who we’re fighting though, the action plays out at 100 miles an hour, yet I rarely found it to be too overwhelming. One nice touch is that Forgive Me Father supports mouse and keyboard as simply as controller, and using this input method is definitely the way to go if you can. These old school shooters thrive with the fast response time of a mouse, and once I made the switch I was knocking headshots out far more frequently.

Levels are graded on our completion percentage, which includes how many of the enemies we killed, how many secrets we found, and a few extra bits such as barrels destroyed or story items found. Each level is pretty short (between 5-10 minutes) so completionist’s won’t have too much trekking to go back and get that 100%.

One other aspect of Forgive Me Father which deserves praise is the presentation. The levels are fairly basic – although nicely done – 3D areas, while the enemies and items dotted around are flat 2D sprites that rotate to always face us. Those enemies in particular are nicely designed, with vivid artwork and colours making them easily distinguishable in the hecticness of a fight.

And hecticness might be underselling it. While there are points where we’re effectively walking down a corridor blasting away, occasionally we’re locked in a room with a horde of spawning enemies for minutes at a time. Here, the music cranks up with some kick ass metal, the bullets start flying, and it’s almost impossible to not get carried away. At least until the ammo runs out.

If there’s anything to bring Forgive Me Father down, it could be that – much like the games that inspired it – it’s a bit one note. Enemies bombard us while we back pedal and strafe around them, and then once that is done, well, we do it again. Again, for me this is exactly why I like it, but those brought up on slightly more intricate shooters might not get what they’re after with this style of shooter.

Conclusion

Overall, I’ve had a great time with Forgive Me Father. It takes what is great about the older generation of shooters in the speed and simplicity of its action, adds a small amount of modern concessions, and packages it up in a really rather good looking game. Shooter fans should definitely be asking for forgiveness if the pass this one up.