Wrath: Aeon of Ruin is a proper throw back to the early days of first-person shooters – so much so, it’s based on the tech that powered one of the first games I eveR played in the genre, Quake. It’s not just the tech but the feel of the game that apes the ‘90s style, from relentless enemy onslaughts to slightly wonky platforming and difficulty spikes that’ll have us replaying larger chunks of a level a bit too many times. Everything moves at a blistering pace too, even on my 60hz screen it feels like it’s running at about a thousand frames a second. Pair all this with chunky 32-bit style visuals, and we get the aforementioned proper throwback feel.
Where modernity slips in is in the sheer size of the levels. They twist and turn in and around themselves, often having us off on a jolly down a long corridor only to arrive back at a central hub room. Most levels take the best part of an hour to beat, not factoring in the many, many retries after deaths. It can be a bit bewildering as to where to go at times (there’s no helping hand so occasionally it’s just run around until we find a new door or batch of enemies to signify we’re on the right track) but usually once we’ve found the door we’re after we’re a bit more funnelled in for a while.
No matter the scale though, we’re going to be shooting a lot. Enemies come in a wide variety of designs, although they are recycled throughout because there is simply so damn many of them. It’s not uncommon to be in a room with more than a dozen foes at a time, only to walk into a dozen more straight away. For their part, the AI is as basic as they come; they see you, the chase you. Some have longer range attacks than others, but regardless all will just follow us down a corridor with no regard for their own safety.
At times we can use this to kite them into a safer space, but when we’re in an open environment then the key is to not stand still. The flying enemies are especially tricky, with one variant moving super-fast and dealing massive damage while being all but resistant to our own outgoing fire. All it takes is a few seconds to be cornered and killed, and if we’ve not placed a checkpoint down recently then there could be a long trek back to this point (likely to die a few more times).
Those checkpoints come in the form of collectible Soul Tethers found in each of the massive levels. Some are on our main path, but it’s worth hunting out the extra ones hidden in secret locations or in alternate areas as they are a vital commodity that carries on with us throughout the game. For example, should we collect 4 in the first level, we being level two with 4, but if we use them all up we’ll begin level three with zero.
This encourages a risk/reward approach to the game, ever taunting us to push that bit further before placing one down at the risk of suddenly being ambushed and losing all of our progress. Modern games have gotten pretty good at signifying when tricky sections are coming up (albeit sometimes that’s made too obvious) but in Wrath we can be blindsided at any moment, making it hard to judge when to use one of the limited resource Soul Tethers we might have.
While initially a good source of tension, I eventually found it too frustrating a system that was hampering my enjoyment of the gameplay. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve barely scraped through a fight with hardly any health or ammo left only to get bombarded almost immediately by a new wave of foes, forcing me to replay the last fight and whatever I had to before it too. This turns those hour-long levels into potentially multiple hour affairs thanks to the repetition. There is also the possibility of placing a manual save down at a terrible time; on my first play of the opening level I accidently placed one down just as a swarm of enemies spawned, only to die seconds later. Every subsequent load had me instantaneously dying, and because we can only have one Soul Tether active at a time this meant I had no choice but to restart the entire level – at a point I was at least 40 minutes into it.
Thankfully, there is an option to enable unlimited manual saves (seemingly without penalty) and while I was initially hesitant to resort to this, I can’t deny I began to enjoy the game a bit more again once I could give myself a bit of breathing room. We still only have one active at a time, but we can at least place them down without worrying that we might need to save it for later on in the game.
Saves out of the way then, the combat in Wrath is simple but effective. The variety of guns all have a best-use scenario, and there really hasn’t been any time I’ve stuck with one gun over all others. Shotguns are naturally a beast up close, but the rapid-fire Fang launcher is good in all cases, and the simple blade we’re given has a charged attack that will mince even the biggest enemies up in one or two hits – with the caveat that we need to get super up-close and personal.
Circle-strafing the wide arenas, bunny-hopping about and giving as good as we get is, in the moment, a lot of fun. Enemies burst into chunks, and there are even ways we can turn them into helpers via friendly fire but having certain types explode or simply getting the lower foes in the line of the bigger ones volley of fire. It’s far from a tactical game by any means, but any advantage we can get is welcome as even on the default difficulty things are hard going.
The simplicity can get repetitive too quickly though, again mainly thanks to the long levels. It feels as though once we’ve seen one massive area full off foes to kill, we’re seeing a dozen more that don’t really offer much different other than a slight scenic colour change. I’ve found playing a single level a night enough for me before needing to move onto something else, and honestly, even that became a struggle the further into the game I got.
One aspect of the combat I did like more though were the power-ups we’re given. There are a good variety of these limited resources to use, from giving us a health boost for each enemy we kill to letting us breath underwater, deflect bullets, become invulnerable and even turn the enemies on one another. Some are better than others in certain situations (the health boost one for example is great in crowd, but only if we’re constantly killing enemies) but they add a nice twist to the simple run and gun repetition. It’s possibly even more worthwhile hunting these out over the Soul Tethers in our eyes.
Conclusion
All in all though, while Wrath: Aeon of Ruin has some potential and nails the retro-style FPS gameplay, it does so with a few too many sour points to really make it stand out in the FPS crowd. Gunplay can be fun, and the powers are a great touch, but the levels are too long and too repetitive to really have us itching to keep coming back to go through them, especially if played with the default manual save options.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
