The retro shooter genre is an ever-growing one. It seems like every few weeks, a new game is either entering Early Access or leaving it. WRATH: Aeon of Ruin is one such title. From publishers Fulqrum Publishing and 3D Realms and developers KillPixel Games and Slipgate Ironworks, WRATH is a horror first-person shooter inspired by old-school classics like Quake. Having been in Early Access since 2019, the game was released on PC earlier this year and on consoles earlier today. For the last week, I’ve been playing the game on my PlayStation 5 and I have some thoughts to share.
In WRATH, you play as an Outlander, who arrives on the shores of a dying world and is tasked by a mysterious cloaked figure called the Shepard of Wayward Souls to decimate the Guardians of the Old World. That’s about as much setup as the game gives you before pushing you into its world. After a brief opening, you are set free to explore an overworld map with portals that take you to each of the various levels in the game. These can be played in any order with enemies scaling appropriately. The concept of the game is fine and on paper, I can see the appeal, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.
Let’s start with what works. The game plays exactly as you expect it to based on its inspirations and the result is a faithful shooter with fast movement. The gameplay loop is simple no matter what level you dive into first. You go into an area, enemies spawn in, and you kill them with your arsenal of weapons. Nothing new there. And, truth is, if that’s all you’re looking for in a game, then you might find enjoyment in WRATH and you need not continue reading. To everyone else, here we go!
It’s not one single thing that muddled my experience of this game. Rather it’s a culmination of a few different factors that grew to be rather frustrating. While the game boasts that it has 15 distinct enemy types, you often won’t feel a sense of variety because, by the end of the first level, you will have seen most of the enemies coming your way. The location might change from ancient crypts to haunted forests but the enemies will be familiar. The game also has a relentless pace, which not only means that you’re constantly bombarded by the same monsters over and over again, but also that you don’t have time to stop and smell the decaying flowers.
You might watch a trailer for WRATH (like the one above) and think it’s a gory action-fest that will make you feel like a badass. And I can’t deny that part of that is baked into the retro shooter genre. But the reality of the gameplay is different. Most of your time will be spent walking backward from pursuing enemies, trying to give yourself a bit more time and space while you reload your gun to shoot in hopes that that is the one to finally bring it down. But spread out across hour-long levels with the pacing the game maintains, it doesn’t take long to get tired of that feeling.
To make matters worse, some enemies also have terrible pathing. (In simple terms, this is how an enemy moves toward the player once they are spotted.) In WRATH, I’ve quite often seen monsters get stuck in an archway or some random corner on their way to me. This is mainly an issue with the airborne enemies but can happen to the grounded ones as well. Considering most of the enemies crawl out of the floor or just spawn out of thin air (as opposed to spawning in a room and walking out or something), it’s annoying to not only deal with random enemies but also have to lure some of them out from their corner to finish the job.
Thankfully, where enemy variety is lacking, item and weapon variety is not as bad. You, of course, have the standard revolver and shotgun that has become a staple of the genre but you also get a mini-gun that shoots fangs, a slag launcher, and, my favorite, the Blade of Ruination. Along with primary fire (RT), weapons also have alternative fires (LT), and the Blade of Ruination, lets you dash and slash forward. At times when you’re out of bullets and the enemies don’t stop coming, the Blade is a useful tool to fall back on.
Going off the beaten path can sometimes award you with items that you can use in the heat of the battle. One item lets you drain the health of slain enemies while another releases a purple gas that makes enemies turn on each other. These are nice additions to the gameplay and are genuinely helpful when you have 6 health and even fewer bullets but need to recover fast.
Then there’s the Soul Tetheres to talk about. These are skulls that are picked up throughout your playthrough and act as checkpoints. To clarify, they are not checkpoints onto themselves, but rather items you pick up and can drop at your own accord as manual save spots. After everything I have said about the game’s brutal pacing and repetitive nature, it’s not hard to imagine why I don’t care for Soul Tethers. They add a level of intensity that I am honestly thankful you can turn off in the settings.
Then there’s the bugs. I can usually brute force my way through a game I don’t love for the sake of the review as long as bugs don’t ruin the experience too much but, sadly, that was the case for WRATH. In my four hours with the game, I have fallen through the map, got stuck on objects, and seen enemies do the same as I have already said. However, the final straw for me happened after the day one patch went through. I was deep into a forest level and I dropped a Soul Tether after clearing a room. A minute later, as I explored the area for ammo and items, I found that my health was curiously at 0 and that I wasn’t dead.
I didn’t think much of it, but once I progressed to the next area and promptly died to a stray bullet, I was given the normal options to continue: respawn at the Soul Tether, respawn at the last Shrine, or restart the level. I respawned at the Soul Tether, as usual, to find that I would auto-die every time I loaded in. The game seemed to have finally realized my health was 0 and I couldn’t progress as a result. My only two options after that were to go to a Shrine, which was all the way back in the last level I played, or restart the level I was currently in, which is the option I ended up going with. But the fact that I had to make that decision at all and lose progress really sucks.
If you’ve read my reviews before or have watched our weekly podcast, then you’ll know that I hate giving negative reviews. And on the rare instance when I do rate a game low, I feel like I have to really justify doing so. For WRATH, there are a number of things that I have already written about above that hopefully paint a picture of my experience with the game but for the visual players, I also put together a short thread on Twitter about it with photos and videos. It highlights the game’s numerous bugs and performance issues that led me to the score I gave below and I hope it explains why, despite hours of giving it a chance, I ultimately did not finish the game.
To put it all together, I didn’t enjoy WRATH: Aeon of Ruin as much as I wanted to. The game’s shooting mechanics are fine and some cool weapons and useful items help reduce the fatigue a bit but the lack of enemy variety and frustrating design decisions hold it back in the end. If you’re here to know more specifically about the console edition of the game, then bugs and occasional hiccups aside, the performance was fine for the most part. But if you’re here for a recommendation, I cannot suggest this one over the plethora of similar titles that are currently on the market. WRATH: Aeon of Ruin is available now on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC. A review code was provided by the publisher.
