1. Painkiller - PC2. Front Mission 4 - PS23. Wasteland 2 - PC4. Arcanum - PC5. X-COM Terror from the Deep - PC6. Military Madness - TurboGrafx-167. Unreal - PC8. Shadowrun - SNES9. Warcraft III - PC10. Dungeon Keeper - PC11. Final Fantasy X-2 HD - PS312. Descent - PC13. Quake Mission Pack 2 - Dissolution of Eternity - PC14. Quake 2 Mission Pack 2 - Ground Zero - PC15. Sokobond - PC16. Hybrid Heaven - N6417. Sonic the Hedgehog - Genesis18. Castlevania - NES19. Super Castlevania IV - SNES20. Castlevania III - NES21. Castlevania II - NES22. Castlevania Rondo of Blood - Turbo CD23. Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders - PC24. Fractal - PC25. Kirby's Adventure - NES26. Pillars of Eternity - PC27. Bioshock 2: Minerva's Den - PC28. Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour - PC29. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves - NES30. Punch-Out!! - NES31. Doom 3 - PC32. The Even More Incredible Machine - PC33. Contra - NES34. Dark Forces - PC35. Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II - PC36. X-Wing - PC37. TIE Fighter - PC38. Bloodborne - PS439. Gradius - NES40. Marble Madness - NES41. The Witcher 3 - PC42. Mega Man X5 Zero Playthrough - PSX43. Wolfenstein The Old Blood - PC44. Might and Magic Book 1 - PC45. Hexen: Beyond Heretic - PCYeah! I started playing this game a couple years ago but got stuck because of bugs in the Doomsday engine; when saves were written to disk they didn't store all the necessary state variables, which would lead to you getting stuck. I ended up giving up after having to beat the first three hubs by using the noclip cheat after I got stuck, and I was sick of it. I wanted to beat things for real.
Hexen is the sequel to Heretic, but it is a game that really stands on its own. Heretic was fantasy Doom with an inventory system, but Hexen does a lot of new stuff for itself and is a distinct game that happens to run on the Doom engine. This is a game that if I had it back in the day I could totally see myself playing at least three times through and probably more, since there's a lot of interesting stuff going on here.
The game starts by having you choose one of three classes. These affect your damage resistance, movement speed, and weapon set. All classes only get four weapons, but the weapons are quite different between the classes. The initial weapon takes no resources and is your standard fallback weapon, though it is still potent and the only reason you don't use it more is there are enough ammo drops to keep you in the other weapons. The next two weapons use either blue or green mana only (blue for weapon 2, green for weapon 3). These can't really be generalized across the three classes as they all have different uses. The constant is that the two combined give you an range of attack profiles, encouraging switching between the two as you face different enemies. The last weapon is essentially your BFG equivalent, and needs to be assembled from three pieces. You can gather them in the first three hubs, or in a secret level in the fourth hub (which requires tripping something in hubs 1 and 2), or in one of the areas of the fifth and last hub. The fourth weapon uses both blue and green mana, but it ends up being a little too good to use most of the time, but against the first couple bosses you can use it against it's quite bad, as those bosses can reflect your projectiles, which gives a bad cost ratio on them. In the final hub it is fantastic against those bosses. The game carries over the item system from Heretic.
Now, I've been talking about hubs, and that's the biggest thing Hexen does. The game is divided into five hubs, which consist of a group of maps that are interconnected using a series of portals. There's a lot of going into one map to flip switches to open paths in another map, and you slowly expand everything out. It makes for a great sense of exploration.
The environments are also quite varied and makes for a great experience. There's a lot of uses of open outdoor space and structures, and because of the way the maps connect they can split features across maps rather than keeping them in a single map like earlier games. And it goes beyond the medieval stuff and into things like ice and lava areas, swamps, and some sort of desolate battleground.
The only thing that's slightly negative is the game is definitely easier than Heretic, due to a combination of changed balance and the fact that all your items carry over from level to level and hub to hub. This lets you spam healing items and horde up the invulnerability and mana refill items. The slew of four bosses in the final hub were quite anticlimactic, as I just spammed my fourth weapon and chugged mana refills while invulnerable for the last boss (first three didn't need it). ALso, the Cleric's fourth weapon (which is the class I was using) is hilariously overpowered; it fires out three spirits that autoseek targets, deal damage, and keep it up for a while and will seek out new targets if they kill the original. You can also pump out a ton of spirits; you don't have to wait for the first set to go away. It was total easy mode, but at the same time it felt nice that my preparation was rewarded. That's something that tends to go away in the more modern FPS's that tend to give puzzle bosses or others of that nature that prevent you from dropping the heavy end of the hammer on them to cheese them out.
