Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders (PC) Review

Those who have played The Ultimate Doom's 'Thy Flesh Consumed' episode might thing that this must be exactly the same. It isn't. The fourth chapter that id software crafted for its fantastic FPS was very hard, but more than doable, even on later difficulties (Nightmare excluded). Shadow of the Serpent Riders, however, ranks up the difficulty a bit more.

Those who found the original Heretic to be a bit too easy, and thus, decide to start in the highest difficulty mode possible, will soon realise that it takes more than running around and shooting stuff here. For starters, and again, especially in the last two difficulty modes, a big part of the challenge is that, at least in the very first level, this is a pretty stingy beast, and while those careful enough will reach the end with plenty of ammo at their disposal, they will realise that the special items that were over-abundant in the original, are anything but in here…

There's one big similarity and one big difference with The Ultimate Doom, though. Firstly, In terms of challenge, instead of the monsters, the real enemy tends to be the level design itself, with tons of traps, with many of them (crushing ceilings in particular) able to wipe out more than 50% of the health meter. As for the similarity, it's the simple fact that Shadow of the Serpent Riders has nothing new to offer.

This is nothing more than a bunch of new levels; nothing at all. Of course, some may say that this was pretty much the same with The Ultimate Doom's additional episode… and here's the real difference between those two. Both are very challenging, and, unfortunately, both use the same freaking material - id Software's masterpiece, however, had an infinitely better level design, when in here stages fall into two categories: ok, and annoying.