Hrot evaluation | PC Gamer

The star of the present in Sovietcore boomer shooter Hrot is solo developer Spytihněv’s ranges, all of that are impressed by or instantly correspond to real-life places in and round Prague. The tenement blocks, metro stations, church buildings, and castles of this twisted model of town all really feel like cheeky de-makes of actual world places, a MyHouse.wad blown as much as large proportions. 

The degrees twist and fold in on one another in shocking methods, and Spytihněv likes to troll. It virtually seems like he is a dungeon grasp in lively dialog with you—or chuckling at your blunders—quite than a stage designer who created these areas and stepped again. 

There’s virtually at all times some sort of trick to activating switches or selecting up keys, with partitions falling away to disclose enemies, lure doorways dropping you into sticky conditions, and even the sport outright teleporting you to a totally totally different a part of the map—Hrot is totally filled with little gags like these that by no means did not get a chuckle out of me, and even once I received punked, I at all times appreciated it.

One memorable bit is the sport’s riff on the basic Indiana Jones boulder lure. Early in Episode 2, you encounter a typical, if shocking one within the lead as much as the tip of a stage. One mission later, and look, there’s one other one, solely this time the boulder would not roll in a straight line: it chases you, a shock yakety sax slapstick sequence in the midst of a foreboding uranium mine deep underground.

One in all my favourite ranges, Granny’s Valley, takes you to a farm out within the nation with an unnerving statue of an aged peasant lady on the heart (one which corresponds to an actual life monument impressed by a Czech novel), and the farm makes for an attention-grabbing puzzle field of a stage, scouring it for keys till its secrets and techniques lastly reveal themselves to you. 

The factor is, the Granny statue stalks you thru her farm and even ambushes you at factors, making for a few of my favourite moments in Hrot. Granny herself is not all that scary to take a look at, however the sheer shock of discovering her the place she did not belong spooked me sufficient my first time by means of that I needed to step away from the pc throughout a late night time session and choose again up the following day. 

Hrot’s moment-to-moment taking pictures is a blast, with an awesome number of hard-hitting enemies demanding improvisation and mastery of its arsenal, however I did discover that arsenal to be quite restricted. It is all FPS staples: pistol (rather more enjoyable when dual-wielded), single and double-barreled shotguns, SMG, sniper-style crossbow, and a “hussite hand cannon” (learn: rocket launcher). All of them look, really feel, and sound nice, and so they’re well-balanced in opposition to one another. 

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I at all times respect when an excellent shotty would not outmode the common one, and Hrot’s ammo economic system means you may need to save shells when each barrels can be overkill. The one place the place Hrot’s arsenal tries to be distinctive, nevertheless, is a little bit of a letdown. There are two wacky Soviet house tremendous weapons that I want had been utilized higher—I discovered them to be underpowered whereas their ammo was exceedingly uncommon. Spytihněv left quite a bit on the desk in the case of retro-futuristic beam weapons, particularly contemplating how zany Hrot will get by the tip.

Getting goofy

Episode 1: Kiss Me Gustav is probably the most grim and oppressive, specializing in sparse, trendy, Soviet-era locales. The center chapter, The Degustation, stays my favourite, shifting out into the nation whereas mixing in additional pagan, earthy settings like gothic castles or a haunted farm. There is a three stage stretch on the finish, Kašperk Fortress, Dobrosov Fortress, and The Granny’s Valley, that is simply an all-timer run of FPS maps for me. It sees you go from a 14th century citadel the place you climb the battlements earlier than descending into its flooded cellars, to a cramped Soviet bunker, to that unnerving rural key hunt I described earlier. This sequence is Hrot at its finest, and actually underscores the range Spytihněv was capable of wring out of this grim, brown world.

Episode 3, the Gastroscopy, actually goes ham on Hrot’s sense of absurd, surreal weirdness—it will get goofy—and for probably the most half, it landed for me. The opening stage, Warfare with the Newts, is a brand new favourite, an homage to the satirical Thirties Czech novel of the identical identify, and likewise, weirdly, an awesome send-up of Return to Fortress Wolfenstein. Different highlights embrace a bumper automotive boss and lovely rat-killing canine companions who instantly shot to the highest of my checklist of favourite videogame canine. 

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That goofiness labored for me proper up till Hrot’s remaining boss. Spoilers forward, nevertheless it’s ah, epic shirtless Vladimir Putin? For me, this non-sequitur landed like a moist fart, and never in a great way like Hrot’s extra scatological humor (it is a sport the place you possibly can take a dump and flush it). The primary two episode bosses are freaky zombified/robofied variations of historic leaders of communist Czechoslovakia, Klement Gottwald in Episode 1 and Gustáv Husák in The Degustation. These felt like sharp, winking riffs on the absurdity of Wolfenstein 3D’s Mecha Hitler, the proper capstones to their respective acts, whereas low-poly Putin seems like an incongruous meme, immediately courting Hrot greater than a twentieth century socialist politician ever might.

It isn’t an ideal comparability, however I maintain coming again to an alternate universe Spec Ops: The Line the place you combat George Bush on the finish. Epic Putin simply defanged and deflated Hrot for me, like the tip of Misplaced or one thing: “all that construct up and thriller was for this?” 

Some method of zombie Vladimir Lenin boss combat was proper there for the taking—there is a ton of era-appropriate Lenin imagery all through all three episodes that may have made for efficient foreshadowing, and Mecha Lenin would have felt like a much more earned, absurd, actual life political determine remaining boss. I might have additionally settled for a zombie Brezhnev, however reanimated Stalin would have been gauche. Ending gripes apart although, I really like Hrot, and it had me hooked proper up till that vexing remaining combat. Hrot is a very glorious FPS, among the finest of the boomer shooter renaissance.