Dread Templar Reviews

Great Retro Shooter :)

For a $5 game, it was alot more then I expected

This is a good boomer shooter, held back by some minor things imo. Worst offender is that the upgrade system is tied to secrets. What the hell did those Chinese developers smoke, when they made that decision? Sometimes the music is a real banger, but the loops are mostly terrible. And lets not start talking about weapon balance.... Is the bomb launcher useful for anything? Did I miss the point somehow? And whats the point of the bow? I only switched to it when I was out of inferno bullets to snipe the annoying flying monsters. The level pacing is okay, episode 1 and 2 are the best and most of the love and creativity were clearly invested there. Episode 3 and 4 are meh. In episode 5 it seems to become promising again, with the cool backtracking level E5M2 (wonder where they got that idea from :3 *cough* dusk). But thats fine, I am a sucker for that kind of stuff. But E5M3, the last level before the boss... What a disapointment... Ah well. If you are bored and need a good shooter, go for it. Just remember to keep a guide for the secrets open on your second monitor. And do not go for the mega secret. That was a complete waste of time.

Around 15 hours of play 100%ing every mission. Wasn't sold immediately at the start, but quickly became a rock-solid FPS after picking up a few weapons and upgrades. There are a LOT of secrets to find, most levels have at least a few and a "super secret." Some of the secrets felt great to find, while others (or spots that lacked them) felt like missed opportunities. The campaign-wide secret was also cool, but the result was... whelming. Overall, solid recommendation for old-school FPS lovers.

fun game, fun gun play, many monsters to kill

I wanted to love this game. I truly wanted to. I saw reviews about it and it seemed fun. Another Quake-like game, which I live. So, it was a natural option for me to purchase. I attempted to play it and... it didn't felt right... Don't get me wrong. The game isn't bad. The game is not buggy or something like. It's just that the gameplay itself is not something I was able to love. The weapons don't have the feeling I was expecting, and the gameplay itself is not what I was expecting. Again. The game is not bad. It just didn't resonate with me. I can recommend the game even with my bad comment because I can see that the game isn't bad. It certainly might have its audience, and I truly wish them the best of luck. Hopefuly they can love it with their souls. Something I was sadly unable to do myself.

Dread Templar is a really cool FPS when you look at it. Weapons look cool, the protagonist looks an edgier version of Dante from Devil May Cry, level are decent and have lots of secrets. But man, playing throught this game kind of felt like a slog. The story is almost non-existent. There are little cutscenes explaining the backstory in-between each of the chapters, but outside of that there is no real lore or explanation of what is going on. The levels stitched together mostly randomly with few cool transitions, but in the end they rely on generic portals in-between. The character has no voice lines outside of aforementioned cutscenes. What enemies are and what they represent is handwaved as generic "demons" from the "dread realm'. In terms of story and lore there literally nothing. The graphics are pretty good as far as the PS1/Quake early 3D inspired style goes. Like I mentioned, I really liked how weapons looked. The levels look pretty cool as well, there is a lot of variety in visuals between each level, even though in sacrifice of some cohesiveness. The enemies look like a mish mash of different styles as well. You start with generic zombies, then you get bug like creatures, and then you get egiptian inspired creatures and generic demon looking enemies. The music is kind of generic metal affair. It's fine, it fits the overall vibe, there were some cool tracks, but nothing too memorable. Now, there are some problems with the gameplay. I played the game once on the "Hard" difficulty. I'm not sure about the differences between other difficulty options, but maybe it could put things into perspective. So, the weapons are cool looking, but they feel really weak for some reason. it may have to do with the fact that enemies barely show any signs of taking damage, but it also may have to do with the their health levels. I have this habit of counting how many shots enemy can take with each weapons, so imagine my surprise, when most of the low-level enemies take 2 shots from most of the weapons. 2 shots from double-barreled shotgun, 2 shots from rocket launcher, 2 shots from a bow, 2 shots from a revolver. Maybe it's related to the games upgrade system. Throughout the game you collect blood stones and runes. Blood stones unlock more upgrade slots that you can put runes into. There are basic silver runes that can increase damage, rate of fire, amoo capacity etc. And also there are gold runes that can actually radically change the function of weapon, or provide a unique buff in certain conditions. So maybe nemy health was adjusted as a way to combat sort of power creep, that completionist type players will get into, because runes potentially can make player overpowered. But here is the thing, most of the silver runes provide only marginal benefits, adding damage rune of level 1 or 2 doesn't really help, since the nemies that died in 2 shots still died in 2 shots, same with ammo runes, adding 5-10 shots with each level. And as with the golden runes, that was actually really exciting thing for me to unlock, only to realise that most of them didn't really help with the process as well. Example with the shotgun golden runes, there is a rune that turns single shotgun into a freezing weapon. Frozen shotgun deals additional damage and adds slowing effect to enemies, but there is a huge downside, because each shot now consumes 2 sheels instead of one, and slowing effect lasts like 2-3 seconds at most, while the damage increase again is so negligible that you get actually the worse weapon in general, because it's ineffecient with ammo. Another example is a golden rune that turns pistols into more powerful version of the pistol, that can penetrate opponents. While the DPS again is marginally improved, it's not worth it to use this version of the weapon because each shot consumes 4 ammo per shot with a very small buff to damage and penetration. So this feels like an overcorrection where the developers were afraid of making runes too powerful, so they feel kind of weak, but power escalation goes kind of beyond players control. Now there are things that I like. Precision weapons - bow and revolver, actually feel good to use because of their ability to do critical hits, But not every enemy has a weak point to hit to get those critical hits, and I feel like adding crit ability to more weapons would probably increase the overall feel of the game. There are also enemies that are immune to the attacks from the game's rocket launcher. There is a level that is filled with those enemies, and they also don't have a weak point to hit with precision weapons. So you have to use more shotgun, not a big deal, but you at some point will get into ammo problems. Once you run out of shotgun ammo, you may fall back to using uzis, but despite their high DPS, they are actually ptobably least ammo efficient weapon in the game, where you can run out of ammo in seconds, and while bullets are the most common ammo type you emcounter, most of the time they are picked up in small bundles that don't enough ammo even for a single mag. Pistols as an alterantive to uzis have very small DPS and get outclassed almost instantly. Revolver ammo is rare and you can't really hold a lot of shots even with ammo runes. Bow has regenerating ammo, but it takes 3 arrows to take down one of these guys, while without runes you can hold 4 arrows max and it takes around 3 seconds for 1 arrow to come back. You could try to melee them, but they have a projectile attack that they can bombard you with especially in groups. So the whole level I had full rocket launcher ammo while switching between weapons picking up like 3 shells and 12 bullets at a time. Another problem is the movement. It's fast and fluid, but lacks certain bounce and feels static. it seems there is no bunny hopping since constant jumping provides no speed boost. The single dash has a 3 second cooldown and provides no additional momentum, so it feels like a quick dash that instantly stops like you are stuck in quicksand, so you could use it only as a dodge move. So overall, the experience of Dread Templar felt really underwhelming to me. There are cool ideas, but everything feels disjointed and ends up just unsatisfying to play. It's not awful, but it could be so much better.

It takes the Doom formula and enhances it by adding a skill upgrade tree and items like katanas and a bow. Overall, the game has a Quake 1 feel, and there are secrets galore. If you grew up playing Doom, Quake, etc., then you'll love this formula. Oh, and the music kicks ass (I recommend turning it down in the settings though).

extremely fast paced retro shooter. it has a lot of levels but each levels are pretty short (around 10 minutes or so of normal game play). the music is awesome definitely has some of a favorite music from recent games. story is also pretty cool too. I just wish there were more cut scenes. overall the game is great!