HROT Reviews

I can easily say this is an amazing game even though I have barely finished it.

good game, fun and pretty unique. some secrets were a little obtuse but its fine. fuck the handheld game though, thank god i never have to do that again for completion

Seems like a cool game, but it has a serious technical issue that causes the game to feel like it's running around 20fps, even when it's actually running much better. This only happens during actual gameplay, as the main menu is able to deliver a solid 170fps. Searching around for the issue reveals that it's common with no reliable workaround. It might be due to me gaming on Linux, but I tried a bunch of suggested fixes and tools like Gamescope & Mangohud to no avail. I'd love to see what the actual game is like, but this is too big of a problem to overlook, and too much work to figure out the precise fix that will work for your hardware (if one even exists). I'll give it another shot if the dev addresses this.

HROT is a sharply designed and well-paced shooter with tons more character than its muddy visual style suggests. It may look like a Quake clone at first, but it's a pretty different kind of game, and in fact I personally enjoyed it more than Quake. The action is simple but satisfying, with the parameters dialed in so well that even small encounters can provide a nice challenge. Its levels are always fun to explore because they're full of detail, including a variety of interactive gimmicks and clever secrets. It has a great sense of humor that's dark, wry and absurd in just the right amounts, and gets into some delightfully weird post-Soviet satire. Unexpectedly, it reminded me of some of the good fan-made level packs for Doom II. The compact and densely detailed maps, the secret areas and gimmicks made ingeniously with a limited toolset, the dry touches of humor in the margins -- I kept wondering if a known Doom mapper was somehow involved with the project. At a certain point I was like "Wait, Gusta worked on this, didn't he????? IT ALL FITS" and of course that was a complete delusion. But it made sense at the time. Play the demo, and if you like what's in there, the full game won't disappoint you.

in short, this is slavic Quake. the game is a basic but fun and quick retro shooter. the enemies are stright foward and simple but they get the job done. the level design is a hit & miss for me, the color palette is fifty shades of brown and can cause some confusion when trying to navigate but the levels themselves are fluid and looking for secrets is fun. overall the game is really fun if you are into boomer shooters.

Wonderful wonderful game. A little slower and weightier than DUSK, but still frantic and chunky. Great sense of humor and variety in encounters and level design, even with the color palette being very very brown and drab. The Czech setting with its own folklore/intricacies gives it a unique atmosphere that cannot be topped. A few great jumpscares, one really crap one. The bosses are some wacky wacky shit.

Alot of boomer shooters although fun get repetitive and/or really easy. But this game finds a way to make you constantly worry about every room and actually has some decently scary traps. HROT is a fun slavic twist on the quake style of gameplay. Really fun take on the boomer shooter genre. 10/10 i played all 3 episodes in 1 sitting.

One of the best retro shooters! Love the world, enemies and gameplay. I do feel like this genre of shooter has issues with the game not offering enough or offering too much, but HROT is simple yet smooth feeling game, not too over the top [spoiler]The final boss was funny but overall I would have wished for something else from the in-game universe, kinda ruined the end for me[/spoiler]

The game doesn't run at high frame rates properly. It's a good game but if you can't handle this like me, you're just going to get more and more frustrated that it feels awful. We're supposed to be replicating something like Quake, right? The same Quake that ran on a CRT? Anyway if you're like me and want to push through because you like the game: use SpecialK and force G Sync (or adaptive sync) to the highest multiple of 50 Hz that your monitor can do, ie 100 Hz for 144 Hz display, 50 Hz on 60 Hz display. Also lock the frame rate to this number. I recommend it because most people aren't as picky about frame rates as me and I was able to get it to just about be good enough. Just don't pick this up expecting a true high frame rate experience.

HROT is a very brown game, like, even more than Quake is, which is an achievement. Unfortunately that brown extends to more than just the visual aspects of the game, as none of the weapons in the game stand out and all of the boss enemies and encounters elicit a feeling of "oh no, not another one" rather than excitement at a coming challenge, hell, even the humour in the game is ...brown. The setting of the game being in a soviet era Czechoslovakia (I might be wrong on this) doesn't help with the feeling of brownness going on either. I played through the game on Very Hard (the hardest of the 5 difficulties) and never really felt strapped for ammunition, there were however times when I had to play it safe due to low HP, but even dying is not a big issue as the game effortlessly restarts the level or loads you straight to your latest save practically instantly, which is very cool. Most of the levels in the game are set up in a sort of "area that you get routed through by off-shoot paths a few times before moving on to the next" type of way, which is noticeable but seems to be part of how they designed things, as the developers are really good at dumping you where you need to go next, and are very generous in giving you ways to back track through levels to pick up ammo/health or to look for secrets. Speaking of secrets.. If you love to scour every inch of a map for old-school DOOM style secrets where you're looking for every jaunty looking texture or interactable wall, then this game might be for you as it has tonnes of them. That's not to say that all the secrets are like that, as some are more logic based where they show you the "goal" and you have to work backwards to find how to open the secret up, and others are more direct "blow up the crack in the wall", or "which of these bricks protrudes from the surface and is thus a button" so there's a good variety in secrets to find. Overall the game is fine but I'd recommend Prodeus or Amid Evil over it, but if HROT looks interesting to you, you might enjoy it more than I did.