Having been there at the start of the first-person shooting genre, I remember playing Wolfenstein 3D and then DOOM, and being pretty amazed at what I was seeing, but it wasn’t until Quake that my jaw really hit the floor. For people who weren’t there at the time to see the early transitional steps moving from 2D gaming to 3D, it’s hard to describe how incredible it was at key moments. In the console world while Mario 64 was a wonder, honestly I was much more taken aback by its control scheme that mostly made navigating 3D worlds effortless. That said, over on the PC side, it was Quake that blew up the FPS genre, and started the ball rolling in earnest towards everyone needing dedicated 3D graphics processors. While there have been quite a number of retro FPS titles on the Switch, I’d say that Wrath: Aeon of Ruin is the first that has really channeled that classic Quake feel in many ways, and it’s welcome.

One of the things it does that I appreciated, though it confused me at first, was to have a pretty large hub world to choose your levels from. The ability to dabble in whatever you like, in whatever order, is a nice touch, and I can’t say it felt like the order of choices made the game easier or tougher than I’d have expected. As always, you’ll continue to accumulate new weapons pretty regularly, but I do appreciate that for the most part ammo is available most of the time but you’ll still need to be careful not to waste it. The variety of enemies will also keep you on your toes, as they can come in high or sometimes spot you from a distance, keeping the action lively and sometimes pretty challenging.

None of this is to say there aren’t some issues though, and for me they began just as the game was getting started. Choosing to have you spend quite a bit of time in the tutorial with only your bladed weapon, in my eyes, did not get the experience off to a great start. Attacking enemies with it is clumsy at best and outright inaccurate at worst, with the regular attack almost always ensuring you’ll take damage trying to kill with it, and the thrust attack which doubles as your dash being very challenging to line up enemies to hit them. Other than it setting the stage for some rare opportunities to make a long jump to get to a secret area, and helping me understand I don’t ever want to be out of ammo for all of my other weapons, it soured me quite a bit before I got my first gun and was able to get down to business. That gets to general aiming and control issues, and as expected a controller simply isn’t terribly ideal; the lack of spot-on gyro aiming assistance is disappointing since we’ve seen it in some shooting titles before.  Throw in the limited save system and some stages that feel ridiculously long, and you can add some pacing concerns to the list as well.

All said, Wrath: Aeon of Ruin gets quite a bit right but it also struggles in some pretty key areas. I would say it is best suited to experienced FPS fans who are more likely going to be able to weather some tough sections and stingy saves, better than people who are more casual genre fans. If you are a part of that crowd that cut their teeth on the early FPS titles like Quake though this may be just what the doctor ordered, satisfying with some retro beats but delivering some challenges all its own.