3/5 ★ – Zacnitude's review of Shrine.

Doom and Doom II are some of my favorite classic FPS games, and the modding scene of these titles is incredible and allows for some impressive creations that sort of play as their own standalone game. So when I found out about this game (A game made in the Doom Engine with extra benefits the source port GZDoom provides) I was willing to give it a shot, it might turn out to be a hidden gem of sorts. While I did enjoy the overall experience and found it quite fun, the game definitely has its problems that may make others less likely to play it, and it's a title I don't exactly feel like replaying anytime soon. The game's weapons are bizarre, both in how they look visually and how they function. While their visual design looks bizarre, they do look good for what they are, with some weapons looking better than other weapons but overall their visual design matches their functionality. However, every weapon has weird quirks about them that make them feel less than ideal to use and in some cases will make the weapons feel like water pistols rather than an actual weapon someone would want to use in combat. The Fang (The game's equivalent of a pistol) is very weak similar to the starting pistol in Doom/Doom II. It's the type of weapon you want to use when you're starting out until you're given a better gun, it's a gun you'll never actively return to for the rest of the game as the damage output is pretty bad on every enemy in later levels. The Slugger is basically a pump action shotgun which has a better damage output than the Fang, though once you get the Vile Slayer this weapon becomes entirely redundant and as a result is also never picked again. The Vile Slayer is the most consistent weapon in the game, it's damage output isn't super amazing on stronger enemies but the damage it does is still pretty good. While the Vile Slayer takes visual inspiration from the Super Shotgun of Doom II fame, its behavior is quite different and is more versatile, with one shot only using one piece of ammunition which means there is never a point where you'll have to switch to The Slugger to conserve ammo for that weapon. The Splinter is a chaingun that has a decent fire rate which can allow for decent damage output, though unlike the chaingun in Doom/Doom II, there is a major drawback to using the weapon as after you stop firing the gun it locks you into a 1 second or so animation with the chamber spinning, meaning you can't switch weapons and you can't begin firing again until the animation is complete. This small change alone makes using this weapon in a majority of firefights a bad idea as it will leave you vulnerable to attack from other enemies any time you are forced to cease firing the weapon, either due to the enemy moving out of the line of sight or dying which happens more frequently than you'd think. The Eldritch Annihilator is a strange weapon, it takes queues from the BFG in the sense that it uses up a lot of ammunition and can do decent damage in quick succession, but instead of shooting one powerful projectile with invisible hit-scan tracers that do a large amount of damage like in all classic Doom titles, there are a bunch of projectiles shot out at once, with the damage they do to higher tier enemies fairly minimal in a lot of cases, as you'll find that you run out of ammo for this weapon before you even get close to killing some enemies. The Placenta Cannon is probably one of the most disappointing versions of the Rocket Launcher I've seen in a Doom total conversion, while the damage it does is pretty good and similar to that of the standard Rocket Launcher the projectiles it fires are quite annoying. Blowing yourself up with Rockets in Doom/Doom II was always a frustrating occurrence albeit relatively uncommon if you weren't too close to the wall. The Placenta Cannon projectiles are small little balls that once colliding with an enemy explode, much like a rocket would, however the projectiles are able to bounce off the walls in the level for a decent amount of time before exploding and due to the enemies moving wherever they want to there is a chance that once you fire the weapon they will have moved and the projectile will bounce back and hit you, causing a lot of damage and even killing the player in a lot of cases. Lining up shots with the weapon can be tricky too, sometimes you'll try to hit an enemy that's on a slightly raised part of the level and you just barely miss the enemy and hit the side of the raised surface, causing the shot to bounce around before it hits something else. The Leviathan is this game's plasma gun, it can deal decent damage to enemies but due to it being a continual beam that damages enemies it can be tricky to gauge just how many shots you have left in the weapon in any given firefight. Finally there's the Bone Saw, the game's chainsaw equivalent which behaves as expected and is all around a situational weapon that can be good against lower tier enemies who are prone to getting staggered. Considering I played this game on Sentinel difficulty (This game's Ultra Violence difficulty) I expected the game to be a challenge and oh boy was it a challenge, probably more of a challenge than I expected. The higher tier enemies are powerhouses and can often feel like bullet sponges a lot of the time, with it taking a lot of bullets to finally take them down. While it may take a while for you to take down an enemy, it doesn't take an enemy very long to take you down, some enemies like the Matriarch can even one shot you with 100 health in certain situations, so a lot of combat encounters will require you to carefully dodge as many projectiles as you can while also attempting to successfully land hits on the enemy. Enemy projectiles can be quite fast and if you don't react quick enough will catch you off guard and deal a lot of damage, so figuring out when an enemy is about to unleash a projectile is a must in many combat situations. Some aspects of the experience have been made somewhat easier for the typical player, like ammo pickups replenishing ammo for every weapon you have instead of having specific pickups for each weapon, but the changes to the strength of enemies in combat makes that particular change somewhat necessary in my opinion, considering how many shots it takes to take down higher tier enemies with the strongest weapons you have. At first, I really enjoyed the level design. It had that Doom-maze style where you'd be looking around the map to find a key to a door while dealing with the challenges each room presented as you got closer and closer to the exit. But in the later levels towards the end, the overall quality of the level design drops. Many of the levels feel less like a challenge which tests the player's skills and more like an artificial challenge where you open a door and a bunch of strong enemies happen to be behind it so you have to act fast or you just die and try again. A lot of my playtime towards the end was restarting the level because I'd enter a small and/or narrow room with a bunch of high tier enemies that do a lot of damage and they'd proceed to kill me, rather than me entering a room and encountering a challenge I was unprepared for and facing the consequences of being unprepared for such an encounter. If the later levels had been more like the initial levels, I think I would have enjoyed the overall experience a lot more. The art direction of this game is very interesting. While I'm not a fan of how the player character looks (though you don't really see them during gameplay and only really get to see them on the title screen and the end-screen image) I found that the overall enemy design for a vast majority of the enemies was quite good, especially the high tier enemies. However, the low tier enemies do blend in with the rest of the level in the opening levels which can be a problem as it makes it harder to know where you're being hit from at times and can be quite frustrating. The design of the weapons is pretty good overall, the Bone Saw being a weapon that looks and sounds great, despite being a weapon I didn't often opt to use much. The music used in this game is interesting, a lot of the tracks feel quite sombre and have that aura of mystery to them and suit the tone of the game pretty well, while none of them were insanely memorable tracks I wanted to listen to outside of the game, they didn't need to be and they worked well. Overall, this game can be quite fun. If you're a fan of classic Doom and want something similar, as long as you're willing to put up with the downsides of this game I'd recommend it. It's a relatively short experience but it can be quite fun. If you're looking for the next FPS masterpiece, I'm afraid this isn't it. The weapon design is a mixed bag, the level design of the latter half of the game isn't very enjoyable overall and the damage you take from enemies can feel unfair at times especially when your own weapons feel like they're doing nothing to the enemy.