Heretic

Playtime: 14.7 Hours

Finished 24 May 2025.

Played on Steam, but used ZDL and the GZDOOM source port, and played with the Brutal Heretic RPG mod, which can be found online on NZDOOM. Since the version on Steam simply runs the base game in DOSBOX by default, I did some basic renaming to have Steam open ZDL instead for the sake of tracking playtime. A small side effect of this is that the Steam launch process will flood ZDL with launch parameters, which are typically used as inputs into the DOSBOX terminal line. My playthrough is done on the full Shadow of the Serpent Riders version of Heretic, containing 2 "expansion" episodes, and with the aforementioned Brutal mod. Note that this mod also has a couple other components - upscaled sprites and textures, an episode-combining script to maintain health, ammo, weapon, and level status between each of the episodes (resets by default otherwise), and of course, the Brutal mechanics themselves with a variety of alt-fire and powerup mode changes and massively improved gore and game feel.

I'm not sure if there's an older version of Brutal Heretic out there, but the one that I'm using seems to be the most up-to-date on that can be found online under active development. I had several serious issues with the game balance which I'll be going into more detail below, so I made some very minor edits to "fix" the game myself, which technically makes my version different but only barely so. Specifically, I adjusted the health of the Iron Lich and the damage of the Firemace.

In comparison to the remastered DOOM 1+2 collection that kept the gameplay as close to vanilla as possible with graphical/performance enhancements and boatloads of content from official expansions and other rereleases, playing Heretic on a modern source port with the Brutal mod to enhance weapon effects and gore is a massive breath of fresh air. In a very large way, the gameplay of Brutal Heretic is exactly what I hoped the DOOM remasters would be; movement is fast, weapons are weighty, and monsters have bucketloads of blood to spill all over the levels. Funnily enough, this applies to ghosts and skeletons too...

For the most part, the base game of Heretic is basically just a clone of DOOM with a mixture of medieval, fantasy, and vaguely Lovecraftian theming. The weapons in Heretic at base are analogues of the DOOM weapons - the Wand is like the Pistol, the Crossbow is basically the Shotgun with extra steps, etc. Even the Phoenix Rod is basically just a reskinned Rocket Launcher, as cool as the concept is on paper. There are some core differences in the gameplay, of course; weapons in Heretic fire projectiles, rather than being hitscan, and the enemy rosters are very different. There's also a new power-up system in this game which allows the player to carry various kinds of powerups in an "inventory" to be saved up and used at will, which adds an extra layer of strategy to the gameplay. This system in Heretic paved the way for more in-depth RPG mechanics in the sequel, Hexen. Another power-up, the Tome of Power, is probably the most interesting of the bunch, as it changes the way each of the weapons function in the vanilla game, effectively extending your arsenal. For example, the Phoenix Rod turns into a flamethrower, while the basic Wand starts shooting grenades instead of tiny bolts, and the Hellstaff sends out a giant Laser raincloud that destroys everything in its path.

The use of a more "standard" sourceport and the Brutal RPG overhaul mod ended up being a bigger impact on my playthrough, however. While the "official" KEX Engine remaster of DOOM 1+2 maintained locked vertical aiming and various other features that kept those games feeling very antiquated, playing Heretic on GZDOOM with options for jumping, crouching, and free mouse aim made it feel far more modern. Some artifacts remain - like inherent problems with verticality (an enemy at a bottom of cliff can attack you if you stand at the edge up top, and can also block you from jumping over them), but movement and aiming are far smoother and less frustrating - particularly concerning the inability to jump. For what it's worth, I didn't use it to cheat and access secrets or later sections of a map - but I found it very useful in combat, or for far easier navigation around places that I already explored. I will also note that the original Heretic did actually have limited support for vertical aiming - but this was not as fully fleshed-out as in GZDOOM; auto-aim was still used on the vertical axis, so the aiming was less functional and more for aesthetic.

Now, the Brutal RPG overhaul adds a ton of additional modernization to the game, far beyond what GZDOOM does by default. The version that I'm using adds upscaled textures that make the game look sharper (though of course there will be visual aberrations with AI upscaling), and the enhanced gore and particle effects make the weapons feel super satisfying and the combat feel extremely punchy and impactful. Weapon functionality was also shifted significantly, moving all of the original Tome of Power effects to a standard "alt-fire" mode for each weapon, unlocked by leveling up with the new RPG mechanics (just involves killing demons, basically). This basically doubles your arsenal and massively changes the whole flow of combat; for example, I noticed that the wand was actually super useful as a grenade launcher, and ended up spamming it pretty much the entire game. Between the normal and alt-fire modes, pretty much every weapon in this game was actually very useful in various situations. Unlike DOOM, where I spent most of my time with the shotguns and the launcher, I found myself using basically everything at various points in this game. I also can't neglect to mention that the Tome of Power now enhances both fire modes even further!

That's not to say there aren't some serious drawbacks with the Brutal mod... Since the Brutal mod was revived and personally rebalanced by a single person, there are lots of serious balancing issues in the game that really compounded over time in my playthrough, and resulted in me adding a number of small fixes myself to keep it somewhat fun & playable. The most significant problem from what I can tell is that enemies appear to scale HP to the player's level, even though player damage does not increase at all - this results in lategame enemies being ridiculously tanky for no reason, especially when keeping in mind that ammo counts do not increase either! General weapon balance faces some other issues; the Hellstaff's alt-fire is super OP and ends up carrying most of the game, which is necessary because of the HP scaling. On the other hand, the Phoenix Rod is incredibly underpowered, doing almost no damage - regularly taking 2+ shots to kill a Gargoyle, the weakest enemy in the game. Even sadder is the Firemace, the "superweapon" that I had to buff by a whopping 40x to make usable. I have no clue what the idea was with this. On the enemy side, I don't understand why the base health of Iron Liches was boosted almost 5x from 700 to 4000 in this mod, especially when they're spammed everywhere. It's unbelievably stupid to make these annoying-ass enemies waste ALL of your ammo in every level, so I set it back down to reality. Ultimately, although the scaling and weapons felt generally very good in the first 3 episodes or so, Brutal Heretic was legitimately almost unplayable by the 2 expansion episodes. Common enemies were draining 5+ crossbow shots, my weapons were pretty much always out of ammo, and each level was just a slog of meat walls. Even interesting enemy behaviors and challenging encounters couldn't save the gameplay at that point, which basically devolved into hours of Hellstaff rain spam.

Ultimately, my takeaway from my Heretic experience is that this version of the Brutal mod is really not worth playing again, even though it was fun at the start. Maybe playing each of the episodes separately instead of combining them all into one campaign would make more sense if it resets scaling? The base game is awesome, and I'd personally put it a little bit above DOOM for the more interesting theming and fun mechanics, but either a fixed version of the Brutal mod or some other mod entirely (Wrath of Cronos maybe) would be a significantly better choice.