Hexen
Base Campaign Playtime: 11.9 Hours
Finished 19 June 2025.Deathkings of the Dark Citadel Playtime: 5.8 Hours
Finished 23 June 2025.I played through both campaigns separately on GZDOOM with all modern conveniences enabled -- true 3D, mouselook, etc. To make it feel like more of a real RPG experience, I ran them with the Wrath of Cronos mod (all default settings for this, as far as I know). I played through the base game as the Cleric, which is the "balanced" character with a mix of melee and ranged/magic weapons, and decided to go through Deathkings as the Fighter, which is the beefy melee character. Both of them were on the UV-analogue difficulty, called Cardinal for the Cleric and Berserker for the Fighter.
Surprisingly, despite the game's reputation, I didn't have to reference a walkthrough too closely to finish either of the campaigns - though I did get somewhat stuck a couple times, I'll admit. For the most part, even though the switch hunting is a bit overdone, they aren't too difficult to find and forward progression as a whole is still relatively straightforward.
The follow-up to Heretic doubles down on adding more RPG-like elements to the game, allowing you to choose from 3 class types (in vanilla) that have different stats and use different weapons. As far as I know, there isn't much more to it than that in the vanilla game, but my only reference point is with the Wrath of Cronos mod, which further implements an in-depth stats and leveling system, active and passive skills, and specialization "paths" that dictate the general focus of your character. I chose to play the Cleric (which is the "balanced" melee/caster class available in vanilla), and went down the "Oracle" path which specializes in buffing and enhancing your summons. As the "balanced" character, I think a lot of the experience felt kind of vanilla to me, with a mix of different weapon types, and being very capable in pretty much any situation. The skills helped add a lot of flavor to the class; for example, Holy Bolt basically fires a rocket that damages enemies and heals you at the same time, and with Oracle my little minions were more powerful and lasted forever without having to re-summon them.
The gameplay is very different than most of the other 2.5D games, feeling quite a bit less hectic in most situations and with a bit of a strange balance, given that multiple character classes need to be considered for enemy placements and mechanics. Difficulty was very manageable in the base game, and I kind of felt like the enemy roster ended up being a bit smaller than I would have preferred... I was fighting the same Ettins all the way up until the end of the game. The WoC mod also adds "commander" variants of each enemy, like the Ettin Commander who throws explosive spike balls at you, in addition to some completely new or re-introduced enemies from Heretic, namely the Sabreclaw (and perhaps others I'm forgetting). These help to spice things up a bit, but still not much; I can't imagine how barren the game would feel if I played it completely vanilla. Even worse, some enemies like the Spectres in the Necropolis hub only appear in a single level, making the real enemy variety feel even smaller. Enemies do scale to your level (but slower than your player character to still simulate increasing power) so you never feel like you can stomp enemies, which I'd consider a good thing with a roster so small.
To continue talking about the Cleric a bit more, I think it had a bit of a rough start in the game. Out of all the classes, he starts with a really dinky and slow mace, and does not get any kind of ranged weapon for the first few areas, getting the Serpent Staff over halfway into the first major hub - a couple hours in. Afterwards, though, the Cleric's options open up significantly -- WoC skills kick in for great earlygame utility, the two main ranged weapons feel powerful and effective (the other being the firestorm spell), and the Wraithverge is one of the coolest weapon concepts in the entirety of the 2.5D shooter era. I love that thing; it spawns groups of spectres that eat through hordes of enemies, jumping around between victims. Shooting a couple charges into a room and coming back later to see piles of Ettin and Centaur corpses everywhere is so satisfying. Lastly, WoC also added a couple of bonus weapons for each class; the Cleric gets a stronger explosive flail and the Lightbringer (from Hexen 2) which is almost a rocket launcher, which further shore up his overall kit. These were super fun to use alongside the other weapons, and made for a very versatile yet balanced experience in the main game.
Probably the most controversial or infamous part of this game is the insane "button hunt", with tons of really obscure switches that you need to flip to progress through the hubs. While the mechanic itself is pretty stupid, and ultimately done infinitely better by Strife's actual story flags, the overall gameplay flow generally wasn't too bad in my experience. You kind of get used to the hiding places the developers like to use: random corners in dead-end rooms, or various switches near (or after) large encounters at the geographic "end" or "center" of a level. I will say that I did have to look things up a couple of times, though; I could very easily see people getting stuck if trying to do a playthrough completely blind. Another point to consider is that a lot of progression requirements can be difficult to figure out, especially regarding key items. They just go into your inventory like any other consumable, and so might get lost in the scroll bar or otherwise mistaken for another usable item.
There were a few problems with the game mechanically, but not too many. First off, the Death Wyverns have been balanced pretty terribly in WoC, giving them a ridiculous boost to their health AND damage, allowing them to pretty much instakill you with the explosives they spam. Thankfully in the base game you only fight one... Outside of that, there was a particular place in one of the levels of Hub 4 (Dungeons?) that infinitely spawned Ettins, which I imagine is a glitch. Later on, in the final Hub, the elevator leading down to Traductus's Tomb (Hero Cleric) is one-way and leads to a softlock without noclip. Finally, the final boss of Hub 4 will glitch out if you are too efficient at killing the trash mobs in the room before he spawns; the trigger to make him appear will never fire due to a faulty conditional in the level trigger, once again requiring noclip (in my case) to resolve. That's more than most of the other games of this type, but they weren't too bad overall.
As a whole, I really liked this game! I think only part of it comes from the actual base game whereas lots of the mechanical improvements were actually from the inclusion of WoC, but the overall experience was great. There weren't many parts of the game that felt miserable (except for some mace-locked parts in the beginning, maybe), overall game balance was good, WoC improvements were plentiful and very well handled (unlike the Brutal Heretic mod IMO). I don't feel like the game really warrants tons of playthroughs for the other classes in this day and age, but it was very well worth trying.
Deathkings of the Dark Citadel
As the expansion for Hexen, Deathkings is balanced like the 4th episode of DOOM, or the Shadow of the Serpent Rider chapters in Heretic. Basically, the difficulty ramps up drastically, with greater resource constraints and more enemies in tougher encounters. Though it has no new bosses or regular enemy types, the expansion is short enough to keep things fresh and interesting, especially given that I'm playing as the Fighter this time around. For the most part, the design philosophy of these levels is very similar to vanilla, just ramped up to make things more difficult. There are some amazing combat encounters; the one at the beginning of Hub 3 which basically involves like 10-20 minutes of chaos felt almost like Serious Sam in the best way possible. Unfortunately, there are also a couple of major negatives -- the sparse enemy respawns in the base game have turned into extremely aggressive respawns, often adding 10+ enemies regularly for no reason whatsoever. Also, there's a level in the first hub which requires you to fight 4 of the souped-up WoC Death Wyverns. Yeah.
Anyway, playing as the Fighter class really felt like a huge breath of fresh air, and a world away from the balanced Cleric playstyle. He's all about speed and power, and comes with super fast movement and a beefy chunk of HP, well-appreciated with the higher difficulty and limitation to (mostly) melee-focused weapons. His powers are all much more direct and aren't really worth talking about too much - a big punch, an AOE stomp, a fast charge, and a stunning hook/chain thing. Passives are more emphasized, since his melee weapons are awesome; the axe tears through enemies (and can be thrown!), while the explosive hammer blasts groups of the little ones in one swing (or throw). The feeling of weaving between enemy projectiles and attacks to tear thing apart up close was super fun; a high-risk, high reward playstyle emphasizing dodging and clean movement. I decide to capitalize on this by going down the Destroyer path, which basically just gave even more benefits to running up to people like a moron. What's not to love? (IMO, the WoC weapons aren't really that useful for him though; they add some ranged options that I didn't really use. The return of the Dragon Claw from Heretic is neat though!)
This was a decent expansion overall (minus the Death Wyverns of Brackenwood), which did exactly what I expected. It's not really mindblowing, but the levels are generally fun and consistent with the quality of the base game.
