The Never Ending Maze of Death

Help!
I'm stuck in... The Never Ending Maze of Death! In this 2009 game made with the Retribution Endinge by GameOverGames Productions we in fact play as someone that was apparently kidnapped and thrown inside a black and white maze with some robots and just a pistol to defend himself. The goal? Well, escaping, of course!

But do not expect and RPG, this time I'm playing an FPS, inspired by Doom (one of the enemies looks like a Doom space marine) and other similar games. Of course there are more weapons besides the pistol and the fists: a machinegun, a laser rifle, a sort of... uhm giant revolver? And so on. I liked that each one uses different ammo, unfortunately ammo is very scarce and sometimes avoiding enemies can be preferable since they do not drop anything, an ammunitions, armors and medikits are simply found scattered in various areas of the maze.

Yes, this is a maze and no, there is NO map that I know, otherwise it would be too easy! The game is divided into various areas, even if they look quite similar, but there is a good variety of enemies: mech-like tough robots, humanoid robots that shoots lasers or rockets, soldiers with rocket launcers, turrets that can rotate and others that are fixed, floating orbs that mose and shoots projectiles and floating discs that do not move but just shoot grenades. The enemies look pretty detailed (look at the pictures), and as you can see there is a good variety, the interface is also pretty well done and functional.


Lots of robots, some weapons and few bullets. Time to escape, or die trying!

The game uses the classic "FPS setup": you move with WASD (but you can walk forward pressing the right mouse button too, and you can turn left and right with the arrow keys... but oddly you can't use them to go forward or backward at least for the default settings, anyway you can change them!), Shift key to run, R ro reload the gun, spacebar to jump and C to crouch (yes! You will have to crouch to pass some narrow areas). You can comfortably change weapons using the mouse wheel or use the keyboard, of course. Like Doom, game lets save and reload the game whenever you want, and this is good since it's pretty hard (for some reason you HAVE to press the Save/Load using the mouse, Enter does not work here, but uhm ok!). The game also offers a good series of options to customized graphics, controls, difficulty and even change the crosshair.

Graphically the game is pretty minimalist for what concerns the setting, but not bad, what I did not like was the use of black and white walls that makes everyting a bit confusing, since we're wandering inside a maze, there are also some transparent walls just to complicate the things, but I liked how the attacks leave stains and bullet holes on the walls. I liked a bit less that sometimes there are enemies that clip through some walls, or a glitch that suddenly made a second hald of a corridor appear with a turrent in the middle. Guess what? I was killed since it suddenly materialized in front of me! There were also a couple of instances in which I died without figuring out what hit me, ok I have an enemy in front of me but it was not shooting (running or just standing still)! Weird...

But the turrets and the floating discs have another problem: unlike humanoid and robotic opponents they do not fall nor explode, they simply deactivate... but it's a bit hard to check this when you are shooting. I saw that some have a little red light that goes off when deactivated, but you have to be close, and that's a really risky move. I mean some kind of sound to signal their death would have been nice since they just stop moving, and there is a similar problem for the items you collect (I mean ammo and medikits), since I never understood when I was getting the item and when not.
I mean maybe there IS a sound, but IF there is (because I *think* I heard something), it's not loud enough to be heard above the music (that's pretty good), the gunshots and the explosions. Aside for this the sounds are pretty good, music is awesome and a note of merit is the (robotic, of course) voice of the bad guy that we heard in some areas.


There are not only robots here! But this tattoed bald guy just runs, he has a rifle but he doesn't shoot!
Is he out of ammo? And how will our adventure end?

... well, tragically I'd say! (but that's misleading: you can always reload a previous savegame!)
Hey... but that's not a robot! You betrayed the human race!!!


Final Verdict
The Never Ending Maze of Death is a misleading title: while there is a lot of Death, the Maze is not Never Ending, and it's possible to finish the game, but well, it's pretty hard and I am not going to lower the difficulty of course! I've some pride, eheh! Anyway this is one of the few FPS I reviewed because there aren't many in this site, and it's... ok! There are many aspects I liked (the graphics, aside for the black and white walls), and others I liked less but the lack of sounds and some glitches I found made the game a bit unpleasant to play. Anyway it's still a decent game that may deliver some fun, so try it if you like mazes and shooting robots!