REVIEW : Jupiter Hell (PC)
Does roguelite seem too little hardcore to you now? Jupiter Hell is a full-blown roguelike, among other things, with powerful hints of Doom. Is heavy metal enough for you?
Shot down by the friendly fire of Callisto’s automatic orbital fire system, one of Jupiter’s moons, our soldier’s mood will only get worse when he discovers that the station is populated by demons craving his evisceration. Alone against everyone, he will have to fight his way with rifles, rocket launchers and machine guns, hoping to bring home somehow the skin.
Is there anything about the setting that somehow sounds familiar to you? Maybe you remember a specific id Software shooter that revolutionized the world of shooters? Did someone say DOOM? Eh, you don’t have all the wrongs, and I can also explain why.
MY IMMORTAL
Jupiter Hell is, in effect, the spiritual successor of DoomRL; the name was then changed to DRL in 2016 for copyright reasons following an injunction by ZeniMax Media, owner of the Doom brand and related intellectual property. The game, whose executable is still freely downloadable from the developer site, offers an answer to the question: “What if Doom were a turn-based roguelike with a top view?”. Here then is that all his arsenal, the monsters and the original equipment, as well as the sound effects, have been taken by the guys of ChaosForgeand re-proposed in a roguelike key, with a high-paced title focused on combat with firearms. Okay, after the short history lesson, we can go back to Jupiter Hell, which brings with it all the gameplay features of the predecessor, this time, however, transposed to a setting, so to speak, original.
In reality, the inspirations and the feeling are admittedly the same as in id Software’s masterpiece. Still, this time the software house led by Kornel Kisielewicz thought it was the case to avoid the risk of legal quarrels and replaced Mars with the moons of Jupiter. Instead of the various Pinky and Hell Knight, we will face a little more generic monstrosities. Jupiter Hell stands out in its roguelike nature for the absence of frills, with a playful system that makes simplicity and immediacy its strong point. Of particular importance is the limit imposed on the number of weapons we can carry with us, which makes it essential to choose which tools of death to equip; even a simple nine-calibre pistol can do an excellent job for several levels, as long as it’s powered by the proper modifiers that are scattered around the levels. Before finding weapons such as heavy machine guns or rocket launchers, we have to wait to reach the moon of Europa, which seems to be a questionable choice in terms of pace since it means having to wait at least twenty minutes (if not more) from the start of every game before you can enjoy these trinkets.
Overall the variety of weapons is, therefore, the strength of Jupiter Hell, along with the actual combat, furious and tactical at the same time. Your positioning and the presence of covers, as well as the timing with which to fire each shot, make each fight a real tactical puzzle to be solved in many possible ways, each of which still deserves great concentration: most of the times I’m dead is it took a couple of rounds of relative distraction to put me in a condition from which it was now impossible to get out alive. And then off again. The design of the procedurally generated maps combines and mixes realistic principles that still guarantee a tremendous variability of levels. Their structure allows, in most cases, to circumvent encounters that see us more disadvantaged than usual: it has never happened to me to have lost because the map had channelled me into a deadly situation (for me).
Suppose from a strictly topographical point of view I can only be satisfied. In that case, the same cannot be said for the tileset variety, which is essentially reduced to two different main types (industrial complex and demonic hell) with some slight modifications here and there; to be honest, after a few runs, I got a little bored with the rooms and corridors of military bases that are always the same, while different environments would have made every restart more stimulating.
In reality, though, the main problem I had with Jupiter Hell is another: it’s not bad enough. Yes, cleaning a room of monsters of all sorts feels good and makes me feel thoughtful about how I overcame the opponent’s numerical superiority, but from a game like this, with a setting and ancestry like this, killing my enemies doesn’t it is enough for me. I want to hurt them, I want them to suffer, and I want to feel it. Okay, the statement is rather sadistic, but let’s face it: that’s the way it is. Most of the enemies go down with a well-aimed shot or two, making the pace of the fights very high.
And here I call the DRL mentioned above to the witness stand, as an expert on the subject: but he may give me more satisfaction than Jupiter Hell, either for the grunts of the pain of my victims when my shots hit, Do you want the shotgun, which makes anyone who dares get caught by a shot at point-blank range fly at a safe distance? It’s this kind of nastiness that’s missing, and the overhead view combined with the absence of satisfying death animations is a betrayal of the original heavy metal spirit, preventing Jupiter Hell from reaching those emotional heights that seemed within his reach.
