It kinda makes logical sense to write this, because otherwise we wouldn’t nail into Hellforge Studios’ heads the idea that their egos have become a complete menace to society. There’s a tendency among indie game developers online: one, they cannot take criticism well at all; two, they spend countless years of “game development” responding to dramas or shitposting on TwitteX; and three, their game is shit. Sound familiar? That’s also the story of YandereDev, the developer of Yandere Simulator, a game so terribly bad and a developer so terribly horrifying it is an example of how not to be a game developer ever. It serves as a primo example of what kind of mistakes to avoid when making any game per se, and it is pretty much the case of an anti-developer, a person with the ego of the size of the Sun who cannot take criticism without throwing a tantrum, who spends millenia responding to emails, tweets and whatnot wasting their valuable time instead of actually improving, or, making the game, and who precisely have a game so jank and bad it is considered an anti-game.

Let me introduce you to the shit-sandwich that is the Age of Hell demo.

Age of Hell is a retro FPS developed by Hellforge Studios, currently in “development”, and I say “development” in very heavy quotations because the leadership of Hellforge Studios, MajorArlene, Bridgeburner, etc… spend their ungodly useful time instead in commenting on bullshit politics that they don’t even believe in. This game is a weird mish-mash of DOOM Eternal, a DOOM II slaughtermap and the flair of modernized retro FPS games. And by DOOM Eternal, I mean, they literally try so friggin’ hard to ape DOOM Eternal to a literal 1-to-1.

The game not only rips off mechanics from DOOM Eternal haphazardly in a way that just purely hurts my soul, but it also tends to rip off monsters especially from the DOOM franchise in general. Played the first areas of the first demo level and I already encountered a good bunch of ‘em. There’s the zombies and mech-zombies ripped straight off of DOOM Eternal, there are the Wendigos from New Blood’s Dusk except they throw fireballs like DOOM imps, presumably, and there are 1-to-1 copycats of cacodemons. Yes, cacodemons. They ripped off the design of cacodemons from DOOM.

But a really “astute” mind would throw me a rebuttal: “a ha! This is supposed to be a work of DOOM fans, who clearly do it for the admiration of DOOM! And also, ProDeus did a similar thing!” - listen, dipshit: ProDeus monsters are mechanically the same than DOOM, but at least they differ in aesthetic design far better than these in Age of Hell. And don’t come at me with that “love for DOOM” bullshit when MajorArlene is just there to use DOOM as a tool for cloutchasing.

The protagonist, aptly named the “Templar” apparently, is what happens when someone takes the main player character from the game Hatred from Destructive Creations unironically and puts him in a power fantasy armor. The guy says the same 3 one-liners during combat, but one of the most egregiously hilariously devious is when the guy hits a bell with his hammer to the one-liner: “Bong!” said unironically as if it was a 12 year old with the voice of a teenager who just stumbled upon Hot Topic and Newgrounds for the first time. Terribly cringe.

To make matters worse, and speaking of said hammer, the hammer is just basically an excuse to keep button-mashing to oblivion because it has apparently some nonsense combos that can seemingly be upgraded somehow with extra abilities, like the ability to make a dash attack that ignites enemies on fire. This is added to the horrid fact that trying to hit enemies with the hammer is either hit or miss, 50% of the time you’ll miss the target because of GZDoom’s janky hitboxes, and you’ll encounter yourself in these attempts getting massive damage from tiny little puny zombies. So if you want to seriously make the hammer the protagonist of the arsenal, why then do you give me the easier option of going with the guns and getting rid of monsters easier? It is mainly a nonsense contrivance made solely for edgelord points from people who only listen to Metallica and Dragonforce and call themselves “metalheads”. Pathetic.

From the weapons I got so far before ragequitting the game in frustration, the arsenal is typical for a DOOM clone. In fact, I found exactly a pistol, a shotgun and a chaingun. All seemingly working similarly to the original DOOM weapons, except they’re not hitscan, they made the job harder by making the bullets projectiles that go slower than bullet-time of shit.

Some of the enemies’ attacks, even, ignore basic 101 of game design; the imp projectiles do an arc that you can easily dodge in a platform underneath them standing still. The dash is only useful if you want to aim like ass pretending to be cool, even especially considering you can still dodge by moving regularly at your speed. Seems like a constant feature creep is going on at Hellforge Studios as if they planned on more things than they can chew! Oh no, wait, they are too busy commenting on new DOOM games on YouTube instead of making their stupid fucking game.

The most absurd thing, however, is how Hellforge Studios wants to eventually charge money for the full game. Especially considering that the game exactly plays like DOOM II. If you’ve played a MajorArlene slaughtermap for free, you already played Age of Hell, not to mention that the game is basically linear corridor after arena after linear corridor after arena just like DOOM Eternal, which is basically the downgrade DOOM Eternal had compared to DOOM 2016’s whole exploration thing. What is the point of going out trying to find secrets if all you do is just go through linear corridors? Even the OG DOOM levels had tidbits of exploration. At least that was something! Even then, the design is so bland trying to be edgy with all the black, grey and red that I nearly fell asleep looking at the aesthetics of the maps. This is basically “We Got DOOM Eternal At Home”.

This game is cringe. Totally cringe. Utterly cringe. Everything about it is cringe.