Remember when games were made by people who loved them and put extreme effort into making them to the absolute best of their ability? Probably not. Hexen: Beyond Heretic is easily up there with the greatest of all time. Easily. Everytime I play this I cannot fathom how once such a great industry, overflowing with talent turned into the bland, dumbed-down, soulless mess it is today. We've come down from seeing hundreds of great games and a handful of masterpieces yearly to seeing maybe 1 or 2 semi decent games every 4 years if we're lucky!

Hexen, while essentially a first person action fantasy game, takes a lot of influence from RPG games of that era, offering expansive exploration that see's you backtrack through earlier stages of the game to access areas previously unavailable until aquiring a key from a later part in the game. The level design is jaw droppingly amazing, some of the best ever, consisting of sprawling non-linear layouts which are almost psychotically well thought out. There are traps, puzzles scattered through-out the levels as well as hordes of blood thirsty minions to hack into pieces.

The setting is very similar to that of Heretic and the gameplay to an extent. There are different classes to choose from, each with their own strengths and weaknesses and each with their own diverse weapons and spells, the classes consist of;

The Fighter - Melee focused character with weapons more suited for striking range.
The Cleric - Which is an all rounder class, mixing the ability to fight with the ability to cast spells.
The Mage - Which is self explanatory, the mage starts off weak, with weak spells that are suited for ranged attacks until he becomes a badass later in the game with spells that allow him to fly.

Hexen is truly a masterpiece, a work of art, a crowning achievement in gaming, if you haven't played it already I suggest you do so immediately and if you have played it I suggest you play it again. Put down your bland whack-a-mole/military shooters and play a real game!

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=333173358

Hexen is the successor to Heretic, and Raven Software worked really hard attempting to make it a superior experience in numerous ways.

The biggest are the addition of character classes. In Hexen you can pick between playing as a Warrior, a Cleric, and a Mage. Each of these classes has different weapons, playstyles and powerups affect them differently. This greatly adds to the game's replayability and the multiplayer.

Alongside that Hexen has hub levels. However part of my gripes with the game revolve around the level design. Hexen requires a great deal of backtracking in it's level design, and you can expect to have to return to prior levels regularly inorder to solve puzzles. This can get very confusing as the game goes on since you can get stuck very easily and have to constantly search old levels for the solution to a puzzle.

However the game does redeem itself by how great it's combat is. Once you get beyond the sometimes annoying level design you have a very enjoyable hack and slash, not one of Raven's best games mind you but still worth playing.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=349548193

This game is not for people who have only played DOOM-cubed. This game is for people who played ClassicDOOM on DOS. Released during the same era of gaming, Hexen is, as the title suggests, the sequel to Heretic. I actually never played this in its heyday, so this is actually a new experience for me. I didn't understand the hub system when I was younger, so never actually touched Hexen until just recently.

In this game, instead of being just one "DOOMguy" or "Corvus/Hereticguy/FantasyDOOMguy," you can choose one of three classes: a Fighter, a Cleric, or Mage. Each have their strengths and weaknesses, and will actually use certain items/powerups in the game differently, most notably the Flechette. The demos that play if you don't create a new game are a bit misleading, as they suggest that each class has a different set of levels to playthrough. Or, they did for me anyway. I quickly figured out that is not the case, and was a little disappointed at first, but quickly got over it. Now that I'm older, I understand the Hub system better and am able to navigate through the levels easier. One thing I would stress: explore everywhere. Don't leave any portion of your maps blank if you can help it. Some important switches are hidden in easily-disregarded places, and you will find yourself stuck if you don't throw/flip them.

People looking for "new and exciting ame mechanics" will likely be very disappointed. As far as I know, this particular iteration of a hub system has not been recreated for any other (popular) FPS-type game outside the Heretic franchise. But, if you played these games and similar during their heyday, I would highly recommend getting them for a trip down Memory Lane.

(Also, the price of these games in the bundle can't be beat. Ten bucks for four games? That's $2.50 USD per game!)

When I was 11, a family friend told my parents I shouldn't be allowed to play this game. Now that I'm 30, I might agree with the guy - but I'm going to play through this now just as I did years ago!!

Don't judge this game because it's old. It's a fun game, but it's really hard also.

Still fun to play.

Another good old game what brings memories...

Its still very fun to play and there is 3 different classes (Mage, cleric and fighter).

Let's take a moment to travel back in time. Far, far back in time when a door opening horizontally in a Doom game was considered impressive. Seriously, in 1995 that was an excellent demonstration of the improved Doom engine. So was the fact that levels spanned multiple maps, and you could return to previous ones. Hole. Lee. ****.

Ok, so, not so impressive these days. However, it is still a fun game. You choose from three different classes - your generic brawler, your clichéd wizard, and an in-between cleric. Each character has four different weapons and two different types of mana to power the weapons. Gameplay is very much like Doom, in that you are searching for the exit to a level, which you get by finding secrets and keys. While the plot (yes there is a plot, just not much of one) doesn't change at all based on your characters, the gameplay does. The brawler uses mostly melee weapons, while the wizard uses projectiles. The game is broken into five episodes, each of which contains several maps. You'll need to get through a bunch of locked gates by finding keys and magical items. There's a wide range of difficulty, both from your character class as well as a difficulty settings.

While the game obviously isn't going to be offering anything new, it isn't just for people who played it 20 years ago. It's still a fun game with great atmosphere and some interesting puzzles. After downloading it, just make sure you get the ZDoom engine for it. It wasn't updated at all for the Steam release, so it looks really ugly out of the box. ZDoom increases the resolution to modern standards and adds a bunch of new features as well.

My favourite where they hell am I supposed to go simulator.
It's also Doom with magic and non-linear levels and ♥♥♥♥, so it's pretty cool.

Choose different classes and have fun, its a really old and fun game, i just hate the puzzles and get stuck a lot.

I punched orcs and lizard demons in the ♥♥♥♥.

This is a good game that happens to use an outdated executable. The most desirable way to play this game is to delete dosbox.exe, download a source port such as gzdoom, and then rename gzdoom.exe(or whatever the executable is named as) to dosbox.exe. And then you should be able to play the game flawlessly while still being tied with Steam(logging hours and showing that you're playing the game).

One of my favorite games. Take Doom and add some pseudo-RPG elements with a larger focus on puzzles. Set it all in a medieval world with a fantasy direction, as opposed to Doom's sci-fi/hell approach, and you've got Hexen. The music is top-notch as well. I recommend playing this in a Doom source port such as GZDoom, Doomsday, or any of the other available source ports. This will allow for a more modern control scheme and higher resolutions. (Note: this will of course mean that you won't log hours on your Steam record for the game, if that kind of thing matters to you.)

Confusing level design trumped by a gorgeous art style, creative weapons and violent gameplay. Not for everyone, but still one of the better FPS games of the 90's.

Full video review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tETrdn48QYE

Greetings mortal. Are you ready to die?

This is one of best games ever created when you can play it in a full co-op mode. I remember co-op each life is taken seriously since everything is lost on death so each person must survive long enough to use certain objects when you find out where they go.

A similar co-op mode would make it one of the best games on steam too!

Where the ♥♥♥♥ Do I Go?: The Game

Miskude's rating: 7.9/10

HeXen: Beyond Heretic, or as I prefer to call it, "WHERE THE F**K AM I GOING" is a game that is quite a long way ahead of it's time. I suspect this is the first game to allow you to freely come and go between levels (once you unlock them, of course), much like you can in games like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (although slightly unlike Castlevania, it has a hub world). The gameplay is, well, imagine doom with more melee weapons, and magic instead of guns. It's kick-♥♥♥♥. It's fast-paced, difficult, murderous fun, however it is not entirely without its flaws.

I very strongly reccomend you download a mod called Zandronum, along with downloading novert, as these give proper mouse-look (well, you can't look up and down, but the game is designed with that in mind, so it's not an issue), along with letting you customise controls and increasing the resolution of the textures, unless you're nostalgic for graphics that, in all honesty, have aged poorly. Also, the level designers seemed to have a raging hard-on for levels with poor lighting.

However, in spite of all that, plus it's insanely easy to get lost, I have to reccomend this game. The gameplay is, as you can tell from the screenshots, DOOM in a fantasy setting. You run around at mach 5 hitting ♥♥♥♥ with a lightning axe or shooting fire from your hands. Buy it, or buy the Hexen + Heretic bundle. If you like video games, fun and retro ♥♥♥♥-kicking action, you won't regret it.

This game is a classic and an amazing game at that. It's doom with medieval themes, melee combat, and magic. The levels can be a little confusing sometimes but that is just a minor setback. The level design is really good and the level system goes by hubs which can have many portals, that take you to different areas of the map. All and all i would say it is worth the money.

This is one of the classic epics like duke nukem/goldeneye/doom/turok and its just as good as any of those 4 definitely worth a try

"What would happen if you gave the Doom engine a massive upgrade, then used it to allow the player to wage a one-man insurgency on a fantastic Dungeons and Dragons plane stand-in?"
This game in a nutshell.
While suffering from the problem of "needs a base-game co-op mode", as well as a minor case of "press a button, something happens somewhere and you don't know what because the level design wasn't the best", the game was good enough to warrant Quake 2 aping off of it's "hub by hub progress" sensibilities.
To top it all off, this very easily ends up being the best showcase of the original idTech engine simply due to the sheer amount of modifications done to it. Atmosphere of this level wasn't accomplished again quite until Duke Nukem 3D.

The intense atmosphere. Complicated mazes. Original fascinating locations. I would recommend this game.