Of all the PC games I played in 2019, only Amid Evil has a staff that hurls shrunken planets as grenades. I got to casually blow up the Earth by lobbing it at an evil space wizard, and earned an achievement for my trouble. So, yeah, Amid Evil is pretty freakin' cool. 

Along with Ion Fury and 2018's Dusk, Amid Evil is part of a thrilling '90s FPS revival that prioritizes speed and madness. I had a lot of fun with the reboot of Doom back in 2016, which tossed out a lot of modern touches (like, say, reloading) to get back to that '90s spirit. These games go further, though, and are either built on the bones of those old game engines or at least dialing back the graphics and technology to feel completely authentic to the era. 

I don't want to sell Amid Evil short, here. I don't think it's great simply because I'm nostalgic for games of that era. I've never even played Heretic or Hexen, the shooters Amid Evil draws inspiration from. The rudimentary 3D graphics and grungy textures, the towering environments you skate through at high speeds, the mish-mash of medieval and gothic and cosmic all set a hell of a mood. This game has a vibe that just wouldn't be the same with more realistic graphics and movement. Some of today's game developers may make games like these out of nostalgia, but the good ones, like Amid Evil, prove how much life there still is in designing with those '90s limitations.

That's all getting a little heady. It's why I find Amid Evil so entrancing, but the shooting is always there to give me something satisfying to do with my mouse every few seconds. This game has a fun arsenal of weapons, like a sword that flings slices of green energy slicing through the air and an axe that you can twirl like a propeller through enemy flesh. They grow progressively more ludicrous, like the planet-launching staff and an arcane spiral of a gun that sends bolds of purple lightning crackling through anyone nearby.

Or, when you're in powered up "soul mode," it simply creates a black hole that decimates everything it can gobble up. 

I love how powerful most of the weapons in Amid Evil feel to use, even when enemies also hit me hard enough to quickly tear me to pieces if I sit still. I'm constantly gliding around the room to dodge their attacks, picking whatever weapon seems best in the moment. Amid Evil follows in the grand tradition of having a weapon that flings baddies backwards and pins them to walls. This one is called the Star of Torment. It's like a mace, but actually cool.

Amid Evil is gleefully unconcerned with having a cohesive aesthetic, instead making each world a set of completely distinct levels with their own enemies ripped from a different cheesy metal album cover.

There are astral warriors who look like variants of Lord Zedd from Power Rangers. There are snakemen and floating space wizards. There are disgusting Cthulhu-esque blobs and geometric horrors with hook hands. Even if they're all simple to fight, the variety shows that if you're going to design a Doom-style shooter in 2019, you'd best account for modern attention spans. None of these enemies stick around long enough to get boring.

The same goes for the worlds you're running through. As Tyler mentioned in his review, platforming in a game where you move this fast can become tedious and annoying. That happens on occasion, when you're navigating some unnecessarily narrow steps or savescumming to make a perilous jump for the seventh time. But I rarely minded because the environments were so striking.

In one level I jumped across the pistons of an enormous machine and spiraled my way up obsidian towers impossibly suspended in the sky. In another I ran across bridges that intertwined like DNA, connecting parts of a cathedral floating in the cosmos. There's some weird Aztec shit. Amid Evil is the kind of game that results from creative people saying, "What's the wildest idea I can come up with? Okay, let's make that."

It relies a bit too much on finding the silver key for the silver door and pressing a button to open the next hallway, but Amid Evil's next hallway is always guaranteed to be a stunner.

Amid Evil is one of the best of the recent crop of retro shooters, with its pseudo-Heretic style and a magic staff that shoots planets. It came a long way over the course of its development, and now you can experience that journey with a free expansion called Ancient Alphas.

The Ancient Alphas DLC lets you play through areas that didn't make it into the finished game, try a very different version of the room-clearing Aeturnum BFG, explore alternate visions of some levels, and experience the full journey Amid Evil took to its final release.

Amid Evil's journey isn't over, however. Developers Indefatigable shared a single screenshot of how their game will look with ray-tracing enabled, and like Minecraft before it the difference is actually noteworthy. As for when we'll be able to play Amid Evil in RTX, all they're saying is "SOON".

Amid Evil's worst weapon is a staff that shoots blue homing blobs—pathetic water balloons that splash against low-poly demons, many of whom look like what you'd get if you coated a bunch of triangles with super glue and threw them in a dryer. It's worth using during the most annoying encounters, when a projectile-lobbing enemy is perched high above and is hard to hit with anything else. I don't like it or the moments when I resort to it, but I can also use the entire earth as a grenade, which more than evens things out. Amid Evil is good.

It's a throwback FPS like Dusk, but rather than hitscan pistol headshots, Amid Evil recalls Heretic and Hexen's magical weapons. The staff sucks, but there's also a magic sword, a grenade launcher that shrinks and fires random planets (like the earth), a spike-firing morningstar, a lightning trident, plus your default axe and a geometrically-unreasonable purple thing that clears rooms like Doom's BFG. 

Most of the weapons are fun, but the Star of Torment, which pins enemies to walls like FEAR's stake gun, or can be used to homer them out of the level entirely like they've been slapped by a god, is Amid Evil's pièce de résistance—I can never tire of it. 

Pushing buttons

Part of Amid Evil's appeal is that it ignores certain annoying, speed-hindering FPS conventions scaffolded onto shooters since the '90s. There's no fall damage. You can breathe underwater. Elevators won't crush you if they catch your shoulder on the way down. They'll just clip through you as they should. Accidental deaths have their place in games, especially when they're comedic, but here they'd only get in the way of the fun and the speed. They aren't missed.

Amid Evil falls prey to other genre foibles, though. Getting out of water is a pain in the ass, because you have to convince the game that you're a dolphin and deserve to majestically leap over the lip of the pool when what it really wants is for you to ineffectually bob side-to-side. 

And then there's the platforming, and you probably already know the type: Here's a game about running very fast all the time because there's a mob of demons chasing you, so how about you climb spiraling, ultra-narrow balance beams and leap between platforms that disappear on a timer?

If you thrive on precarious ledges, you should definitely play Amid Evil—it'll make for impressive speed runs—but I took to quicksaving constantly so that if I tripped up and stumbled down three-quarters of a level I could reload and try again without having to climb all the way back up. I love that there's no fall damage, but sometimes it's a curse.

Also slowing things down are the gods' button-centric architectural designs. You're the latest mortal champion taking a stab at cleaning up their evil-infested lands, and except for the boss stages, every level is a button hunt. Body-check one of the big blue switches, and something about the level changes: an elevator activates, a door opens, the water level rises. And then you go find the next button to walk face-first into until you eventually find a key to open up the next big area, just like in the classics.

That's not really why I liked the classics. I love Amid Evil's big open levels—the way some of them fit together, especially the one made of moving gears, boggles me—and they're full of secret areas to discover. But kicking around demon guts as I retrace my steps to try to figure out which damn pathway the last button opened up isn't as fun as pinning demons to walls with the Star of Torment, which is very fun.

Soul sacrifice

Most of my 'buts' about Amid Evil go in the other direction. Some of the levels are tedious, sure, but I always wanted to see what strange machines and inadvisable architecture lay around the next corner. Anti-aliasing is off by default (I turned it on for these screenshots), and I might prefer it that way—the glittering jaggies give Amid Evil the look of a rare foil baseball card, and it's more endearing than garish. It's beautiful all smoothed out, too. The opening scene, overlooking a church at the bottom of a cavern, drew me in like a siren. 

And some of the enemies are boring, but one time I fought two giant space serpents while suspended in a glob of water floating in the astral plane. Some of the demon spawn are just green triangles that rush at you, but in one part there are giant laser monsters that come across like Angels from Neon Genesis Evangelion.

When I'm just tearing through evil knights and stone giants and weird heads with flamethrower mouths, and I'm more kite than man, Amid Evil shines like the best of Quake and Serious Sam. My second-favorite weapon, the sword Whisper's Edge, slings waves of green energy that can clip multiple enemies. I could spend all day circle strafing around courtyards, slicing the heads off of the chain of grunts following me and flinging the occasional wave at the flying artillery above.

My favorite thing about Amid Evil is that while its Hard Mode is challenging, just about every bad situation is salvageable—it feels nearly ideal to me, as difficulty modes go. I've mentioned quicksaving, which is one useful tool, and secret areas with big heath boosts are also helpful. There's also the part where you can go super saiyan.

Slain enemies drop souls, and if you fill a meter with them, you can activate Soul Mode, which turns all of your weapons into fire hoses of death. The Star of Torment fires clumps of homing crystals that one-hit just about anything and explode outward on contact to clean up nearby grunts. Whisper's Edge fires bigger waves that always pierce enemies and bounce off walls. The BFG-like Aeturnum, which often saved my ass in normal mode when I needed to vaporize a room without a real fight, fires black holes.

Soul Mode is not nerfed at all against bosses. I took the first of them down with a soul'd up Star of Torment like he was nothing. Though the final boss was tougher, it only took me a couple tries, and the first was just to figure out the concept. Would I have felt more satisfaction had it been harder? I don't know, but I didn't feel unsatisfied. I kind of wanted to go kill the gods I was doing all this dirty work for afterward. How were they gonna stop me?

My only complaint is that I didn't need Soul Mode enough. I'd hold onto a full meter for ages, thinking I'd surely encounter an untenable situation where I'd release it and mop up Hell's minions like a spill on aisle 666. But in some levels I never even thought about using it, and when I did I'd obliterate what was in front of me so quickly that I'd desperately sprint around looking for more stone giants or creepers or flame spirits to devour and find none. That's helped a little by playing the hardest difficulty, Evil Mode. It's semi-hidden, but I'm sure the brave will find it.

There are quiet moments in Amid Evil, too, and not just when I get lost looking for a button. As I took a breather from the carnage in one of the final levels, a faint, bumbling trumpet unexpectedly cut through the ominous vocal 'ahhs' and synthy moans, as if one of the orchestra members was bleeding out in the astral plane somewhere outside the level. I was moved by a game about slaughtering low-poly demons, it's true. 

The pithy signs around the levels aren't especially original as far as godly decrees go (and are hard to read because the font for everything in Amid Evil is awful), but they do evoke a curious universe that could live in the pages of old fantasy quarterlies. Despite barely telling a story, Amid Evil made me wonder if the gods might be the real assholes—they were the ones who put buttons everywhere, after all—and when it was over I lingered for a long time before letting it end. I want more.

There's been a lot of big news today—Baldur's Gate 3, Stadia, Destiny 2 F2P—but there are other things happening, too. Things like, for instance, the announcement of a release date for The Void, the seventh and final episode of the Heretic-inspired FPS Amid Evil.

In many ways, despite the obvious Doom-and-Heretic differences, Amid Evil is a lot like Dusk: It's very retro, extremely good, and goes to some really weird places in the later stages of the game. I won't spoil anything, but I will say that Amid Evil's level design is really something to behold: Dusk embraced Quake's muted, heavy-on-the-brown color palettes, but Amid Evil goes all-in on the full spectrum, bright and intense. It's almost overwhelming at times. Based on the trailer above, it looks like that tradition is going to continue (and ramp up) all the way to the end. 

Amid Evil: The Void will be live on June 20, unless you own the Early Access release of the game, in which case you can dive into it a day early. You can pick it up on Steam. For a closer look at what it's all about, check out our preview from March.

New Blood Interactive made quite a splash last year with the retro-flavored shooter Dusk, and now it's gearing up to roll out its next project, Amid Evil. It's been available in Early Access for almost a year now, but episode six, The Arcane Expanse, went live today and brought with it a new trailer showcasing "a non-Euclidian dimension of otherworldly design known to drive lesser beings insaaaaane." 

Like its predecessor, Amid Evil is inspired by classic shooters from the mid-'90s, but where Dusk channeled Quake, Amid Evil is firmly rooted in Heretic. You'll still be shooting at everything that moves, but with blasts of arcane magic rather than bullets, and the levels are more open and overtly otherworldly. It gets hairy at times, but the parts I've played, from the game's early episodes, feel somewhat slower overall.   

For a closer look at what Amid Evil is all about, hit up our preview from last year. It doesn't have a full release date yet, but a studio rep said work on the seventh and final episode is well underway, and it should be ready for launch soon. The Early Access version is available for $20 on Steam.

The day I saw the introductory trailer for New Blood Interactive’s new Heretic-inspired shooter Amid Evil, I felt a call to action. I felt a call not to “reclaim our weapons,” or “save our lands,” as the narrator begged, but rather to explore the bizarre purple hallways and massive temples of whatever land this may be. I’ll get around to saving it later, I promise. 

Like a kid trying to make sense of a Dungeons and Dragons ad in a 1980’s comic book, I had seen only the tiniest slice of this world, but instantly I wanted to know everything about it. I wanted to buy the tie-in novels for this game. I wanted there to be a Magic: The Gathering expansion set for Amid Evil just to read the flavor text on the cards. I entered Amid Evil with questions about the whos, whats, and whys. Now, having taken the plunge and examined every low-res inch of the pre-alpha, I can provide only the faintest whiff of an answer:

I do not belong here.

They did not want to be friends. 

The first clue was that I got my ass kicked by the first guy. As I approach the first level’s moon temple entrance I'm greeted by pair of goons, as one might expect. Unlike standard-issue level one goons, however, these guys are not at all interested in serving as target practice. They're fast, aggressive, and out for blood because they do not want me in their moon temple. They rush with axes, dead set on keeping me out. Armed with an axe of my own, I swing and pray, leaving behind some disembodied heads and a lot of my HP.

At half health now, I poke around for some health orbs, since I apparently need them. I'm embarrassed for even considering the “hard” difficulty portal before deciding to choose the medium setting. I love a challenge, but really, I'm here to explore. I can test my mechanical skill later on the included horde mode, but for now I want to see how deep this temple was built into the surrounding cavern, and what lunar god it serves. While the fight was good fun, I'm more interested in the cryptic messages etched into the temple walls. “Our Leader, guardian of the moon, he now dreams of death and pain,” reads on. Tough times at the moon temple, I reckon. 

Unfortunately, the goons (and later advanced goons and mega-goons) are having none of it. I can outrun them but only for so long, as they have a nasty habit of leaping through the vertical spaces in the level to catch up with me. I quickly shift my mindset—I'm no Doomslayer here. My faceless character is not an unstoppable force, but a mortal in way over his head. Even the tools at my disposal are unfamiliar: mana-powered swords and sticks that fire off projectiles like green arcs of energy and homing blue bolts, and a staff that shoots explosive planets. Tight.

Use your Soul Power with the planet-shooting staff and it'll start shooting stars. 

Fortunately, the soul meter system does provide moments of pure fragging catharsis at regular intervals. Killed enemies drop souls and if you collect enough of them to fill the meter, your weapons become greatly empowered for a short time. Naturally, you are encouraged to use your empowered weapons to take down as many goons as possible, which in turn drops more souls, keeping the party rolling until you run out of goons. As enjoyable as it is to take down a clump of helpless monsters in a typical shooter, it is doubly gratifying to erase a room full of bastards who had legitimately been kicking my ass for the last 10 minutes.

Soul Power turns every weapon into a legit goon-deleter.

The levels do a great job of re-using space periodically to provide anchor points. You dive deeper and deeper into unfamiliar territory, looping back to a central area after making significant progress, like obtaining a key or triggering a button. I feel like I am always seeing something new, slightly disoriented at times, but rarely lost. 

Near the end of the second level I wrap up a big soul power fight staged in a large open arena. I'm starting to get a grip on things, falling into a familiar rhythm of combat, exploration, and more combat. I'm beginning to feel comfortable, having won enough big fights to regain the pride I had lost when I nearly died to the first enemy in the game. I scan the walls and floor of the ruined celestial cathedral for the button that would open a door to the next room, or perhaps produce an elevator to the arena’s second floor. When I find it and step on it, this weird thing happens:

Is that an arcane ramp or are you just happy to see me? 

Look at that thing. What even is it? Who made it, and why? It leads to the second floor, but I slip off of it the first time I try to ascend, shattering my brief sense of confidence. It is too narrow and oddly curved to climb it comfortably, cementing the feeling I had throughout the playthrough: this place wasn't meant for me. The beings of Amid Evil’s world aren’t like us. Their too-tall, too-narrow doorways weren’t constructed with clumsy humans in mind. The gods they serve aren’t interested in my mission to cleanse their realm of evil. All of the levels hold bizarre, illogical surprises like this.

While I only played through 12 of the 28 levels that will be available in the final release, the dark, opaque world makes Amid Evil one of the least predictable shooters I’ve played in recent memory, proof that simple graphics can be as powerful and mystifying as anything your 1080 Ti can render. The maps, small bits of lore, enemies and environments flawlessly ride the line of being weird, but clearly purposeful. Nothing here is weird for weird’s sake, which makes it all the more compelling when it doesn’t make much sense at first.  

Compared to other retro FPS games, there hasn't been anything like it for some time. In DOOM, I’m very aware of my destination: I’m going to Hell and I’m going to frag some demons when I get there. The world is telling me a story, just not a very fresh one. In Serious Sam, I don’t know where I’m going but I’m very aware that it doesn’t matter. Desert level, jungle level, and so on. Sam's world isn’t telling me a story at all. 

Amid Evil sits in the middle of this spectrum with a story to tell, but not one where I can guess the ending. Somebody built these uncomfortable platforms. Something stalked these tombs long before I got here. There’s a war here between astral and lunar cultists and humanity’s last hope thrust in-between, fighting for a world where he does not belong. Every space is imbued with a sense of history and purpose that makes Amid Evil's arcane fantasy feel grounded, as eccentric as it is. It's not just a string of big shooting arenas for the sake of it (but that stuff is good fun too).

And even though I don't belong there, I can’t wait to dig even deeper into the weird, pretty world of Amid Evil.

Amid Evil is a retro-FPS homage to Heretic and Hexen, Raven's Doom-powered fantasy-shooters from the mid-'90s. Nearly everything about it is ripped from a different era, including its blistering speed—"like a 1980s straight-to-VHS horror with fast forward locked on," as we said in our PAX Australia chat with the developers last year. Today, publisher New Blood Interactive revealed more gameplay in a new trailer showing off the "Hordes of Evil" endless mode, and more importantly announced an Early Access launch date of March 12, less than a week away. 

The Early Access release will include three episodes taken from the campaign, as well as the Hordes of Evil mode shown in the trailer. The full game will feature seven episodes, each distinct and non-linear, with unique settings, enemies, secrets, and lore. Cheat codes will help deliver "a truly golden PC age experience," while the soundtrack comes courtesy of Andrew Hulshult, the composer behind Brutal Doom and, more recently, Dusk. 

The great thing about a game like Amid Evil is that you know pretty much immediately if you want to play it. There's room for discussion about the quality of the experience, how it remains true to its roots versus how it's been modernized to appeal to contemporary gamers, but the bottom line is that you likely don't have to be sold on the idea: "A new Heretic in Unreal Engine 4" either brings all your boys to the yard, or it doesn't. 

Amid Evil will go for $20 in Early Access. The full release will take place later this year. 

Amid Evil is ostensibly a first-person shooter but it feels more like a racing game. Most modern shooters with a fondness for old school values are fast, but everything about Amid Evil, from the level design to the head bob to the tenacity of its foes, feels like a 1980s straight-to-VHS horror with fast forward locked on.

It’s also, as you’ll quickly cotton on when watching the trailer, hugely indebted to Heretic – the Raven-developed fantasy FPS developed in Doom’s engine. I never played Heretic 2, but Amid Evil feels like how Heretic would play in Quake’s engine, developed by someone with… maybe an unhealthy guarana habit. Or something much worse.

Developers Leon Zawada and Simon Rance – both involved with the 2013 Rise of the Triad reboot, among other things – have been tinkering with FPS engines since they were young. “We started out when we were 7 years old making mods for Doom and things like that,” Rance said. “We’ve been doing this our whole life, now we’re making an actual game, which is wild.”

Amid Evil’s most striking quality is its presentation. It definitely looks “retro” but not in a laboured, overly-referential way. While the team has worked on some neat visual tricks involving 2D sprites for both weapons and their projectiles (you’ll quickly notice that all collectibles are 2D sprites, too), the game doesn’t feel too anchored to the past. The lighting, in particular, is gorgeous and very much a 21st century phenomenon. 

No, Amid Evil is more concerned with the “spirit” of early true 3D FPS level design, and the most obvious marker of this spirit is the structure of the levels themselves. Environments often shirked any pretense towards realism in favour of what felt good. And this (as well as technical limitations) resulted in levels that were strange and illogical, weird even, which dovetailed nicely with how bracing it was experiencing them in the ‘90s for the first time. Playing Amid Evil, with its speed, its bullet hell pace and sharp-edged hell-inspired worlds, feels like a fever dream.

“We wanted to up to abstractness of it,” Rance said of the hand crafted levels, which are spread across seven episodes, each with three levels and one “boss” level. “Old levels prized fun gameplay areas over the way they looked. Who cares if it doesn’t make sense if it looks cool? A part of the feel of those games were the otherworldly spaces. The fact that they didn’t make sense made them feel more unreal.”

Still, Amid Evil won’t be a bunch of shooting intercut with a key hunt – Rance was careful to emphasize that the level design wouldn’t be as blandly labyrinthine as some early FPS levels could sometimes be. “It’s not like you’re going through a maze to get to them. And once you have it, you know that the door is right there.” There will also be set pieces – which won’t simply be based around ambushes, a common trope in the first Doom and Quake games. 

Developed in Unreal Engine 4, the game feels similar to its publisher stablemate Dusk, but while that game looks like a gritty reboot of Redneck Rampage, Amid Dawn is dark fantasy through and through. The seven weapons (which you can carry all at once) range Heretic-esque crossbows through to battle axes through to precision-oriented magic staffs.  Enemies will chase the player throughout levels and can even jump and vault in pursuit of you, which has taken new players aback, according to Rance. Add to that a lack of fall damage and hugely vertical worlds, and it feels unlikely that anyone who played an FPS in 1996 couldn’t find something to love in this. 

While it all sounds quite orthodox, Amid Evil does a few tiny things to elevate it above the iconic games it apes. It looks better, of course (I can’t emphasis that enough) but each weapon also has a soul mode. When enemies are felled they drop souls, and once you’ve filled the relevant meter the equipped weapon will go into carnage mode. For example, the battleaxe rotates like a jackhammer, tearing through foes with ease.

Published by New Blood Interactive, Amid Evil is due “soon”. Check out a gameplay walkthrough recorded during PAX below.

If you miss the days of first-person shooters that gave you magic staffs and axes then let you loose in spooky cathedrals to carve monsters into gibs, then indie studio Indefatigable is working on just the game for you. 

Amid Evil's reveal trailer shows magical lightning, fireballs, black holes and more being used to demolish both bad guys and the blocky level geometry around them. It looks like a lost third game in the lineage of Heretic and Hexen, which is very much by design.

Indefatigable is based in Australia and New Zealand and are made up of "The producers of DUSK and the creators of Return of the Triad." Here's what they've said we'll be looking forward to in Amid Evil:

• SEVEN distinct episodes each featuring a completely different setting and enemies 
• LUDICROUS magical weaponry that can be overcharged with the souls of the dead 
• BRUTAL and adaptive enemy AI that will hunt you down over land, sea and air 
• SPRAWLING non-linear levels filled with secrets and ancient lore 
• MULTITUDES of in-game options and cheat codes for a truly "Golden PC Age" experience 
• BUILT in Unreal Engine 4 for cutting edge visuals (even if they are a bit retro) 
• OPTIMIZED to run on a toaster (a pretty nice toaster) 
• EPIC original and dynamic soundtrack composed by Andrew Hulshult 

Amid Evil's release date on Steam is simply "SOON™". We'll have more info for you once we've had a closer look at how it plays.