What if — and I know this is hard to imagine — but what if… Hexen was good?
I kid the Hexen fans. I know there’s a lot of love for the game for some reason, and I don’t mean to offend. On the other hand, this is my review series, so… indulge me just a moment while I tell you a few of the many ways that Hexen sucks. I mean, Heretic’s enemies weren’t tanky enough already? Okay, with modern modding tools you could easily tweak the HP values a bit yourself for a significantly better experience, but what’s the fun in fighting those enemies with only four weapons? One of the classes even has two different melee weapons — half their arsenal. Maybe if they were to combine all the classes into one, somebody could put together a decent eight- or nine-weapon selection, but then what about the maps? At least 50% of them need a ground-up redesign to fix all the aimless wandering and switch hunts. And now we’re talking about a completely different game.
In truth, I don’t think there’s any world in which I had a chance of liking Hexen. What I was looking for was a real sequel to Heretic, not something Beyond it. So the less mean and maybe fairer question instead is this: what if Hexen had been more of a direct sequel to Heretic? What if Hexen was to Heretic as Doom II is to Doom?
Leave it to our very own James Paddock to provide an answer to that exact question.
Faithless is precisely what I imagine Heretic II would have looked like, had it come out in 1995 rather than 1998. It’s an entirely new game’s worth of content that builds upon Heretic as a base. From there, Uncle Jimmy adds in the elements of Hexen that worked best, while leaving the rest on the cutting room floor. Really, what Faithless is to me is all of the strengths of both Heretic and Hexen, with none of the weaknesses.
Is that undue praise? Probably. Certainly Faithless isn’t perfect, and I may still have gotten lost in a few places. But any of those moments of frustration were the result of me missing something relatively obvious, not the designer expecting me to comb through the five previous maps looking for the one brick that had moved. Still, I loved the hub system of Hexen, portaling back and forth between maps as you complete objectives and find various relics. An interconnected world — and that’s one of the things Jimmy brings over into Heretic via this WAD.
These days you could probably plunk this sort of design under the ever-broadening label of “Metroidvania,” though the progression here is always linked to keys and artifacts rather than newly-acquired abilities. It holds the same allure though, with new areas opening up across the entire episode every time you pick up a key. Some might be simple shortcuts and others secret caches, in addition — of course — to the critical path.
When you reenter a map you’ve cleared out, which you’ll be doing a lot, a handful of enemies will respawn every time, keeping the areas from coming across as totally barren and static after the initial runthrough. A few ammo pickups kindly repopulate too, so you’re not really at risk of running completely dry on ammo just because you’ve gotten lost and are revisiting a bunch of maps one after the other.
Enemies you’ll be facing across the 28 maps of Faithless include a brilliant mix of Heretic alums, Hexen transfer students, and a handful of custom DECORATE freshmen. I’m not entirely sure if the Hexen creatures have been adjusted at all or if they just feel better to fight with Heretic’s weapons, but it definitely helps that Jimmy leaves out the dull ettin and infuriating centaur. And additions like the flying skull cube and fantastic leaping sabreclaw variant cap off an awesome lineup. I will say that hearing the cultists in Episode 3 yelling Cabal voice lines from Blood was a bit distracting and weird, but… ah, I’ll allow it.
Combat is so, so much more vibrant in Faithless than in Hexen, partly a natural result of increased variety in weapons and enemies, but mostly due to Jimmy crafting far more exciting and hectic run-ins with those enemies. Multiple bosses, wild arenas and traps, and it seems the name of the game in a ton of these maps is to simply establish a safe foothold once you step through the portal. Initial resistance is heavy, but if you try fighting them from the starting room you’re going to get overwhelmed. And for god’s sake don’t let them push you back through the portal, because the horde will be waiting right there for you as soon as you return.
Jimmy is of course best known for his fifty thousand midi contributions to the community over the years, but I’d argue he’s underappreciated as a mapper. Everything of his that I’ve played has been great, and the dude’s got this really distinct style of squarish but super clean and interconnected layouts that I quite like. You’ll see that style primarily in the first episode, while the second strays into larger and grander designs inspired by Not Jabba’s work (who created E2M1) and the third gets much more caverny and organic. I can’t quite decide which is my favorite of the episodes, since each has its unique strengths, but I’m especially fond of the way the levels in E3 unfold, are connected to one another, and all loop back to where you started by the end.
Speaking of Jimmy as a world-class composer though, Faithless’ soundtrack is an interesting subject in that it’s — let’s say — not great. That’s a blasphemous thing to say about a Jimmy project, but Paddock didn’t actually score this one himself and I found at multiple points I was desperately wishing he had. There’s about one really great midi per episode; the rest, while sometimes establishing decent atmosphere for the map in question, tend toward repetitive — and occasionally annoyingly so.
Technically Faithless is still in beta, so who knows if Jimmy will retrofit it with some of his own music before a final release. I doubt it, but even with its current score this WAD is one of the coolest fan projects I’ve ever played — and one of the scant few that I’d consider a true and worthy sequel to the game it’s based on.
Faithless is everything I love so dearly about Heretic and then some. Sure Heretic was just “fantasy Doom” but are you really telling me “fantasy Doom” isn’t one of the raddest ideas you could come up with? And Faithless is everything I love about Hexen too, because yeah, there are parts of that game that I love even if I don’t care for it as a whole.
I genuinely could not put this mapset down. I stayed up past my usual old man bedtime playing it. I was late for work because I was at it again first thing in the morning. I thought about it all day at work. Faithless is so good I was willing to install GZDoom for it. Is there any greater praise than that?
Faithless requires HERETIC.WAD and runs only in GZDoom. If you’re not sure how to get them running, this may help. And for more awesome WADs, be sure to check these out!