What do you do when Dracula comes calling? You shoot him up and save everyone, of course. 9 years in the making, Doomsday Hunters, by Moregames, tasks you as 1 of 10 playable characters to cleanse the world of the mutated filth that now inhabits it. Sinners will need to sin again to defeat evil.

The year is 420AC (After the Cataclysm), and the world is now infested with dark and corrupt entities. Decades later, only the strong survive this new world, and the ‘Hunters’ are the elite strongest of them all. Using your vast array of weapons and skills, you must run and gun your way through them, all to your ultimate showdown with the head honcho himself, Dracula. It’s the basic good vs. evil, but the lore at the start is so interesting as you progress decades later through this post-apocalyptic land.

With 6 levels of difficulty, even normal is challenging to master, and you will die a lot. With procedurally generated levels your character is thrown into an environment and must twin-stick gun their way through the onslaught of enemies. Throughout the levels, there are multiple, and I mean a VAST array of weapons, weapon mods, perks, and healing supplies to pick up. You can also add a variety of boxes that can upgrade certain colour-levelled weapons.

As mentioned before, weapons come in a range of loot values. The colours indicate this, with purple being an ultimate weapon that charges over time. The weapons are very impressive; coming in as basic as pistols and AKs, to fleshy monstrosities straight out of a Lovecraftian novel. You can also mod guns to impressive levels as you progress. Loot boxes will give you keys, health, or even curses that will make your run progressively harder or easier depending on how you utilise them.

My favourite part of this game is the character/enemy variety. Each is so unique and creative in appearance, with each adding even more variety in attacks and defences. Speaking of characters, the hero selection is vast and you can unlock them in the base HUD at the start of each run, with my favourite being the walking hand, which comes unlocked as a starting character. This is where you can also use purple coins, one of the few currencies found in the game, to unlock permanent and temporary traits or even upgrade your heroes, with perk trees such as bonus health, stamina, mana, armour, etc.

The controls are dual movement with the mouse directing the attacks and the arrow keys or WASD moving your hero. Swapping weapons held uses the control key, and talking and scraping items is utilised through the R key. Your ultimate weapon is on Q. It is compatible with a controller, thankfully for some, but I actually found this was one twin shooter game I preferred to play on mouse and keyboard and had much more successful runs that way. You also have the ability to remap your keys, a must in most modern games.

The graphics are retro-esque but with a modern twist. Everything is in neon glows and has a rich and vibrant palette. Each environment is teeming with things to look at from oozing sludge in neon greens to glowing lava and dark eerie purples of caves. It really is a pretty game to play with lots of little features to admire. The weapons’ output contrasts each perfectly too, so you can accurately see where you are blasting.

The audio complements the game well too. It has melancholy ‘Alien’-like tunes, chiming in as you patrol each area with it amping up as you enter a boss fight, and the sound effects change for each weapon you use. It’s a nice little touch that shows the devs pay attention to the small details that keep a game fun.

Overall, Doomsday Hunters is such a challenging but fun little indie title you won’t want to stop trying to further in. The controls can be a bit hard to manage at the beginning but you will soon feel like you are mastering them… until you get slapped back into reality by a boss encounter. Dracula has risen, mutated, and he’s angry. Rise to the challenge or die trying, hero.

Written by: Stacey