The Citadel

 

I don’t usually care for FPS games at all but after seeing a few pictures of The Citadel I was very captivated by it. It’s made by a single developer and he’s also a fan of Blame! so I pretty much had to play it. There’s a very unusual charm about this title, I can’t really put my finger on it. It’s a super violent shooter, all the enemies are either weird biotech creatures or female soldiers, you seem to be walking around this futuristic endless city and you’re there to kill angels, destroy the false god and set people free… by spilling their guts all over the floor. Like I said, I don’t usually care for FPS games but as you can see by my quick description it’s a rather unique game and it loosely reminds me of Baroque, that old title for the Sega Saturn. In there you also have all these odd elements and you pretty much don’t quite know what the hell is going on.

I finished the first 3 acts on my own but when I realized it was going to be a fairly repetitive thing, I just used a cheat and finished the rest with the best weapon in the game. Maybe I don’t really appreciate FPS gameplay but the first 3 acts were quite enough for me. I was still interested in the story so I wanted to continue but couldn’t stomach to slowly crawl my way through hordes of deadly enemies to see it. This game is not hard by the way, but you need to take it slowly. The enemies are not particularly intelligent but that could easily be explained by the brainwashing done to them by the false god. All they do is walk forward and shoot. The way it works with this game is you have to take the enemies one by one pretty much. If you just run in there without any caution you’ll get shot to smithereens, so it can be a slog sometimes. Then again, maybe it’s me and people who do like FPS games will like this one a lot.

It’s a pity that there isn’t much dialogue or any plot exposition. You’ll have to assume most of the story since there’s only a couple of people you can talk to and the dialogue is very limited, maybe 20 or 30 sentences total. To me the world was the most intriguing part of this game and I would have enjoyed a little more plot exposition here and there. Gameplay is very similar to the original Doom but a little bit more smooth I think.

Along with the weird world and the interesting graphics, the music is really, really good. I can’t remember a single bad bgm for this, every single one is really fun and enhances the whole experience of going through this super violent, super depressing neon future. I think people who actually enjoy this genre would really be able to appreciate this. I had a lot of fun with it myself. It’s one of those games that don’t particularly excel in any aspect but just the combination of its parts create this charming, rather odd experience.