Despite the marketing blurb, Amid Evil doesn’t feel much like Hexen. It doesn’t feel much like Heretic either — I played both of those games back when they came out1 (or the shareware/demo versions, anyway), and they were considerably slower than Amid Evil’s breakneck combat pace. No, the game that Amid Evil most reminds me of is Quake, despite — in fact, precisely because of — its dark fantasy trappings. Much of Quake’s art and enemy design famously came about from an aborted attempt to adapt id Software’s long-running D&D campaign into a video game, and so it had gothic castles and undead knights rubbing shoulders with grimy firebases filled with shotgun-wielding grunts. Similarly, Amid Evil has plenty of evil mages, stone golems, and vine monsters, but it also has a few levels which are inhabited by robots and lit by lasers. The mix of technology and fantasy is a little different, but it’s there, and when you combine it with nearly all of the player movement and a little bit of the weapon design being lifted directly from Quake, you end up with a game that feels like a direct successor to it.
- A mere 23 years ago. ↩