Hexen: Beyond Heretic (PlayStation) review "Absolute heresy!"

Hold on a sec. Let me put my cane and copy of AARP Magazine aside before I start this review...

…

I hope some of you younger folks are reading this so I can tell you just how spoiled you are! You buy an FPS on console these days and don't have to ask yourself, “Will this even work properly on my system? How is it going to control?” You whippersnappers and your dual-analog controllers, with stable first-person console games that don't have to sacrifice many features or functions just to be able to run! Back in my day, we spent $60 on a PC game ported to PlayStation or SNES and played it without any analog sticks while trying to tolerate lower quality graphics, crappy play control, humongous save files, and load times that lasted as long as an episodes of whatever nonsense you're binge-watching nowadays. And you know what, we liked it!

Or we pretended to because we were out $60 and didn't want to engage our feelings of disappointment...

In my case, I bought Hexen: Beyond Heretic on PlayStation because I didn't possess a powerful enough PC to play it. Yeah, if you could believe that: there was a time when expensive, in-home PCs couldn't even run archaic titles like this one without requiring its owner to shell out hundreds in upgrade fees. We were unfortunately left with few options: forking over the money for updates anyway, purchasing a whole new PC with the latest and greatest hardware, forgoing the game entirely, or hedging our bets on a console edition. Obviously, I picked the last of those choices, and regretted it in the utmost. Bear in mind that even low-level computers back then pretty much ruptured your bank account, so acquiring a console edition constituted a cost-effective (yet risky) alternative.

Hexen is a sequel to Heretic, a game that is pretty much Doom going through a D&D phase. In Heretic, you wandered a fantasy realm and blasted demons and undead creatures with various magical weapons, all in an effort to dispatch one of the three devilish Serpent Riders, D'Sparil. Hexen continues that storyline, where three heroes have stepped up to take on the next Rider, Korax.

Hexen's mechanics mirror its predecessor at a basic level. It's a first-person job where you run around magical fortresses and murder hellish beasts. However, this entry comes with some vast differences. For one thing, you get three playable characters, each with their own nuances. One works like a standard warrior-class dude, complete with melee weapons. Though this guy deals some serious damage, he's strictly short-range and can easily get pummeled. The second character, a cleric, comes with more balanced stats, but doesn't gain projectiles until later. Lastly, you have a mage who's great with range, but somewhat of a pushover physically.

On top of that, Hexen's campaign doesn't entirely play out in a stage-by-stage structure. There are levels here, but they're larger, more convoluted, and require you to explore and puzzle them out. Here's where part of the experience's issues begin: it's tough to tell where you're supposed to venture next. You spend ages wandering, looking for a passageway or a switch you may have missed that will open the next portion of the level up to you. Meanwhile, enemies you defeated previously sometimes respawn, forcing you to deal with them while only receiving a finite amount of healing items and ammunition per area.

Suffice to say that having a walkthrough handy is a must, but one of the appeals of first-person shooters of yore was that they offered exploration and discovery-based content through levels with simple enough layouts. Hexen goes against one of its antecedent's perks, which is a bold move. Though it didn't pay off, it's far from the worst flaw displayed in the PlayStation iteration...

From the get go, this title brings the pain. It's not quite a “Doom on SNES” level of torture, thankfully, but that's a low bar to overcome. Enemy animations prove wonky and jerky, giving the game a cheap appearance. Meanwhile, attempting to move and interact without dual-analog becomes a chore quickly. Let's face it: pre-Dual Shock first-person games on PlayStation were a mistake. The control scheme on offer isn't intuitive in the least and remains inadequate even after you've acclimated. The layout as a whole feels unnatrual, as if the game wasn't originally developed with a PlayStation controller in mind (spoiler: it wasn't).

This is to say nothing of other, smaller problems that only further cheapen the affair. For one thing, you've got to handle save and load times that take ages, a far cry from the nearly instantaneous save and load from the PC edition. To make matters worse, one save requires fifteen blocks! Fifteen!

Oh, I can see the look of confusion on the faces of you youngster. Fogies like me way back had to buy external memory cards for our systems. Yeah, the original PlayStation didn't have a built-in hard drive like some fancy, newfangled device. The cards only came with so much memory, expressed in blocks on PlayStation. A standard memory card gave you fifteen blocks, which is just enough for one save file of Hexen. You read that right: you needed to not only fork over the required absurd cost of the game itself, but also another batch of cash for a memory card, or else delete every save file you have for every other game just to play this one.

At best, Hexen is perhaps average in its prime form on PC. On PlayStation, its issues become amplified by a mixture of inadequate visuals, slow mechanics, and long-ass save and load times. However, play control remains one of its biggest issues because the old D-pad-and-buttons scheme never feels natural or up to scratch. People nowadays complain about modern games getting crummy Switch ports, but they've never had to suffer through a big PC release from the '90s converted to a console that can barely handle it.

That's why I say you young'uns are spoiled. You whine about Mortal Kombat 1 looking like hot garbage on Nintendo's platform, but dagnabbit, you've never had to experience the pain of watching a large chunk of your paycheck fly out the window after grabbing a botched PC port you can't even control properly, let alone visibly tolerate. Where are my prunes? I need to deal with this constipation and take a nap before “Matlock” comes on...

Staff review by Joseph Shaffer (October 30, 2023) Rumor has it that Joe is not actually a man, but a machine that likes video games, horror movies, and long walks on the beach. His/Its first contribution to HonestGamers was a review of Breath of Fire III.