The Citadel is a First Person Shooter that sees us tossed into a hostile world and ordered to slay seven Guardian Angels. The term being ‘tossed into’ is really quite appropriate here. You will have no idea what is occurring and even the intro text to set-up the story disappears within a single second of it appearing on screen. To get this out of the way from the get-go, this title is simply too obtuse at times. Your first sight will be that of a difficulty selection environment that is similar to Quake 1, yet chances are you’ll jump into the first hole you see without knowing this is the most important decision of the game. All it tells you is that “You Have Chosen the Way of Faith”, which means nothing to the player. Faith is easy, Devotion is normal, and finally, hard is Zealot.
Faith is a mode you likely do not want to choose as it is far, far too easy. It amounts to about the same level of enjoyment as playing through a game with god mode on. Devotion is not all too challenging either, but there is a risk of dying if you play poorly. With that said, minus that major flaw, the opening is pretty cool. It is surrealist and you completely stumble about aimlessly until you are given a weapon, then a purpose. Jump down an inexplicable shaft floating in the air and color will return to your world as you find yourself immediately under attack by those you are tasked to kill. Are we good, bad? Doesn’t matter, we are the gal with the gun.
Using that gun, one thing will soon become apparent. This does not use any form of hit-scan and projectiles do drop off when shooting great distances. You’ll have to estimate around where you believe a bullet will hit judging by distance, speed, and arc of how it is shot. The first gun you have access to is a pistol that holds seven rounds. Being accurate is quite important as you die rather quickly and you have to manually reload each round, which takes up a considerable amount of time. For all the mention of ‘old school shooter’ on Citadel’s store page, this has far more in common to tactical shooters than a game like Doom or Wolf 3D. I don’t mean this as a negative, it is just so far removed from those types of shooters that I found it odd it’s called a ‘love letter to the classics’.
Your character, also known as The Martyr, has access to a great variety of abilities right from the start. She can double jump, sprint, and throw a kick Duke 3D style in close quarters combat. All of those drain the stamina meter, which is the blue one on the bottom left. Her mobility greatly exceeds that of anything you will face and the lack of hit-scan attacks will allow the skilled player to weave through all the projectiles thrown at you. There is a significant amount of verticality to this title, turning into a pseudo platformer at times. Most enemies you will face are just as vulnerable to damage as you are. One good head-shot is what it takes to put them down, yet you are rarely facing off against a single foe. Dodging the barrage of gunfire coming your way and calmly lining your shots can be an exhilarating dance with death.
To further push players toward this fast-paced playstyle, it includes a hunger meter. It depletes rapidly and the more you linger around, the worse it gets. Neither your stamina nor health meter can exceed your hunger. What this ultimately means is that your health is always ticking down and the less mobility you’ll have if you drag things out. In order to refill this gauge, you will either need to find some food or to buy a ration pack. It is highly unlikely you will find anything, so buying it will be a necessity. This means not only are your health and stamina constantly draining but so too are your funds. The hunger system could have been neat, yet is something you’ll ultimately find to be a needless annoyance. Ration packs cost more the higher the difficulty you are playing at, up to 150 ‘points’. When a single silver shard only gets you 1 point and a rare gold nets you 10, you’ll actually be losing money for taking the time to collect everything in a stage and exploring.
Funnily enough, it also makes picking up health items nearly pointless. You can not exceed the hunger meter, so any you pick up will be immediately drained. And waiting until you actually take enough damage for it to be of use isn’t even worth the time to go back and retrieve them, as hunger ticks down so fast you’ll be back at square one soon enough. Most of the damage you will take will be from this hunger system. Your main form of staying alive will be your armor, shown as a white meter next to your health bar. It takes all the damage from an attack and makes you far more durable than trying to take hits to your health directly. Imagine the space sim genre if you will. Your health is the hull, armor is your shield, and hunger is.. the space gasoline I guess >_>. With the number of systems at play here, it is shocking how little it explains to the player or hinting at it in an organic fashion.
Odder still is that less hardcore features than hunger like being able to lean or weapon durability are optional. Leaning left is bound to Q, which is also used to kick, and leaning right is E, the key to open doors or activate things. That will quickly become nauseating, so I recommend rebinding them. Weapon durability felt like a feature that probably should have been on by default, given that the very next gun you receive, the Auto-rifle, is by far the best weapon in the game. It does great damage, has the best accuracy short of using a Sniper, and has a death laser as its alt-fire. Not to mention how common ammo for it is. Having to worry about its wear and tear the more you use it would have been a brilliant way to combat this balancing issue, as well as encouraging the player to give other weapons a try more often.
Despite that, the weapon durability was off by default for good reason. If the gun you are using should ever reach 0%, the game will glitch out and leave you unable to switch guns. That leaves you with either trying to find a merchant to buy the gun that just broke that you now can’t let go of, or to kick your way to the end of the stage as it is now your only form of attack. Did I mention this title’s frequent crashing? I’ve tested it across four different computers and it was stable on none. Thankfully, it usually crashes when entering or exiting a level. It could have been a much bigger issue given that you can not manually save and levels do become pretty lengthy. It may sound like I’m ripping this game apart, but aside from the crashing, everything else is bearable, just really confusing or unnecessary. This is a prime example of the term ‘feature creep’ and a developer having no idea how to implement all of his ideas, to be blunt.
We’d be here all day if I mention things like suddenly being able to ride a mech and how poorly that was hinted at causing you to unload a ton of precious ammo at an empty vehicle, being able to call in airstrikes which never seem to work, and much more sporadically thrown in elements. There is so much to mention, but I’ll just get to the meat and bones of it, which is the core gameplay. It feels good to play. The weapons sound punchy and the death animations when shooting an enemy apart is top-notch. This is a pretty violent title. Enemies in this game are a combination of machine and human. You’ll see an enemy downed on the floor with tears on her face, a stun shocked trooper after blasting off both of her legs, and just a heap of metal & flesh after using explosives on them. Making matters graver is that they are all anime waifus.
I’m well aware of the fact that the developer has said he is not a guro artist, but there is unmistakably some sexuality to the violent deaths and enemy corpses. Nowhere to the point of being actual hentai, just some fan-service thrown in on occasion for those that are into it. Putting that aside, it is no less satisfying blowing them apart and seeing the various pieces of machinery mixed into their bodies. The sprite work is one of Citadel’s strengths. Every enemy and boss is pretty detailed. Especially when you shred them apart with gunfire and see them for what they truly are, as morbid as that sounds. They all pop against the low detailed environments and this grim-dark styled artwork is what drew me to this title in the first place. I did not leave disappointed in that regard, there were some really interesting designs that I won’t soon forget.
By this point in the review, you’ve likely asked yourself what on earth is with all those cyan-colored environments in these pictures. That is a good question. I have no idea what they were going for with this look, yet I’d be hard-pressed to tell you which episode any of these took place in. They all blend in with each other and the level design is not enough to make most of them stand out. There are seven Episodes/Acts overall, each with a boss at the end. They all lack any sort of theme or gimmick to set apart the levels leading up to them. You could take almost any level then randomly scramble them around and it wouldn’t make much of a difference to the flow or difficulty spikes. In fact, by far the most difficult stage is found early on and I’d advise on investing some cash into RPG ammo as soon as possible.
The economy of this game is also a neat idea that mostly works. There is no way you will be able to scrounge up enough money to buy all that you need. You will need to sell some ammo and grenades to invest in either upgrades or bullets for the weapons you use most. I just wish it was done in a way that didn’t involve such an aggressive hunger system. Having alt-fires and even multiple burst fire modes to some weapons was neat too. Its huge range of mobility options is swell, yet the levels themselves are either too small and constrained or feature too many death pits for fast movement to be viable. The Citadel just lacks the much-needed balance that a QA team could bring, or of having been an early access game instead of a full release. It feels like an early beta, technical instabilities and all. That chaotic energy of random ideas being thrown in can work for its favor at times, such as the case with the mech battle in a fully destructible area, but most need some serious fine-tuning. I commend it for having a demo, which is a rarity these days, and you have nothing to lose by checking that out. While I won’t recommend the title, it is not a terrible game, and its demo may resonate with you.
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