Wrath is fine, but the missed potential sure stings.

Let's start with the positives: the game, which runs on a source port of Quake, looks great and the enemies are also nicely animated.

The weapons feels good and satisfying to use. I especially like the shotgun, which sounds punchy and is powerful, and the Ruination Blade whose secondary is a dash that obliterates most enemies.

...Ok, let's talk about the levels now: Wrath has a total of 15 levels and 3 bosses across 3 hubs. It doesn't seem much, but those levels are long and chock-full of enemies, even reaching over 500 monsters in one case.

The problem is that the enemy roster isn't really big at 15 monsters, and you encounter more than half of them in the first hub. It can get boring if you're doing long play sessions.

The first hub also likes to have big, open areas in its levels, something that the other hubs seems to do less, preferring closed enviroments more. The levels themselves are fine, although the instakill pits of the third hub can get annoying.

Then there's the save system: you get an autosave at the start of a level, one-use shrines thorughout each level and Soul Tethers, which are consumable quicksaves.

It may seem intimidating, but the whole system is kinda pointless on Normal and Easy: I admit I was a bit stingy with them, but I finished the game with 46 Tethers left even after I ramped up their usage in the third hub.
Hard and Outlander difficulty limit the amount you can carry, so maybe they have more sense there.

There are also Artifacts, active consumables with different effects ranging from a projectile shield, gaining health from killing enemies, making enemies infight and more. You can hold 9 of each item, a cap I reached easily since I didn't use them much even if they're useful.

Long story short, I still had fun with Wrath despite its shortcomings, but playing it piecemeal definitely helps things.

A Quake experience with player movement that is far too janky, and which completely ruins the whole game.

Similar to this game, Quake has challenging jumps, nerve wracking boss fights, and some crazy jumpscare spawns. This game, however, makes casual traversal across any map with traps or dropoffs feel like childhood trauma. This is all done in the service of a gimmick weapon that shoots you forward, enabling you to launch over chasms or get to secret areas. Its basically the jump module boots from Half-Life. It's like if the whole game was on Xen, but if Xen was even more infuriating and you had 2 quicksaves and 1 checkpoint save. The inertia from each launch cannot be controlled and it often overshoots you or makes you slide off what would normally be a safe ledge. Even worse, this entire game has that horrible inertia problem, so even when you aren't launching yourself like rubber ball from a slingshot with your gimmick weapon, you are still sliding off geometry and bouncing off walls into oblivion. So bottom line is, that this game's "cool" feature to set it apart from its contemporaries is actually a hacky rippoff of a flawed mechanic that was much better implemented 25 years ago.

Admittedly, this game does a few things well. The wheel for consumable selection will slow time to a crawl, for smooth powerup activation. It also has some very expansive and well designed maps and plenty secrets that are fresh and fun to find.

Awful player movement mechanics, emotional scarring 4/10