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Corvus has other tricks up his sleeve: a Hellstaff, which fires energy bolts at a furious rate the Storm Bow, whose magical red arrows create deadly thunder showers and the Phoenix Bow, whose ammunition explodes in the image of its fiery namesake. All of these look dazzling as they light up the screen, and if anything, they're not quite as devastating in effect as they are in appearance. The brunt of his ranged weapons are magic spells, including fire- and lightning-based attacks, and worse.
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He has several slick moves with this weapon and can even pole-vault with it to make those especially difficult jumps. The mainstay in Corvus' arsenal is his sword staff, which he'll power up to stunning potency over the course of his quest. He walks, runs, sneaks, sidesteps, crawls, rolls, flips, climbs, and swims much as you'd expect from an elf of his stature, but he's at his most impressive when he's fighting. Since the soft-spoken elf hero Corvus is in the spotlight at all times, he's made to look especially detailed. The violence is accented by appropriate if somewhat subdued and nondescript sound effects and a correspondingly meek and understated musical score. Best of all, they die in spectacular gouts of blood and gore, and you can even dismember the humanoid ones with your sword staff. A host of appropriately dressed, appropriately sinister monsters populate each region, and all of them look great even if some look a little puny. All the environments look different, from room to room, and especially from level to level. Even those sorts of places that are traditionally ugly and drab, like swamps and dusty old temples, look absolutely stunning in Heretic II, with fog and lighting effects subtly implemented to make such places look both real and fantastic. Instead you get expansive, meticulously detailed, and tastefully colored architecture that is amazing to behold more often than not. Gone are the claustrophobic corridors of id's shooter. Sure, the game is based on the Quake II engine, but you'd never guess from looking at it since it looks just that much better. You wouldn't want to live there, but the world of Heretic II is a beautiful place to visit. Heretic II, which plays from a behind-the-back third-person perspective, still controls a lot like a first-person shooter, but it's different enough to look and feel not just like a great new shooter, but like a great new kind of game. But it turns out Raven was dead serious, as not only is Heretic II a satisfying departure from the lukewarmly received Hexen series, but it's a bold step away from the genre's traditional first-person confinement. So when the Raven team decided to pull a fast one and create a "true" sequel to the original Heretic based on the Quake II engine, it seemed like they were just being cute. After all, Heretic, the original Doom clone, spawned the Doom engine-based sequel Hexen, which gave rise to the Quake engine-based Hexen II.
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#New heretic game software#
Didn't seem like a good idea when Raven Software announced it was working on Heretic II.
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