![]() Cover is still king, but you’re encouraged to zip about the environment in search of it rather than turtling and hoping the arch-reaver’s hit points run out before yours.Įnvironmental features like exploding barrels not only honour the hallowed FPS that inspired Jupiter Hell, but also amplify this sense of dynamic movement. Similarly, your chance to dodge increases the more you move around, giving Jupiter Hell a dancey sort of upbeat rhythm. To discourage you from stumbling into oncoming fire you’ve got a pain meter, which gradually increases with the damage you take and saddles you with an accuracy penalty that recedes once you dodge or take cover. ![]() Whereas the slow pace of classic roguelikes is set by the need to get close enough to a kobold to thump it in its stupid kobold face, the long-range shooty gun combat of Jupiter Hell takes a little more getting used to. Rockets are big and noisy and kill pretty much everything, but fire one from behind cover and you risk clipping a wall and exploding yourself into many hot ribbons of lightly singed meat. Revolvers are accurate, but have limited ammo capacity and need to be reloaded bullet by bullet. Shotguns, for example, will cut through multiple possessed grunts if they’re standing next to one another, but as they need to be reloaded after each round you don’t want to miss with your opening shot. ![]() Almost every action from firing your gun, reloading or just switching between weapons incurs a time cost, so anticipating what might be behind the next locked door makes a difference to how things pan out. ![]() How you approach rooms is determined by the kinds of baddies you encounter and the type of weapon you’ve currently got equipped. And it’s tile-based, so you move from cover to cover like you’re a rampaging chess piece, trying to position yourself in the most tactically advantageous square that you can. It’s a roguelike, so level layouts are randomised, death is permanent and enemies only move when you do. Now set on the moons of Jupiter, which are absolutely nothing like the moons of Mars, it has you battling through descending levels of increasingly demon-shagged yet legally distinct science labs, corrupted mines and space ports. Jupiter Hell is way less lawyer-baiting and far prettier than the game that spawned it. But only in one could you go and make yourself a tofurkey sandwich while standing in a room full of cacodemons. In both, a keen sense of situational awareness and tactical positioning were critical to not getting popped in the face by a demonic fireball. DoomRL contrasted the apparent mindlessness of Doom’s frantic demon slaughtering with the more methodical, chin-stroking nature of roguelikes, and in doing so found some common ground between them. Such spontaneous pettiness could never happen in Jupiter Hell, a roguelike and sequel to the slightly more cease-and-desisty DoomRL, which ported the classic run and gun shooter into a top-down, slowed-down and turn-based format. On Saturday evening, for example, I poured two thirds of my pint into a man’s brogue because he was very annoying. No, it is better to never consider the consequences of your actions, and to live life as an unrelated series of fluke accidents and bad mistakes driven by the misfiring impulses of your idiot brain. By fifteen I would be many thousands of years old inside my skull, an ancient god trapped inside his own decaying mind, having spent a few millenia here and there trying to think of which words, when spoken in the right order, would make me seem cool in front of an older boy. At age three I would become wracked with decision paralysis for two centuries next to some swings. In practice, the ability to pause time for a think would be a kind of living hell. Often I think my life would be better if it operated as a roguelike, where I could wait as long as I needed before every step I took, to consider all possible moves before committing to one. This week, he descends into the depths of a demon-infested moon base in Jupiter Hell. Premature Evaluation is the weekly column in which Steve Hogarty explores the wilds of early access.
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