Retro 3D shooters are difficult to get right. So, what did DUSK get wrong? Let’s find out!
Game: DUSK
Webzone: DUSK
Devel: David Szymanski
Engine: Unity
Price: £15 / US$20 / CA$21.99
Wazzat: Battle through an onslaught of mystical backwater cultists, possessed militants & even darker forces as you attempt to discover just what lurks beneath the Earth in this retro FPS inspired by the ’90s legends.
Mandatory Disclosure: Devs sent us keys
Venn:
Does It Launch
- No issues here.
- 418 RTX master race!
Performance @ 1080
- Limited to 122 on the 2060 @ 2160…. 60.
Graphics
- Filled /w all switches, no problem.
Control
- Ice skating with WASD, more on that later.
Jordan:
Does It Launch
- After almost 15 years of openarena, it better damn run
- The DOS thing at the beginning is cute the first time, but if I install my game on an SSD, I’d really like it to load like it was running off one
Performance @ 1080
- Runs like openarena
Graphics
Control
- Go on, play it with a controller
Pedro:
Does It Launch
- It crashes in random places with the 418 NVidia beta.
- Works fine with the 415.27 version
- Not sure where the blame lies and 418 is a beta driver so I won’t ding it a chair
Performance @ 1080
- Frame limiter defaults to 144, unless you’re playing in UHD (and even then) you may want to keep that.
Graphics
- They work, there’s even several different color palettes.
Control
- In my testing to see what was crashing, I changed to the proton version and that’s when I realised the mouse sensitivity on Linux is jacked all the way up.
- In Proton, 0.05 sensitivity means the mouse barely moves.
- In fact, the setting it to 0.25 in Proton is equivalent to 0.05 in Linux.
- I thought this had been fixed, Unity!
QA Score:
Fedora:
Soulless:
Ubuntu:
Fun section:
Fun?:
- Venn:
- It really quits, I like this.
- If someone explained Quake 1 via interpretive dance to someone who never played it and that person made a game from their newfound knowledge you would get DUSK.
- Every play the game telephone?
- Because I feel like I’m playing the business end of that.
- You have Quake graphics, Duke Nukem 3D level design, and Turuk (ice skating) movement.
- New Blood Interactive got about 10% of what made classic FPS good, mainly the speed and the music.
- The other 90% looks like something I would have rubbed out with Qoole back in the 90’s over summer break.
- I was hoping to get in a little multiplayer but that’s… what’s the word, ah, dead.
- David, you did the best you could with what you had.
- It seems to have good reviews on Steam and I’m happy to see it.
- However, for someone who grew up with this nonsense… this is a tinker toy and we both know it.
- The only crime committed here is slapping the DONE label on it.
- If you want old school done right with all the blood and gore pickup Apocryph, and save yourself $5.
- Jordan
- It really is an OK shooter
- It’s an OK shooter that uses the visual language of retro shooters to try and invoke some nostalgia, but it really just is OK. Nothing stellar, just OK
- And therein lies the problem with this game. All of the effort was put into making it look and feel like a quake game that controls like q3 arena
- But we already have that! We have so much of that. Why not give us something new?
- The sound design is pretty top noch, and the soundtrack is decent heavy metal noodling
- Yes, you can strip away a lot of the bullshit modern shooters have and still have a good time. A lot of the review I read laud it for the retro feel, but I think the game just kinda rests on that and doesn’t do anything creative
- Also fuck those rats.
- Pedro
- Playing through Dusk filled me with meh.
- It’s a perfectly competent, retro inspired, first person shooter.
- Like which there are a ton of on Steam.
- Hell, I’d hoped for something like STRAFE but with the more traditional Quakeyness to it.
- It certainly has the linear progression with the odd branching path and secret level.
- But it really doesn’t do much else to be different.
- Yes, some of the levels go all Serious Sam on the physics but those are very few and confined to the end of the game.
- You can tell the end is coming because the levels start to get interesting.
- And there’s only 30 levels (33 if you find the secret ones) so it won’t take you very long to get through it.
- But when it comes down to it, there’s just nothing here to keep me interested.
- Not even the Multiplayer.
Fun Score:
Venn: 
Jordan:
Pedro:
