Nightmare Reaper

Sometimes, less is indeed more when it comes to anything designed to entertain people and retain their interest. Nightmare Reaper personifies that to an almost comical degree: it's a game that's doing too much conceptually when all it needed to do was stick to its core concepts. With visuals comparable to the original Doom or Wolfenstein 3D -- both regarded as FPS (first-person shooter) legends -- the game carries with it a charm that's hard to sell to a modern crowd expecting high-end, realistic graphics. This comes from a wide variety of weapons that have status effects, so players may find a sword that burns enemies upon impact, or a shotgun that freezes monsters where they stand. Even upon dying, which happens a lot, levels, loot, and monster placement is randomized, so the variations make Nightmare Reaper endlessly fun.

But it's the total package that's the big problem. The random feature adds hours of play but can create quicker deaths for players. "Random events" that pop up after you clear out an area toss in traps, portals that spawn more enemies, or red orbs that damage the player until you can destroy it. Nightmare Reaper revels in how random and unfair it can be, which isn't fun. It also overstays its welcome with an average playthrough taking around 25 hours, but without a story to warrat the gameplay. You're drip-fed the story through notes, which doesn't work well when you've suffered through a level multiple times only to get a sentence or two's worth of plot/character development. While the adrenaline-pumping music is fantastic, it gets repetitive. Even the level-up system, which requires that you play retro-style mini-games through a handheld device that looks awfully similar to the Game Boy Advance SP becomes a chore. Nightmare Reaper is a fun game that's sure to appeal to die-hard fanatics of the punishing FPS games of decades past, but its surrounding elements are either diminished or overdone to the point of hurting the overall experience.