I’ve covered more than a few FPS releases here over the years, with titles like Severed Steel, Chernobylite, and Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem getting my adrenaline pumping and my reflexes set to fly on a twitch. So when I saw Scathe coming with a more-than-evident DOOM influence, I was intrigued from the second I laid eyes on it. Now that it’s out, just how well does it play, in comparison to the tons of “boomer shooters” that have hit the market since 2016?

Quite like DOOM 2016, Scathe throws you into action following a brief cutscene and the acquisition of one weapon. The layout of levels, however, hearkens back to the first few DOOMs; where your point A to point B doesn’t lock you into a room and you can navigate the areas to your whim, as opposed to being locked in combat arenas in the series’ most recent titles. It was a relief to have a bit of non-linearity and not have to fight every demon I came across.

When it comes to these demons, Scathe is a bit disappointing in its presentation. There are only about 5 enemy types to battle through in the early goings, and only one weapon to use against them: a pea-shooter assault rifle that makes the tougher foes feel like absolute bullet sponges. There are some particularly annoying foes too. One flies around the arena and races towards you upon hitting them, while another of the rolling and exploding variety makes a screeching yell for the entirety of its last moments before you mow them down. They’re positively insufferable in giant rooms where there are 5+ of them at once.

Scathe doesn’t do much in terms of guiding you in what to do either. Once you pick up your first magic power, there’s no way to know how to use it unless you pause and navigate to your keybindings to figure it out. While the maze offers branching paths, there are no indicators as to what going one way or the other will mean towards your progression. At the very least, slaying some demons gets some entertaining commentary out of the Divine Creator that tasked you in the first place.

The selling point of Scathe is that it includes a four-player co-op. The problem there is, that every time I tried to join, I was either thrust into a fight and immediately killed, or kicked from a group of players that decided they didn’t want me even though the lobby was set to “open.” This is a discouraging experience and I ended up giving up and going it alone, even though I could tell in this playthrough that it would have been massively enhanced with even one other partner. Unfortunately, with no “buddy pass” and minimal replay value, it’s going to be a challenge to ask a friend to shell out $25.

It’s a bummer to play a game like Scathe when the potential is huge, and especially when the winning formula shouldn’t be hard to compute, as titles like Dusk, Neon White, and Ultrakill are setting the genre on fire. It’s certainly easy to say that Scathe is the dollar-store DOOM, but I know if it introduced more variety, had a more clear-cut direction, and expanded on the guns at hand, it could have been a great game.

A PC key of Scathe was provided by Kwalee for the purposes of this review.

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Scathe

$24.99

5

Score

5.0/10

Pros

• Solid Setting
• Great Graphics

Cons

• Guns Lack Punch
• Cheap Deaths
• Too Generic