There's definitely lots of variety, most weapons have an alt-fire mode, and you'll often need to swap between your arsenal as ammo runs dry. The weapons range from a pistol to two types of shotguns, a laser weapon, a fire-blob thrower, a machine gun, and more. And over the course of the game, you unlock more and more weapons to blast enemies with. Moving around feels good and you've got an option to jump, sprint, and dash. Like the visuals, the gameplay is smooth and very focused on the basics. Still, it's fitting and certainly matches the chaos. All of this is accompanied by a rock-infused soundtrack that's more in line with the more recent Doom remakes but while the music is good, it kicks in and drops out fairly artificially as the action picks up, and it's rarely a smooth transition. The UI is a bit annoying though, taking up way too much of the screen.
Even the enemies and your own weapons are animated with the same effect, so they are not smooth and have noticeable frames missing when in motion. It's a 3D game, but everything has been pixelated and reduced in resolution to look like it was created in another era, from the walls and buckets of blood spilled all over them, to the gunfire and smoke particle effects. From the outset, the game's most striking feature is its stylized visuals. Instead, it's a worthy tribute to that first person classic shooter. To say that Prodeus is a remake of the original Doom wouldn't be fair nor is it an imitation. So for the most part, you'll just be moving from level to level, completing them and progressing through the campaign that largely consists of shooting tons of enemies and doing some exploration. You simply run through to the end where you can spend Ore Fragments (the 2nd type of currency in the game) to unlock new weapons and abilities. Lastly, there's a shop area that you can visit, and it's a bit pointless to have to backtrack to it and load it as a level. There are also a few special weapon trials, challenging players to complete a course as quickly as possible with a given gun. There are occasional diversions, such as being able to take a shortcut to a later level if you’ve explored with extreme diligence and collected enough Runes during the levels. The campaign is split into individual levels, and you progress between them on a largely linear overworld map. And interestingly, the game still chooses to end with a cliffhanger – which is a confusing decision, as it both annoys the player and also makes you reflect back to how little narrative there is. A back-to-basics approach is fine, but there's literally no story here to grab on to, other than inferring vague hints from events. Each mission has a quick text intro, but the usefulness of that information varies. You can piece together there's some kind of virus or an invasion from another dimension, you are fighting Prodeans and forces of Chaos, but there are no mission briefings, no journals or logs to find, and no audio dialogue. It's one thing to be minimalistic, but this shooter forgoes any sense of understanding as to what is happening. In fact, it doesn’t really have a narrative to grab onto at all.
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