People who haven't played this, and maybe are wondering what the hoopla is about: at the time the game released, it was unusually full of bugs, of the kind that typically doesn't make it unplayable once the game actually launches, but makes it look unpolished. It doesn't matter to someone who is interested in narrative and animation, gameplay, and so on. But it will affect the impression a reviewer has, and make it a difficult sell, even if you like it yourself. As a reviewer, you feel like you're going to push your quirky opinions on someone else if you gush over it. On top of that, the cd-version came in a box (a cardboard box, like all games had then) which had the shape and quality reserved for rushed, low-budget releases. Or an empty shell with a cheap cd-case rattling around on the inside, and a thin sheet of an inside cover that didn't fit completely. Along with a warranty card and nothing else. That the game then had a number of functions that made the gameplay very convenient, with solid key binding setups that didn't overlap, flipping powers back and forth made very easy, quicksaves without long loading, short cutscenes (though memorable and good at setting the context) - that didn't matter.
Other issues the game faced from a PR perspective, like any similar game would still do, to be honest, is the intrinsic disrespect for Christianity the presentation has. This is an impossible PR problem to solve: either the game treats it seriously and becomes cringe-worthy and creepy. Or it treats it with caustic humour, and becomes a draw for a certain type of criticism you want to avoid. Or else you do it like Cyclone did and borrow the theme from the Revelations, and make up a consistent narrative in a slightly more present context than you would get from just reading the bible. Making it draw ire from all extremist camps at once, but on the whole makes it a better and more enjoyable story. So it's not preaching, or in any way made to appeal to overt Christians. But it does treat the actual narrative in the Revelations with a kind of sly seriousness that perhaps is probably perfectly reflected with the cover-graphic; a gruff Angel (a messenger) with a shotgun and flaming eyes. It doesn't say: "Rebel Angel", but that was maybe the backup title. The writer probably nailed his coffin shut in the end when you meet up with the despondent rebels who are fighting the demons of the telecast screens, in body and mind - although one of the battles seem to have been lost already, and the other one is obviously futile. And then the other messengers before you, unknown to you, have been betrayed. The apocalypse comes, one way or the other.
Meanwhile, the first impression of the graphics is that it has more in common with Doom and perhaps Strife rather than Quake and Sin, or any of the Unreal games. That all had a very specific visual approach in focusing on shot effects and surface treatment, static animation at specific presentation points, etc. rather than character models and movement (an approach that was grating if you cared about the actual game more than the initial bullshot impression - after all, the logic behind the animation sets in Half-life, for example, is really no more advanced than what you had in Duke Nukem - perhaps it is even less complicated - or, that it's reduced to a cardboard cutout that walks around with the same spline loop until you trigger an "ouchie" and a death. An advanced comic strip, so to speak, on the abstract level, and not much more in practice). Sin, for example, received some acclaim becuase it added on the baseline with some creativity on hit-locations and AI behaviour. But it was also fairly simple, and often scripted.
Requiem has very little surface treatment, and instead goes full burn on the bullet-physics and character animation, AI movement, and so on. In the same way the actual fire animation on the gun is positively cartoon-like, while the impacts and hits are location dependent with a subtle glow, that I'm sure must have given the programmers all kinds of headaches to make. It doesn't look like much now, perhaps, but at the time this went way beyond what we had actually seen before it. It had bullet-time, of course, before we had a name for it, where projectiles could be followed through the air. The movement and impact animations were gorgeous, location based, and has a fairly convincing impact model (although it's probably not physics based, it looks right an awful lot). And of course the most impressive part of it is that the enemy animation in bullet-time is adjusted with higher frequency to show off the reactions and escape attempts (the operative word being "attempts", before their blood boils and they're turned to salt pillars, or invited to witness the touch of god by your short-range pentecostal fireball), rather than just being the game played back more slowly - which makes for a quite convincing display of the kind you still don't actually don't see in successful modern games.
How and why they did this bullet-time variant would be a great subject for a post-mortem if anyone could get hold of the developers. But the sheer nerd-power that was behind the idea to perfect that bullet-time animation flow (after all, you won't see this in the game early on (unless you've played the game before during the initial boss-fight, and might not use it that much later on either) permeates the entire game. And I don't think it's much of a guess to say that this part is where the effort of the entire production went, at the cost of surface treatment, textures, UI, icons and cutscene creation.
Overall a memorable game that although it ends too soon and in a hurry, as low-budget productions with a grand vision are wont to do, has a core gameplay approach and narrative flow that everyone who likes games should at least have seen.
trusteft: Out of curiosity, why no Windows XP?
JudasIscariot: We tested the game on a fully updated Windows XP install, it did not work and, thus, we cannot comfortably support it here.
..that's kind of weird. After the 1.3 patch, it only worked on WinXP or in win98 compatibility mode :)
