The Most Immersive Retro FPS in Years: Our Derelikt Review
"Retro" has been a thing in contemporary video games for over a decade now. It’s interesting to see a developer take a stab at a specific era—what they get right, and more often than not, what they get wrong. Some games manage to be so close to retro that they feel like they could fit right alongside the era they're trying to emulate. And then comes a game like Derelikt, which not only perfectly matches the era it's attempting to emulate—warped textures and all—but adds in so many immersive details to make you actually feel like you’re starting up a retro console. As soon as I saw that fake PS1 logo and logo sound, I knew the developers were onto something. When I heard the damn disc drive read noise, I immediately had to show my wife.
Derelikt is a first-person shooter inspired by classic console and PC shooters like System Shock 2 and Alien: Resurrection. It’s set up like a console shooter—like the ones you could find on PlayStation 1, back when it was just called the PlayStation.
It veers more towards survival horror than it does action. While I wasn’t exactly resource-starved in my playthrough, ammo wasn’t something to waste. And like any other survival horror, there’s a fair amount of inventory management. In proper retro first-person shooter fashion, there are key cards to find. But there are also notes left behind by survivors which include not only lore, but clues on how to proceed, door codes, etc. There is also the occasional puzzle, and some of them turned out to be pretty tough.
While Derelikt takes after retro FPS games, it’s more of a survival horror than a boomer shooter. There are moments where enemies will swarm at you, but don’t expect non-stop shooting and action. The weapons are fun and feel good to shoot, so there’s no problem there. However, I didn’t find any of the enemies in the game very fun to fight. They’re either bullet-spongey or uninteresting. In fact, I think the enemy variety and types in Derelikt are one of the weakest aspects of an otherwise fantastic game.
As I mentioned at the start of this review, Derelikt’s presentation is unparalleled. I’ve never been so immersed in a retro game like this. I spend a lot of time with retro hardware, and when I first heard the fake disc read noise, I just accepted it.
The warped textures are a fantastic touch, too. And for those who grew up playing retro PC games like me, you can remove all of those effects, and even put the game into “HD” mode so it looks like a retro game using a graphics accelerator. Er, graphics card. There are even full CGI cutscenes that perfectly mimic what you would see during that era, and memory cards in different slots, with the save slots represented by memory blocks.
Derelikt is the first modern game that truly made me feel immersed, as if it were a legitimate retro game. It emulates so many aspects of not just what a retro game looks and plays like, but also the small details like the memory blocks and disc read sound. The game itself is solid for the most part. It feels very PlayStation 1 era, and if you’re hankering for a new retro game, Derelikt is the closest thing you can get.
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