A rare effort from 3DO to create a first-person shooter franchise, Requiem: Avenging Angel (released April 4, 1999) had a fascinating premise but nevertheless was a critical and commercial dud. It was also the last game to come out of Cyclone Studios, a short-lived development house that never managed to find its footing despite having a string of interesting game concepts.
Requiem’s mythos combined a near-future dystopian scenario with a story of heavenly intervention. Fallen angels have come to a late 21st-century Earth and suppressed the populace under totalitarian order, with the goal of using that disciplined force to build a starship that would touch the face of Paradise. As this is an act God cannot allow, he sends his angel Malachi to Earth to deal with the situation.
This combination of tropes is unique, engaging, and provides the game with its greatest strength: its arsenal. It’s huge, combining your typical FPS weapons loadout with a variety of neat and sometimes hilarious angelic powers. In 1999, it was almost worth it to play through the game just to get the Pillar of Salt ability, and really get biblical on those grunt soldiers.
But for all its attempts to do something interesting with the genre, Requiem suffers from a great many negatives. Like many FPS titles that began development before Half-Life but shipped afterwards, it felt obsolete out the gate. But in addition to this lack of vision Requiem had enough post-Half-Life development time to attempt to shoehorn its story in via in-game scripting. Unfortunately, the technology simply wasn’t there to support this type of game structure, and the result was lots of stationary NPCs talking: a wooden, hollow telling of what could have been an interesting yarn.
And yet Requiem had even bigger problems in that its gameplay itself failed to engage. Interestingly, this was not because the mechanics of the shooting game itself were bad (although they were loose). Rather, Requiem suffered from a lack of adequate positive feedback: the player didn’t feel powerful no matter how powerful they actually were. The reason for this was primarily a failure on the part of the game’s audio direction. Most weapons and powers simply didn’t sound like they had any oomph, enemies rarely responded to damage with reasonable exclamations of pain, and these lousy samples were put into the game at a low audio quality, which made them sound even more tinny and weak. If you’ve ever wondered how important good audio direction is to a game experience, Requiem: Avenging Angel should be your textbook case of why skimping in that department is a bad plan.
Requiem was the last game to be developed by Cyclone Studios, and it actually released several months after 3DO closed the studio and absorbed its assets. This may have been the best option for the studio: reports from the time state that Cyclone had a habit of hiring green developers with no experience but incredible passion for the medium, which is no doubt why it’s major franchises, Requiem and the early first-person RTS Uprising, were so interesting in concept and so messily executed. It’s unfortunate that we’ll never get to see these concepts handled with the weight of experience behind them, but with 3DO gone and its assets thrown to the wind its unclear who even owns the rights to Requiem: Avenging Angel anymore.
Requiem still has fans, as is evidenced by a Quake 4 engine total conversion effort that actually got pretty far along before apparently being scuttled just a few days ago. But that doesn’t mean it has too many fans: you can find copies for less than a dollar on the aftermarket. Fully patched Requiem: Avenging Angel gives the illusion of working in Vista, but it’s really too buggy to get very far without an incredible amount of frustration.
Previously on Ten Years Ago This Week:
Everquest
Army Men 3D
Silent Hill
Syphon Filter
Alpha Centauri
