Hey you!
Today I wanna talk about one of my favourite games, and that's Amid Evil from New Blood Interactive.
New Blood Interactive and Amid Evil
The creators of Dusk, Gloomwood and Ultrakill amongst others. If you don't know any of these, I assume that you're not a fan of retro shooters, and that's all right, I wasn't one 2 years ago.
Back to the game, Amid Evil is one of the best modern retro shooters that there is, also, it's the first game released by Indefatigable.
How I get to play this game
In February, I was just finishing building my new PC, for which I chose an RTX-2060 graphics card, and I wanted a game with Ray Tracing integrated to test it. Back then, I had a very small display that was already 8-10 years old. He still made a post about it back then, here's the link.
At first, I was a little sceptical about it, I thought that it was a little overrated as I was thinking Ray-Tracing is a technology made for the modern graphics games and can't make any big difference for a retro shooter. I am so glad I was wrong, cause this game just looks amazing.
About the game
An interesting fact about this game is the fact that, instead of having some UI to chose your difficulty, you have to wonder through a hub where you have 3 gates, each representing a difficulty, and if you are exploring every part of a game as I like to do, you can even die in the hub, before the game to literally begin. I got an achievement as a reminder of that I lost before enter the first level.😆
But, that's not all of the hub, it has a secret path where you can find the highest difficulty, the evil one, on which I played the whole game.😎 
Reason for which I see a lot the following screen, but for the same reason I am still playing this game, I really enjoy the challenge.
Game Mechanics
The movement of the player is basic, walking and jumping being the only way to move though the game, but it's very fast paced and there isn't fall damage. The simplicity of this mechanics are limiting you from doing certain things, but this isn't a bad thing. The no fall damage is making what enemies are at the end of your landing the only thing you have to worry.
Weapons
The weapons are diverse, what you are using is totally you're choice as all of them are good. Each of them, except for the double edged axe need a specific type of mana that you can collect in the game. This isn't actually a thing to worry, except for the last weapon that can get you out a lot of trouble if you save it, there is plenty of mana placed around the levels, you can't really remain on 0 unless you want to.
The above screenshot is exactly what you think it is, you have a weapon that shoots with planets. Some might find this weird, but after you try it, it's pretty funny.
The difference between normal and soul mode
If you take a look through my screenshots, you will see that in some of them a white light is coming from the bottom of the screen. When you kill an enemy, he leaves his soul behind for you to collect, when you have enough souls, the light will appear telling you that you're really to activate the soul mode.
To give this a little more explanation each weapon is empowered during the soul mode, but it's not just doing more damage but it's behaving differently, gaining new abilities like rapid fire, bigger explosions and more.
In the above screenshot the weapon is in the normal mode, creates an point from which attacks nearby enemies by making a straight line towards every accessible one in a limited range. Below, the same weapon in soul mode will create a temporary black hole dragging all your enemies in it, nothing survives.
Level completion
The game also gives you the liberty of choosing if you wanna explore the whole map and look for the secrets, or simply go for the Par Time, in my case, I even stop in some parts to admire the game, also learning some level design along the way.
Final impression
This game really proved me wrong and changed my opinion about retro games, and I am really happy for this cause it opened the way for a lot of similar games that I wouldn't played before.
The ray tracing looks amazing even through it's not in the final version for this game. If you have the chance I would say you should try it too, if not, thanks for reading my thoughts.
Info
All of the images were captured by me during my play, as well of the writing is done by me.
If you enjoyed what I'm writing, you should also check out: @vladalexan, @enjar, @liberosist, @namiks
Cheers,
@cm0isa