I'm sorry, Raven Software. I love some of your later games, but this is just bad. I appreciate the attempt though.

Hexen is a game that was made and released too early, before the necessary technologies for it existed, which kinda makes it impressive from a certain point of view, but that also makes it a pain to play. Unlike Heretic, which it's a sorta sequel to, this is not a first-person shooter, but rather something like a first-person brawler with some shooter mechanics and some minimal RPG mechanics. Of course this means the level design has to be super convoluted because it wouldn't be a wannabe RPG if you just slaughtered your way through it. No, you gotta do a lot of backtracking, keyhunting, and switchhunting. I think the level design here might be worse than in Heretic's expansion, but it strangely feels more fitting here.

Ultimately though, I'm giving this game some points for being a strange beast. First-person melee combat a whole decade before Condemned, and it feels like it. It's really janky and lacks nuance, which is expected with Doom engine's rudimentary physics. For what it is, it does work surprisingly well, and is actually playable. However, taking damage is near-inevitable. And it's like the devs knew it, so they threw in a shit-ton of healing potions. Dodging enemy attacks is practically impossible, your best bet is blocking, but I still don't get how the blocking works. Sometimes I'm blocking and still take damage for some reason. You do get SOME ranged weapons (how many depends on the class you pick), but the game keeps shoving you into tiny corridors where you have no room for maneuver, so using ranged weapons is a death sentence. At least with melee you can block.

So the gameplay is essentially: running around in mazes and occasionally getting ambushed by enemies in tiny corridors, barely surviving if at all. The game is incredibly hard, but the difficulty doesn't come from fair challenge.

Maybe it gets better later on, but I'm not gonna bother to find out. The two hours I played were just non-stop misery.