Cemetery Warrior 4

I have a soft spot for the kind of game that just commits to a vibe and refuses to apologise for it. Cemetery Warrior 4 is that game. It is a first-person shooter built around one simple promise: you play as Zexus, a demon previously cast as the villain of the series, now crawling back from hell to take revenge on his own father. It is pulpy, self-aware in the loosest possible sense, and largely unashamed about what it is. The combat loop draws obvious inspiration from the old Doom and Serious Sam school of design. Rooms fill with enemies, you cycle through a compact arsenal, you move. The four weapons each have a readable niche: the shotgun rewards headshots, the machine gun can paralyse enemies mid-charge, the laser concentrates burst damage, and the grenade launcher clears clusters in a single satisfying boom. Layered on top are two demon abilities. Flying lets you reposition instantly rather than strafe around geometry, and the Demon Roar is essentially a panic button that shreds anything in a cone in front of you. Neither ability is deep, but both add a second layer of decision-making that keeps the fights from feeling completely brainless. The enemy roster includes wall-crawling monsters, earthworm-type ground creatures, spike-shooting ranged types, and larger titan-class enemies, each requiring a different read on spacing and weapon choice. Bosses get their own unique AI patterns, which is more effort than you might expect from a game this small. The honest caveats: the production is clearly micro-budget. A community guide has been written specifically to skip the 30-second Falcoware advertisement that plays on boot, which tells you something about the rough edges around the experience. Some players have reported achievement triggers failing entirely. Normal difficulty can feel underpowered in early chapters, so bumping up to hard is worth doing immediately if you have any old-school FPS muscle memory. The game runs only a few hours from start to finish, and replay incentive is thin beyond the three difficulty tiers and 13 Steam achievements. What it does offer, surprisingly, is a heavy metal soundtrack that actually commits. The audio has a raw, grinding quality that suits the pacing, and in motion the game has a scrappy kinetic rhythm that the bigger-budget retro-FPS revival titles sometimes over-design out of their products. For the audience this is made for, namely people who grew up feeding quarters into arcade cabinets and still find Doom WADs on weekends, Cemetery Warrior 4 scratches a specific itch. For anyone expecting polish, breadth, or a narrative with weight, this will feel thin. Know which camp you are in before clicking anything.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Cemetery Warrior 4.