Part 30: Chapter 5, Level 3

I'll try not to make JoJo references. Especially since I still haven't watched/read/whatever JoJo.

I'm sorry to say, however, that the devs completely slipped on this level and forgot what not to do. To put it simply, Ishmael's level is not designed with Ishmael in mind. He has only 1 Strength, which means he tops out at 100 health and 100 bullets. This is not the kind of guy who is designed for shootouts with multiple cultists clowns and/or Shikari. This is not the kind of guy who is designed to take on any amount of Drudge Lords or Priests. This is definitely not the kind of person who needs to fight off a Behemoth, much less in a small and cramped area - especially since the one thing they did to make it at least possible, lining the room with several ammo pickups, is mostly wasted due to the fact that A) some of those pickups are explosives, which the room is definitely not large enough to safely use, and B) the Shikari that inhabit that room first can and will pick up the ammo themselves if they run over it while you're trying to get in to kill them in the first place.

By all means it sounds like a level where everyone just said "fuck it" and got drunk instead of playtesting it, but the fact that there actually is a method to get through the level (particularly dodging Drudge Lord attacks by standing still, of all things) and more Life Seeds in this one level than I think I saw through all of Chapter 2 leads me to believe it's instead supposed to be a "hardcore" type deal. An expert FPS, so to speak. We all know how that tended to work out back around the turn of the millennium, though at least this one remembered to account for people who insisted on not turning on God mode from the start rather than waiting until the second quarter to start being reasonable.