HROT is pretty mediocre. Cool how a bunch of these retro shooters have been getting made and not really any of them are a better pick than just playing Quake. Not that they're all so bad, but none of them do much better overall. It's like all the effort going into making them would've been a hundred times more worth it if they just made map packs for Quake instead of their own entire game. Though of course you can't sell that.
Felt to me like the entire thing is made not cause they wanted to make something more fun than what they're trying to replicate but just because they thought the gimmick of a commie Quake is cool. I guess it is? I liked the visual feel of it and honestly it's the only thing that makes it worth playing through once. But it's impossible for me to want to go through any of the levels a second time. They're all forgettable because they somehow forgot that their game was 3D, so most of everything is mapped out as if it's DOOM 1. They committed so much into the Soviet aesthetic that they made their levels feel like the gameplay equivalent of commieblocks. It's all the same dull shit.
Almost every single fight is "shoot thing in a corridor" or "shoot wave-spawning things in a big flat space", or something as equally as boring. Not much gets combined together or needs you to do anything someone who held a mouse for the first time a week ago couldn't do. Even if the maps themselves weren't uninspired, I can't recall a single instance where the enemy placement felt interesting and not just randomly strewn about for me to beat most of the time by doing nothing other than circlestrafing. The only way the game ever gets an upper hand on you is by having enemy mob spawns that you can rarely avoid getting hurt by unless you already knew that they're gonna be there, and cheap shit like that is whatever. It's kind of impressive that the most dynamic that the first episode gets is in the sewer level of all places.