Wrath: Aeon of Ruin was built on a modified version of the Quake engine and you can really tell. With the chunky pixels, the fast movement, and the open levels this game screams retro 90s shooter. It's a shame that there isn't much here beyond a graphical and gameplay throwback.
If the goal of the game was to accurately and competently represent games from decades ago then it accomplishes it with flying colours. Wrath looks great, leaning into the low-poly models and the pixelated textures with level and character design that doesn't lose anything in quality despite the low fidelity. If you're willing to live with jagged edges and don't need to make your graphics card cry there is much to love here. The environments are highly detailed—within reason for the engine's limitations—and are reminiscent of the more fantastical and gothic parts of Quake. Twisted edifices tower over bleak landscapes that hide grotesque body horror constructs underneath. Thankfully everything is a lot brighter and more colourful than the brown/grey worlds of Quake. The game also takes advantage of the low amount of polygons by having lots of wide open spaces that show off its massive draw distance and makes great use of verticality. The design of the weapons and enemies is equally stellar, with enough detail to make everything interesting and very readable as you're frantically running around the combat arenas.
The game also feels amazing to play. The enemies are fast and dangerous, but you're faster and by far more dangerous as you speed like a wildman around the arenas. Facing a horde of different enemies, all with different types of attacks and movement patterns, forces you to think quickly and switch between the varied weapons to best make use your positioning and enemy prioritisation. Attacks take off large chunks of health and the smallest mistake can quickly lead to your demise, but when everything clicks in place—which it does quite often—the gameplay is incredibly satisfying.
Together with the id Software staple arsenal (shotgun, machine gun, rocket launcher, rail gun - in this case all with a fantastical twist) the game features the Ruination Blade, a melee weapon whose secondary attack is a dash that you can use to quickly cross the battlefield or across small gaps. Coupled with a set of power-ups you collect and trigger yourself, the game does feel unique in many ways from other games in the current wave of fast-paced retro shooters. Enemies can be a bit tanky, but are all predictable, and when you're faced with many of them it's a fun puzzle to get through alive using your collection of weapons, abilities, and skill. Wrath definitely captures the essence of what makes games like this fun in contrast to shooters that only use hitscan weapons. That, together with sound design that helps you listen for attack cues and make your weapons feel like they're really having an impact, makes it so that you can have a great time and feel real mastery over this inter-dimensional domain.
It's a bit of a shame that in the long run it feels like a bit of a slog to get through. The game is separated into several chapters that all start with a hub world where you must complete five levels in any order and then face a boss at the end. Aside from the bosses and one or two additions per chapter, the enemies are basically all the same throughout the experience. There are enough monsters to add a degree variety as they all have different attacks and require a bit of a different approach when facing them, but towards the end I was getting a bit tired of dealing with the same enemies that I had killed hundreds of times already. This is exacerbated by the fact that they all take a bit too many shots to take down and have a tendency to teleport in anytime you do anything: pick up a health boost, kill another enemy, or just walk into a new room. The gameplay can be really frantic and fun when it works, but cannot maintain that level of excitement when you're facing the fourth wave of the same enemy that keeps teleporting in as soon as you've killed all their friends. There isn't much of a story to keep you compelled to continue, despite having lots of lore available to read, so towards the end of my 10-hour play-through I was getting annoyed every time I heard that teleportation sound.
In conclusion the game is quite fun and worth trying if you're a fan of retro 90s shooters, especially ones built on the Quake engine. Just don't feel obligated to push it through to the end, as there isn't much of a reward waiting for you.