Heaven Dust 2 is a Horror-Adventure Indie Game made by One Gruel Studio and will release on Jan 6th. We had a chance to try it out during the closed media playtest, and it feels great.
Like the first title, Heaven Dust 2 was greatly inspired by the classic horror game Resident Evil, especially the early titles. The game has minimal inventory space, iconic green & red herbs, documents everywhere, puzzles to solve, and of course, herds of zombies hunting the protagonist. It is a love letter to the old school horror game enthusiasts and brings them back to when they struggled through Racoon City.
Writing down everything they know is what people cannot resist in survival horror games.
The map design of the game is fairly decent. It provides several familiar scenes to horror game fans, like a mansion with statues of a goddess, an underground parking lot, a tunnel, and a secret lab. Like the Resident Evil series, players will find shortcuts, reveal secret passages, unlock doors and eventually connect the whole map. It’s a proven formula that works well in this game, and the gameplay feels solid and fun.
Here is the statue of a goddess, which you can tell is related to a puzzle at first glance.
As a sequel, Heaven Dust 2 improved its combat control over the previous game and added more elements to the recipe. In the game, players can aim longer to shoot at weak points for bonus damage. The protagonist can also perform finishing moves on staggered enemies, like the martial arts moves in Resident Evil 4. These improvements enable a skillful player to eliminate mobs of zombies with only a few bullets, making the combat very satisfying.
Though players are much stronger than they were in the first title, the game doesn’t lose the tension of a survival horror game. Soon the player will face enemies with special abilities like additional bone shards to protect their weak points, regenerating blood armor that requires rapid-fire or electric attacks to break, long-range acid spitters, etc. It will encourage the players to choose carefully from their arsenal to kill the zombies most effectively. The game keeps upping the challenge, and the player’s ammo is never enough.
Except right here where I had a stationary Heavy Machine Gun
Players will embark on an enjoyable 10-hour journey through the game with decent replay value. The expert difficulty is available for the second play-through, and the game has two escape routes which will lead to two different endings.
For players who couldn’t have enough of the old-school top-down zombie horror games, Heaven Dust 2 is certainly a title worth checking out.