Maze Wars

The Good
Maze Wars is a cute if aggravating game, and it has an undeniable charm about it that makes it worth a try. The game's simple gameplay and easy to learn controls (you can use either the keyboard or the mouse for movement, but you need the mouse to shoot) make it instantly accessible. Being able to change the colours of your surroundings and enemies is a nice touch. (Actually it's more of a necessity than a luxury, as there is so little contrast between the default colours it's easy to confuse the walls and floor). The game can attract you on the same level that Pacman does, simple entertainment.

The Bad
...but simple entertainment rarely = long-lasting entertainment. Mazewars makes Breakout or Tetris look like the pinnacle of gaming sophistication and complexity. Other than the 3D element (which is actually quite primitive compared to id's Catacombs 3D which came out half a year earlier, there's no texture mapping and no eye-candy at all) what you've got is an incredibly basic shoot-em-up that probably wouldn't have been up to snuff in the mid-80s arcades. Once the game's initial charm wears off (and it will after about 10 minutes) there's absolutely nothing to keep you interested. There are no alternate game modes, no story or premise of any kind, no difficulty settings, nothing at all. That couple of measly screenshots I submitted show literally all there is to see of Maze Wars.

I tried to be tolerant when playing this game, but you need a lot more than mere tolerance to play this game without going crazy. Maybe it was because I was playing Maze Wars on an OS it was never meant to run on, but the controls are awkward almost beyond belief. You must hold both the left and the right mouse buttons down together to fire (which takes a lot of getting used to in its own right) but the left mouse button also makes you move forward. So you have to be very precise when shooting, if you click the left mouse button even a fraction of a second before the right, there's every chance you'll jump forward unintentionally and bump into the very enemy you're trying to kill. And make sure you don't shoot for too long, because the game runs so fast on modern processors (even if you use CPUKill or some equivalent slowdown utility) that you'll go through 100 bullets in the space of two or three seconds, and then die because you ran out of ammo. And when you try to turn you rotate a clumsy 45 degrees to the left or right every time, making lining yourself up with enemies far more of a hassle than it should be.

Other gripes. The game suffers from clipping problems, sometimes you can walk straight through walls. This is especially annoying because enemies will sometimes get stuck inside walls, making it impossible to kill them, meaning you have to restart the game from the beginning. Hit detection seems way off, sometimes an enemy would pass straight through me and I wouldn't get harmed, while at other times I'd die to an enemy that was nowhere near me. And since there aren't any textures, just flat colours, it's often difficult to find your way out of the maze, as there's no way you can tell where you are. Wolfenstein 3D also had a lot of mazes, but at least it had landmarks to help you find your bearings ("ah...I've been in this room with those three swastikas before, I must be going around in circles"). In Maze Wars there is no way to tell where you're going. An overhead map of the maze would have been nice, but I guess that would have spoiled it.

The Bottom Line
Maze Wars is a tiny game with little going in its favour. Perhaps if I'd been playing it on a 386/40 I would have been more lenient. Perhaps if I'd had childhood memories of playing it I would have cut it some slack. But regardless of what it might have been like when it was released, these days you might as well play some flash game on the internet if you're desperate for a gaming fix. Collectors only.